Taking Cox Communications From People Insights to Action

About Cox Communications

At Cox Communications, VP of New Growth Joshua Sommer leads a multidisciplinary team that de-risks hypotheses for growth through traditional research and development, building internal startups, investing in external startups, and leading corporate development. Josh’s team is charged with leading innovation for the organization, and he believes that looking to the future of the organization means looking to the future of your people.

In 2018, Cox went through major growth, bringing on many new employees that had been hired from outside the company. This influx of talent prompted Josh's team to take a deeper look into the organization's demographics and culture. "Inclusion matters to culture, diversity matters to perspective, and equity matters to the individual employees," Josh explained. As a forward-looking and strategic executive, Josh wanted to drive responsibility for people goals across the organization and needed additional data to improve workforce development.

Goals

To better understand the experiences and sentiments of Cox’s growing workforce, Josh's innovation team began designing and fielding custom surveys using SurveyMonkey and spreadsheets. The surveys dug into topics like psychological safety, sense of belonging, connection to the company's mission, and more.

However, collecting and analyzing the survey data manually across spreadsheets proved to be a hugely labor-intensive process. Plus, this process didn’t deliver the insights Josh’s team needed to implement targeted initiatives and better understand the entire employee journey.

Then Josh met Illoominus founder and CEO Noelle London at a Techstars event in 2021. He could tell that Illoominus could enable a seamless way to do what his team was doing manually. More importantly, the platform would make it possible for Josh’s team to drive real action and accountability from the survey insights.

Solution

In the Illoominus platform, Cox's New Growth team and Illoominus co-designed the next iteration of their survey tool and reporting processes. In the Illoominus platform, Josh's team evolved their survey approach for deeper demographic segmentation across factors like department, job level, gender, race, ethnicity, and more. This enabled more targeted analysis to pinpoint gaps and opportunities for change.

“For example, if directors were experiencing low psychological safety, and the scores for female directors were even lower, Illoominus made it possible to analyze that gap between individual contributors and decision makers in a more tailored way and address the root causes,” Josh explained. “Because solutions are not one-size-fits-all.” — Josh, VP of New Growth

Outcomes

Josh emphasizes that any organization looking to level up their people analytics must drive alignment across HR, IT, innovation teams, the c-suite, and others to see widespread adoption of a solution like Illoominus, creating a new standard across the company and avoiding duplicative efforts. To achieve that buy-in, Josh recommends elevating the value of people analytics to the highest levels of leadership.

At Cox, the credentialed, hyper-specific insights and tailored recommendations from Illoominus made it impossible for department leaders to ignore. "The nice thing about that visibility is it creates self-driven competition,” said Josh. “I saw leaders whose teams had lower scores immediately start making changes to catch up.

“That visibility and credibility gave Josh's team the leverage to have powerful conversations: "Illoominus gave us the ability to go to a leader and say, 'The fact base is clear: your peers are outperforming you in key areas. Let's work together to improve.” — Josh, VP of New Growth

By combining Illoominus' robust people analytics capabilities with a strong internal commitment to action, Josh thinks organizations can more effectively nurture an engaged, inclusive, high-performing culture.