C2HR Team Innovator Award (Content Developer): Discovery

Content & Connectivity Human Resources (C2HR) is shining a spotlight on four with its annual recognition program. Read on to learn about this year’s Team Innovator winner.

Discovery’s People & Culture team earned C2HR’s other Team Innovator award for not just integrating Scripps Networks Interactive into the company, but creating a new global organization. When the legacy companies came together to form the new Discovery, the team created a set of guiding principles to set the culture. “The principles grounded our employees in a common purpose that was so valuable to the process of building a new corporate culture,” Discovery chief people and culture officer Adria Alpert Romm explained. This year, the People & Culture team launched its first enhancements—new wellness centers, a digital well-being app and more. The group’s already hard at work on 2020’s new products.

How did you incorporate employee input?

Alpert Romm: We enrolled employees in the design, development and testing of all the new products we have created across the People & Culture function, including a brand new feedback and performance tool.  This has allowed our team to build products that meet our customers’ needs and enhance their experience at Discovery. Earlier this year, we fielded an employee survey to understand, in broad terms, the priorities and challenges across the organization and set a baseline we can work from as we design programming to fit the needs of our dynamic work force.  From there, we have started to roll out shorter pulse surveys around specific focus areas, most recently around Learning and Development, to help us understand what our employees want and build tools and products that meet their needs.

What’s your best advice for working with a large company that has many different campuses?

Alpert Romm: As a global company with nearly 10,000 employees working in 40 offices around the world, it’s really important to stay connected to your employee population and to understand their needs while also staying connected to other offices/campuses. We use a collaboration and information platform called Workplace, where employees can learn about company priorities, share information and collaborate on projects and initiatives. This helps create a consistent employee experience across different locations and enables employees to feel connected to each other and to the broader organization. We approach everything as global but also respect the local differences of each of our locations to provide an opportunity to customize as needed.