Turnkey Search yesterday gathered four top execs for a 60-minute webinar to discuss the landscape for women in sports, media and entertainment, and on all four of their minds -- strategizing to navigate the COVID-19 crisis. Fox Sports Senior VP/HR & Business Operations Kim Beauvais, a '16 SBJ "Forty Under 40" honoree, on her company’s day-to-day leadership strategy, said, “We at Fox Sports have a daily task force meeting every morning to talk about what’s happening across the country and all of our locations and if there’s any updates, how to work through those very quickly and efficiently.” Beauvais also spoke to the importance of corporate communication during this time, saying the “best thing” Fox Sports can do as a company to “help ease some anxiety is to continue to provide information, whether it’s about the business, (or) whether it’s about various locations.” She added, “That’s probably been the biggest change, in terms of us having those meetings and then communicating out to all of our employees and working with them to try to figure out how to manage their staff and still how to move the business to a point that we consider normal or, at least, normal the way it is now.”
SPEAKING TO SCALE: Coca-Cola Chief People Officer Lisa Chang, whose company has some 700,000 employees in 200 different countries, said of the virus’ impact on a business of Coca-Cola’s scale: “It really is just mind-boggling to think about what we’re going through right now. Every day, for the past several weeks, has been essentially a crisis, and we’ve been living this since early January when it started in China. It’s day by day. We’re evaluating the situation. We’re making decisions to shut down our operations to make sure people are safe, to clean their facilities, to put tracking mechanisms in place, to make sure that we’re notifying people if they’ve potentially been exposed. It’s been all hands on deck, full on crisis.” Still, Chang offered an optimistic perspective on just how meaningful this moment in history is, both for her company and business at large. She said, “What’s going to come out of this is a whole new set of requirements for what work looks like and how we do work. We’ve now proven that teleworking on a global scale can work, not only technologically but operationally and so, I think that changes a lot of things.”
LEAGUES & TEAMS: MLB VP/Global Corporate Partnerships Uzma Rawn, a ’20 SBJ “Forty Under 40” honoree, spoke to COVID-19’s impact on the league’s marketing partnership deals, many of which were to be triggered at the start of the season. She said, “This is definitely a fluid situation and the approach we’ve really been taking with our partners as it relates to communication is to try to be as frank and as transparent as possible. ... They’ve been very understanding.” She added MLB is continuing to “keep our partners up to date in real time as it relates to the state of our season, their current contracts, the digital and social opportunities that our content team is coming up with and ideating on a daily basis, for us to continue to engage fans without game play.” Trail Blazers Dir of Equity & Inclusion Octavia Chambers, an inaugural SBJ “New Voices Under 30” honoree, also shared her perspective: “I want to applaud the NBA for really leveraging the power of sports to advance public health. There’s just so much unknown, to be honest. I think for us as an organization, it’s kind of challenging us to do things a little bit different and figure out how we can leverage those diverse perspectives in our workforce.”
