May 5, 2008

Joint Effort For a More Diverse Industry: WICT, NAMIC Streamline Research

WICT and NAMIC will make their surveys easier to complete this year.

By Benita Fitzgerald Mosley and Kathy Johnson

The cable industry has spoken and we have listened.

Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT) and the National Association for Multi-ethnicity in Communications (NAMIC) have come together to streamline our research survey process for WICT's PAR Initiative and NAMIC's Multi-ethnic Employment in Telecommunications surveys.

The comprehensive research conducted by our organizations has had an undeniable impact on the cable industry, helping companies attract and retain the best possible talent by highlighting progressive business practices. While WICT and NAMIC will distribute separate surveys in 2008, we have simplified the process for reporting basic employee demographic information common to both surveys by presenting the questions in a similar format.

We realize that extracting employee demographics is no small feat and, with this new process, you will only have to do your calculations once, thereby saving you time and effort.  Later this year, WICT and NAMIC will distribute the results of their individual surveys and create reports to further help you build upon proven diversity strategies.

For the past five years WICT's PAR Initiative, in collaboration with Working Mother Media, has evolved into a comprehensive advocacy program, helping companies to set goals, institutionalize practices, measure progress and achieve results.  Each year, the PAR Initiative grows more valuable because it provides not only a report on the current landscape, but also a quantifiable history of the advances and declines in pay equity, advancement opportunities and resources for work/life support.

The PAR Initiative showcases best practices regarding company policies and procedures, which are truly making a difference throughout the industry.  It has led to other valuable WICT programs including Tech It Out, an advocacy effort aimed at increasing the number of women working in cable technologies; PAR At Work, a quarterly newsletter that showcases the Best Companies for Women in Cable and the women working at those companies; and The WICT Guide for an Equitable Workplace, a resource for corporate human resources departments looking for principles, strategies and tips to create fair and reasonable policies for the workplace.

NAMIC's biennial survey, A Look Toward Advancement: Multi-ethnic Employment in Communications, was launched in 1999 and is the first comprehensive research to provide a baseline of statistics and opinions about the state of multi-ethnic diversity in our industry.  Deployed and tabulated in partnership with DiversityInc Benchmarking, the NAMIC survey serves as a catalyst for measuring human capital, CEO commitment, corporate communications and supplier diversity as demographics shift and our business becomes increasingly global.

Participating companies can benchmark their diversity efforts against those on the DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list as well as other companies in our industry.  Key outgrowths of the NAMIC survey include the launch of NAMIC’s prestigious Executive Leadership Development Program and The Leadership Seminar for managers and supervisors in partnership with UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.

WICT and NAMIC research is vital to advancing awareness and understanding the state of gender and ethnic diversity in the cable industry.  Without you, we couldn't provide this valuable research.  Please look for both surveys by the end of this week and thank you in advance for your participation and for assisting our efforts to help the companies in cable become employers of choice.

[A news article on this subject in  the May 5 edition of CableFAX Daily says the surveys eventually will be consolidated into one.]

Benita Fitzgerald Mosley is President of WICT. Kathy Johnson is President of NAMIC.