What are your thoughts on Activision Blizzard’s situation right now? I don’t remember employees staging walkout for such a high publicity case before. How will things likely change for the industry?
For those who aren't aware, today many employees of Blizzard will be staging a walkout today at around 10am Pacific Daylight Time. This is the latest in a series of events that started with the California State Department of Fair Employment and Housing bringing a sexual discrimination/harassment lawsuit against Activision-Blizzard. You can read my [original post on the matter by clicking here].
In the time since, a number of things have happened. These were all happening in parallel, so astute readers should not necessarily assume a chain of events here. I have attempted to break them down.
Activision-Blizzard employees collectively written an open letter to the management with these specific demands:
An end to mandatory forced arbitration to resolve employee disputes (abusers are often protected by the arbitrators)
Better recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and promotion practices to remedy the secret rankings and boys club career tracks
Transparency on things like compensation, equity grants, profit sharing, promotions, etc. so compensation and promotion discrimination is more difficult to hide
A third-party audit of ATVI's reporting structure, HR department, and executive staff to see where the failure points are
As of this morning, the open letter has been signed by over 3200 current and former Blizzard employees. That's a pretty great sign rate considering Blizzard has a total employee count of around 2500 and Activision-Blizzard has around 9500.
The Leadership Statements
There has been a large amount of internal pushback from the employees against the corporate response - both the public statement from Activision-Blizzard and Fran Townsend (Executive in charge of HR). I think that the brass at the top did not realize how deep the corruption ran when they released their initial response to the lawsuit or how angry the employees were now that it became public. Some of the current and former executive leadership wrote statements to the public and/or to the employees. These statements generally boiled down to "this is a real shame, I didn't know and I'm sorry I didn't notice" which generally incensed the employees even more because these were the people in charge of the company when all of the abuse was happening. Claiming ignorance either means they were super out of touch with their own employees or they knew and were too cowardly or complicit to do something about it. Neither is a good look.
Activision-Blizzard held an all-hands meeting on Friday to try to address the issue. The executive leadership spoke about the situation for a while, giving typical corporate type responses and promising to do better. Then they opened the floor to comments and questions and the dam broke. Person after person shared their stories. I suspect it was around this time that the executive leadership realized that the situation ran a real risk of entire organizational collapse if something wasn't done to address the issue quickly.
After the All Hands Meeting, the message to the brass was received loud and clear. Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision-Blizzard, wrote a [letter to all employees that went out Tuesday], committing to:
Listening sessions for employees to suggest ways to improve
Immediately evaluating managers and leaders across the Company and terminating anyone who behaved inappropriately
Improved hiring practices
Removal of in-game content that celebrates some of the sexual predator employees, both current and former
All of these lead us to...
In the meantime, the employees did some organizing on their own because huge numbers of them refused to tolerate what their leadership said. The World of Warcraft team, for example, put out [their own statement] on the state of current events. Many of the middle and upper managers within the Blizzard org participated and pushed for action and change as well. The Blizzard employees are asking for solidarity today from fans - they are requesting that players all log out from all ATVI games and services during the hours of the walkout.
This employee walkout follows a similar walkout that [happened at Riot Games in May of 2019 for similar reasons]. From what I've been told by employees currently working at Riot, things there have changed for the better in the years since. One hopes that this enormous show of employee solidarity will push for some lasting change.
As for my own thoughts on the matter, I really want everyone out there to understand that this is not just an isolated incident. This is not the work of just a few bad actors. This is one of a long line of problems that are built into the system itself. It happened at Ubisoft, at Riot, at Microsoft, at EA, at Bioware, at Gearbox, at Square-Enix, at Capcom, at Bandai-Namco, at Uber, at Facebook, at Google, at Amazon - it happens everywhere. It is still happening. I put out the request for safe employers that my network would be able to feel comfortable working for, and I got three responses all came with the caveat “Well, this only applies to my current team”. Three. This sort of thing absolutely needs a cultural change, and that can only happen if we start putting ourselves in the uncomfortable positions of recognizing and calling it out at our own personal risk.
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