Know Your Value Guides Employees Toward Success
Mika Brzezinski has three simple words for anyone who has ever struggled to move forward personally or professionally: Know your value.
“If you don’t know your value and you can’t communicate it effectively, you’re leaving money on the table — not just at work but in any relationship,” says Mika, co-host of Morning Joe on MSNBC and the author of two best-selling books focused on giving women the tools to advocate for themselves and their financial futures.
Last year, Comcast NBCUniversal’s Global Benefits and Diversity & Inclusion teams built on Mika’s message of empowerment by creating the Know Your Value professional development program, a set of unique resources designed to help all our people achieve their own vision of success.
“Know Your Value reinforces our goal of providing experiences that enhance employees’ emotional, physical, and financial well-being,” says Shawn Leavitt, Senior Vice President of Global Benefits. “When our people feel valued and rewarded, they perform better and our company gets stronger.”
This program builds on the success of our efforts in 2015, when more than 250 employees were selected to experience Mika’s Know Your Value events. Attendees gained inspiration from a diverse set of speakers and actionable career advice from Comcast and NBCUniversal executives during exclusive breakout sessions.
We kicked off our expansion of Know Your Value last November with a daylong event at New York’s Rockefeller Plaza, where more than 100 employees explored practical ways to strengthen their personal and professional value. In addition to sharing her own experiences, Mika emceed a series of panel discussions with other NBCUniversal professionals, including TODAY Show Financial Editor Jean Chatzky, Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough, and our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Tanya Benenson.
Following the event, we rolled out a comprehensive Know Your Value curriculum on our myBenefits online portal. Employees have on-demand access to videos, articles, and self-directed exercises spanning three core topics:
Knowing Your Value. This module focuses on better understanding and managing our unique strengths, weaknesses, tendencies, and stress triggers to help drive positive results inside and outside the workplace.
Growing Your Value. In this module, participants learn how to effectively build their personal brand and professional portfolio, expand their network, and create more valuable interactions with others.
Showing Your Value. This module helps employees successfully navigate conversations about performance through techniques such as crafting a personal success story, addressing difficult topics constructively, and being prepared to confidently express their worth.
The program has yielded tangible results for both our business and our employees. We have seen measurable gains in employee engagement as well as accelerated growth in employees’ roles and levels of professional responsibility.
“The Know Your Value conference has empowered me to refine my own personal brand and work to establish it throughout the company,” says Henken Bean, Art Director at Comcast’s Digital Center of Excellence in Philadelphia.
Casandra Kate Escobar, a Manager at NBCUniversal International Television Distribution in Los Angeles, describes a similar experience. “Knowing my core values and having a brand statement has given me the confidence to pitch business ideas and secure budgets — to roll out those ideas,” Casandra says.
