Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [382]
It’s never come up, to their credit, from their end or our end. They’re very funny about having us not anchor shows together. I don’t know what they think would happen—is she going to hit me in the head with a frying pan or something? That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to become Regis and Joy Philbin.
JOHN SKIPPER:
As I took the job in October 2005, it was certainly my intention to diversify our group and to provide an environment without harassment. It was an overall priority for our company. It has certainly been the case that the behavior of a few individuals has muddied this effort, and so we made a decision to have less tolerance for such behavior. If they were paying attention, employees should have had a clear understanding of what constituted inappropriate behavior between them. We took a number of steps to ensure that they paid attention.
I have never knowingly placed anybody in charge of any production after being told, “Do you know you’re putting them in charge of somebody they have now or in the past had a relationship with?” We may have had situations come up, but I’ve never knowingly said, “Gee, you’re now in charge of X, are you aware you’re creating a conflict there?”
The hardest thing about this is the fact that from the very top of our company, there’s a sincere dedication and insistence that everyone here behave appropriately—and the vast majority of our employees come to work every day, work very hard, and we don’t hear anything about them except that they’re doing a great job. We have learned we must expect coverage and scrutiny. We are ESPN. We have close to a thousand people who we put on-air. Many of them are quite prominent—former players, former coaches. No one else comes close to having that many people on-air.
ED DURSO:
We’ll address anything that’s inappropriate. It can come up in any number of ways under the general heading of workplace behavior, language, demeanor, approach. Certainly there are conflicts of interest, inappropriate behavior when dealing with vendors or whatever you have—others cheating, putting false stuff on your bank account. So we’re dealing with an array of potential problems and issues. All [our policies are] calculated in a way to run our business honestly, fairly, openly, as best we can. We’re trying to do something of value.
There are no sacred cows in our organization. We are not going to provide somebody higher up or lower down with anything different in terms of meting out discipline because of their position. There’s no one so important to our company that we would pull punches on that.
JOHN SKIPPER:
As someone whose memos have been leaked, and whose words said at meetings have appeared on the Internet, I can tell you that we have learned that we have to be careful about what we say. However, we have also chosen not to let it cripple us. We continue to be candid with our employees, to share a lot of information, because we believe that the greater good is still to do that. Is it disappointing when things get leaked? Yes, it is. It’s not nearly as debilitating day-to-day as I think it feels when at the senior level of the company we’re trying to figure out what to do. Last year we had a 96 percent retention rate. We do internal surveys on a regular basis to ask our employees how they feel, and they overwhelmingly feel excellent about working here. If I took all the resumes we got in the past two or three years from people who want to come here, it would fill up this office. Did we not have more than ten thousand applications last year for about sixty internships? So it is still regarded