Christy Pambianchi Is Blown Away By Verizon's Strong Workforce During COVID-19

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With over a hundred thousand employees working from home, Verizon Chief HR Officer Christy Pambianchi discusses how the company's mission statement of connectivity is more relevant now more than ever.

Video Transcript

- So let's talk about that for a second, because Verizon is a massive company. You have retail employees. You have field engineers. You have Verizon Media, and you have all of us working at entertainment. Everyone does something. Have you seen--

CHRISTY PAMBIANCHI: Right.

- --like, a through line, a universal thing, that regardless of position or who we are, that people have reached out to you with something that has connected everybody right now?

CHRISTY PAMBIANCHI: I would say that's a great question. And one of the things I love about Verizon is people have a really strong affinity with the, you know, the mission and the purpose of the company about really delivering these networks that, you know, connect the world and allow people to move forward, as our slogan has it.

And so that's definitely what I see coming through-- people asking me a lot of questions about how can I help, how can I participate, here are some things I'm worried about for my co-worker. A lot of people write me about other people, not always about themselves. And it really speaks to just the spirit of camaraderie and we're in this together in the company. So I think that's definitely one thing.

And I think we've gotten a lot of employees who are dealing with this new normal, whether it's having to have their family in the house, doing school, or trying to support their customers by home on the phone, trying to write their content, trying to keep data centers operational, trying to keep our customers, our fields visits, and things like that to sort of the essentials only. So really, we're kind of trying to find our way through it.

And one thing that's underlying all of it is this just strong spirit of our workforce wanting to make sure that we're living up to our purpose. And in a crisis, there is so many nations around the world calling on the telecommunications infrastructure, the internet infrastructure, to help society find new ways of going forward and help us from keeping the economy established. And so I think some really cool things that were on the Yahoo platform last night, like our Dave Matthews--

- "Pay It Forward." Yeah.

CHRISTY PAMBIANCHI: --really focused on small business. And he gave so many real examples to what that means when the barbers and the small restaurants and things like that can't operate. And I think every family is touched by that. You know, I have a sister that's a nurse. I have a sister-in-law and a brother-in-law that own restaurants. And I'm sure every family has a connection to that.

So I think we're very fortunate here, at Verizon, that we're able to keep as much moving forward. We've got over 110,000 people now working from home that-- literally, inside of a week, we've moved that from what was 4,000 people whose jobs were designed from home for our home base agents to now, you know, literally it was 112,000 yesterday and growing.

So I'm amazed by our ability to come together and work toward a common goal. And that's why we keep the dialogue open. The suggestions are coming in, and we really try to act on those. And it's changing every day.

- Yeah. For sure.

CHRISTY PAMBIANCHI: So there's also a real need to keep a really open dialogue loop going with our workforce so that they can be giving us better ways and ideas for things we didn't consider for how to support our employees in this difficult time, as well as how to allow people to continue to contribute.

And that-- that's one of the things I definitely know from from our employees and even from family members, is people don't want to just be idle. They want to find ways to contribute, add value, even if it's outside the norm of their role, or even volunteering. So we'll have more next week about ways in which our people can volunteer. And so I think, for me, the heart of humanity comes through with all the V Teamers I get to interact with.

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