Kotick drops arbitration for Blizz staff

General Discussion
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Genuinely, that’s a rather Mark Morheim type move. Finally some good news from Kotick.

Hopefully Blizz can get back to making industry leading magic.

Kotick outlined five new changes the company is taking in a letter to staff:

  1. We are launching a new zero-tolerance harassment policy company-wide – In the past, when we discovered and substantiated harassment, we terminated some employees and provided verbal or written warnings or different disciplinary actions to others. In retrospect, to achieve our goals for workplace excellence, this approach is no longer adequate. We need tougher rules and consistent monitoring across the entire company to make sure reports are being handled correctly and discipline is appropriate and swift.

As a result, we are implementing a zero-tolerance policy across Activision Blizzard that will be applied consistently. Our goal is to have the strictest harassment and non-retaliation policies of any employer, and we will continue to examine and tighten our standards to achieve this goal everywhere we do business.

Any Activision Blizzard employee found through our new investigative processes and resources to have retaliated against anyone for making a compliance complaint will be terminated immediately.

In many other instances of workplace misconduct, we will no longer rely on written warnings: termination will be the outcome, including in most cases of harassment based on any legally protected category.

Future employment contracts and equity awards will be clear: termination for these reasons will result in the immediate forfeiture of future compensation.

We also want to ensure that employees who file reports are encouraged, protected, and heard. For all reports of harassment and retaliation, we will investigate the allegation and whether the Activision Blizzard personnel who received the report of such behavior took the appropriate steps to protect the integrity of our compliance processes.

There may be some places around the world where local law may restrict some of these measures. In those cases, we will apply the highest permissible standards and the strongest possible discipline.

  1. We will increase the percentage of women and non-binary people in our workforce by 50% and will invest $250 million to accelerate opportunities for diverse talent –Today, approximately 23% of our global employee population identifies as women or non-binary. Building on the success that King and other business units have achieved, we will seek to increase our percentage of women and non-binary professionals by approximately 50% – to more than one-third across the entire company – within the next five years and hopefully faster. Each franchise team, business unit, and functional area will be expected to have plans to help fulfill this ambition.

With respect to diversity, while we perform better than our peers with 30% of our U.S. workforce from diverse or under-represented communities, broadening this progress will continue to be a significant focus of mine as well as company, business unit, and franchise leadership.

To further this commitment, we’ll be investing an additional $250 million over the next 10 years in initiatives that foster expanded opportunities in gaming and technology for under-represented communities. This commitment includes inspiring diverse talent to pursue career opportunities in gaming through an ABK Academy that includes partnerships with colleges and technical schools serving under-represented communities, mentorships for participants, and a rotating apprenticeship program that leads to game development jobs, similar to the programs we began with the United Negro College Fund and Management Leadership for Tomorrow. We will also provide learning, development, and advanced degree opportunities for current employees to increase the number of women and those from under-represented communities in leadership positions across the company and in our industry.

In the coming months, Brian Bulatao, Julie Hodges, and I will share details about how we are operationalizing these goals and implementing and measuring this expanded investment.

  1. Based on feedback from employees, we are waiving required arbitration of sexual harassment and discrimination claims – For any Activision Blizzard employee who chooses not to arbitrate an individual claim of sexual harassment, unlawful discrimination, or related retaliation arising in the future, the company will waive any obligation to do so.

  2. We will continue to increase visibility on pay equity – As described in the recent note from our President, Daniel Alegre, and our Chief Administrative Officer, Brian Bulatao, the company continues to focus on pay equity for employees. In fact, our U.S. analysis showed that women at the company on average earned slightly more than men for comparable work in 2020. To ensure transparency on our continuing commitment to pay equity, we will report these results annually.

  3. We will provide regular progress updates – We will be monitoring the progress of our business units, franchise teams, and functional leaders with respect to workplace initiatives and we will provide a status report quarterly. We also will be adding a dedicated focus on this vital work in our annual report to shareholders and in our annual ESG report with information on gender hiring, diversity hiring, and workplace progress.

Kotick’s earlier pay cut this past April brought his salary down to $875,000 from $1,750,000—although he was and is certainly still rich. In today’s letter, he is asking for an even bigger salary reduction.

“Lastly, I want to ensure that every available resource is being used in the service of becoming the industry leader in workplace excellence,” writes Kotick. “Accordingly, I have asked our Board of Directors to reduce my total compensation until the Board has determined that we have achieved the transformational gender-related goals and other commitments described above.”

To be more exact, Kotick asked the Board to cut his pay to the base salary under California law, which is $62,500.

“To be clear, this is a reduction in my overall compensation, not just my salary,” added the CEO. “I am asking not to receive any bonuses or be granted any equity during this time.”

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Well time will tell if this is mainly a PR move or real changes that would improve the work environment.

I hope the salary cut can be redistributed to the employees.

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Well, similar. But I would hope that Overwatch team could get a larger development budget to work with.

Which would go partially to benefiting existing and new staff.

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That would also be nice.

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Hiring people because of orientation and gender and not because of skill? Yeah, PR move at its best.

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If he’s really taking a pay cut and

Then its already a better PR move than the McCree name change.

You know, that’s the double edged sword to diversifying. It still is tough to say “Yeah, we’re explicitly hiring based or race and gender, which is racist and sexist by definition, but here’s why its a good thing!”.

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They worded it terribly. I for one support affirmative action.

I believe in reaching out to women and minorities and in creating an environment where they’re accepted and encouraged to apply.

I don’t believe in making “quota or checklist” such as “we’re increasing the amount of x employees by 50%.” That’s terrible and makes applicants feel like “diversity hires” who might be wrongly subjected to harassment from parties who feel like they don’t belong and got their position based on those factors alone.

Also, just because they want to hire more women or people of other gender and ethic backgrounds doesn’t mean those people will be under skilled or under qualified. Your statement heavily implies that and is quite ignorant in the grand scheme of things.

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Yeah I get that and why they woudl want to do it but if you think of it it is kinda of unethical if you have higher chances to get hired because of… you know.

It is like fighting discrimination but then applying it in another way.

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It’s a lot deeper than that but I get what you mean.

However it’s important to keep in mind certain groups start out life at a disadvantage. There’s a reason the professional higher up world looks very uniform. We all know it, it’s been cited in many a history book why that is.

It’s important to take an active hand in changing that.

And it’s not like they’ll l hire one person who’s totally unequipped to do a job over someone else based SOLEY on those factors. (Despite what the internet will lead you to believe)

Whoever they hire SHOULD be able to do the job they’re applying for and that will show on their application. If they’re also factoring in that they want certain viewpoints or groups represented, then they’ll take that into account as well.

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who cares. Why do companies try to fill diversity quotas? Just hire people based on skill.

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His salary has zero influence on whether they grow the development team for a game or not. They have billions of dollars in cash in savings (we’ll likely in stocks) that they could use at anytime to grow a development team if they saw it as a good investment.

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I understand what you are saying, but these moves tend to ignore one reality: the number of degrees earned in a particular field by the group that is underrepresented. This is something engineering disciplines have dealt with for decades. For computer science and game design, ~85% of the degrees are earned by men. For that reason, in large companies you should not be even close to approaching half of the development staff being women.

Blizz has women making up 20-21% of their work force; I haven’t seen it broken down by role, so this next part might be off. If 20% (assuming the man-women split applies to all departments) of the developer and service infrastructure employees are women, then Blizz is actually performing better than expected based on the number of women that earn related degrees. However if my assumption is wrong and that number is closer to 8%, then they are clearly not doing enough to hire women.

Granted, there are most likely social factors that keep women from entering the field, but those aren’t something you can change overnight. Even the most progressive, egalitarian Scandinavian countries have giant discrepancies between men and women in engineering. Surprisingly, those Scandinavian countries have a bigger delta between men and women than in what are considered to have less equality between men and women. Additionally, there are plenty of studies that show that men and women have different interests (things vs people) which influence self-selected job choices, and it appears that has evolutionary roots based on primate studies. So this could be a somewhat intractable problem.

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