ESPN creates a virtual community for career development with SharePoint spaces

Foster, one of the 25 percent of ESPN employees who have visited the Career Center in its first few months, earned the prize by racking up the most points while exploring the career guidance available to employees in a 3D career metaverse. It shouldn’t come as surprise to sports fans that ESPN, a global leader in sports broadcasting, could create a fun, immersive career development experience for its employees. What is surprising is that the ESPN HR team could create this world with games, chatbots, and detailed, real-time analytics in only a few months with minimal custom development.

Seeing the opportunity to go the extra mile

ESPN is full of talented employees who produce some of the most innovative, exciting sports coverage and original content around the world. Retaining those employees by matching the quality that ESPN delivers to its viewers with equally impressive employee experiences is the goal of the ESPN HR department. “One of the many ways we’re elevating the employee experience is to really strengthen a culture of career at ESPN so all of our employees, across all levels and all segments of the company, feel that The Walt Disney Company is a place where employees never stop growing and their careers are limitless,” says Tonya Cornileus, Senior Vice President, Learning & Talent Solutions at The Walt Disney Company.

With career development as a priority, Cornileus and her team developed the idea of modeling their efforts after the career counseling provided by many universities. “We knew we had to provide a way for employees to connect to internal talent mobility opportunities while building internal connections and networks,” explains Cherita McIntye, Senior Director of Talent Management and Development at ESPN. “As a university career counselor, I saw firsthand how valuable they could be.”

The project took off when Dayana Falcon joined the HR Talent Management team at ESPN, transferring from a sales marketing role at its parent company, The Walt Disney Company. Falcon wasted no time when she joined the company in developing a network of colleagues and stepping into leadership roles in several resource groups available to employees. She repeatedly heard from employee resource group members that it was difficult to learn about career opportunities in other areas across Disney. “With any large organization, it’s hard to understand what everyone does and what the opportunities are,” explains Falcon. “We wanted to remove those silos and create best-in-class career services to support our employees in their career journeys.” 

Taking advantage of corporate culture with a sports-themed virtual world

Tapping into the abundant creativity within the organization, Falcon and the team set out to create the ESPN Career Center with four primary objectives: personalization, community, gamification, and recognition. They were originally inspired by videos they had seen of teachers using Bitmojis in PowerPoint presentations to make them more engaging for their students at the beginning of COVID-19. But everything changed when a Microsoft partner suggested that they look at SharePoint spaces. “When I saw the 3D environment in SharePoint spaces, my mind exploded with ideas,” explains Falcon. “I imagined turning a sports studio set into a career center with an interactive environment that provided employees with endless possibilities to explore their career options.”

The vision quickly became a reality. Using SharePoint spaces and a host of other technologies from Microsoft, Falcon created a virtual world despite not having a programming background. “I didn’t know how to use any of this technology less than a year ago,” says Falcon. “It’s really intuitive, and you can just jump in and start experimenting.”

Falcon felt it was important to bring in ESPN’s business priorities to create a more immersive learning experience and tie into the organization’s mission and culture. Erica Vittal, a coordinating designer for ESPN, agrees: “It’s nice to know that people at ESPN care enough to make things like this. The Career Center is interactive and visual, with sports themes and graphics that ESPN employees care about deeply. Who would have thought you could basically take a class on career development by clicking on objects like a video game?”

Personalizing the experience for individual career journeys

With a goal of providing value to all ESPN employees, the team came up with five personas that employees can select to match the Career Center experience to the type of guidance they’re seeking in their career journeys. “We want to meet our employees where they are in this Career Center,” says Cornileus. “Not every persona is focused on progression in terms of getting to the next level or promotion. Some employees might be very happy in their roles and just want to continue developing their skills.”

The persona player cards that can be selected are Career Starter, Career Upskiller, Career Shifter, Career Returner, and Career Accelerator. Selecting a player card leads employees into different sports-themed worlds that provide career guidance as part of a fun, engaging activity, such as a track race or a baseball game. “SharePoint spaces provided the platform to create unique experiences and different player stages,” says Falcon. “A Career Starter is in their initial sprint, so we have them sprinting down a track to perform activities at various distances.”

Each world is full of items related to the event that employees can interact with. “When you click these different items, they might take you out to a tweet, a post, a blog, or a video. As you play the game, you can immerse yourself in content related to your career stage,” says Falcon. “Leading with short-form, digestible content that has original rap music videos describing our peer mentorship program, GIFs, and Bitmojis resonates because that’s how people consume content day in and day out.” Music, voice-overs, and crowd noise enhance the experience as players progress through their games.

With SharePoint spaces, organizations can create 3D environments to facilitate the types of engaging experiences that ESPN desired. While Microsoft provides a catalog of 3D images to spark ideas, Falcon used ESPN employees’ film and graphic design expertise to create custom 3D images that aligned with the sports-themed experiences she wanted to create. “We have a lot of graphics expertise at ESPN, so we were able to make 2D images to represent the Sports games we were designing and then filled each world with 3D graphics,” says Falcon. “The entire process of designing and building the five player worlds in SharePoint spaces only took five weeks, and we can easily update the content to keep it fresh, relevant, and exciting.”

To help players get started, ESPN took advantage of other Microsoft technologies to add more experiences and guidance to the Career Center world. A Power Virtual Agents–based chatbot helps get people started in Career Center and pick a player card. Power Apps was the foundation of a Prep Your Career Plan app that helps employees plan out their careers by reflecting on their purpose, transferable skills, and aspirations. Using low-code Microsoft Power Platform capabilities, Falcon can program and update applications herself. She explains, “The chatbot was really only a few hours of work to put together, and because it’s so easy to program, we’re looking to grow the content within it to go beyond the player card selection and make additional career development recommendations.”

Creating digital networking opportunities

An important goal for the Career Center is to create a community where employees can network and inspire one another. The opportunity to network across ESPN and Disney has decreased over the past two years with so many employees working from home. Building on her original inspiration, Falcon incorporated Bitmojis into the SharePoint spaces environment. Each Bitmoji was created by an employee who volunteered to provide career guidance and successfully reached their career aspirations in a specific career stage. “We have the Bitmojis in the world to give advice,” explains Falcon. “You can listen to an employee’s story and then get their contact information to network further.”

In the future, ESPN plans to use Microsoft Mesh to enable deeper networking experiences. Employees will be able to interact within Career Center using their avatars. “We could use Career Center to host a speed networking meetup to explore their career path options or just have people interact with others with the same interests as they explore the Career Center content,” says Falcon.

Turning career development into an engaging experience

Providing a competitive element to the Career Center was important to make the experience more fun and provide the ability to recognize people for investing time into their career development. A solution from Microsoft Partner Network member Intlock tracks employee interactions with the Career Center SharePoint content and can display real-time usage via a Power BI dashboard to see what content types are resonating. “Intlock has an awesome gamification technology that we used to create a custom algorithm to assign points to various user interactions and then tap into our competitive culture by awarding monthly career development prizes,” says Falcon.

Extending the platform to recognize achievements

The flexibility that SharePoint spaces provides enabled ESPN to launch another contest within the Career Center. The ESPN All-Star Talent Showcase is an annual, internal competition set up as a tournament-style bracket. It’s designed to celebrate and reward best-in-class work across Disney that ties into ESPN’s four strategic priorities: Audience Expansion, Direct to Consumer, Quality Storytelling and Programming, and Innovation. Thirty-three employees submitted their work using Microsoft Forms, and the submissions, which showcased projects that aligned with ESPN’s goals, were posted on interactive video walls inside the Career Center.

Almost one in five ESPN employees voted on the submissions in a head-to-head contest or watched the live event for the championship, which was produced like an actual ESPN show. Chris Strong, Associate Director of Remote Production Operations, became the inaugural ESPN All-Star Talent Showcase Champion, winning a VIP weekend to the Masters Tournament for creating the ManningCast alternate broadcast technology. “A lot of people at ESPN like competitions. I definitely wanted to view all the submissions to see what I was up against when I entered the competition, and it opened up insight into groups that I didn’t know existed,” says Strong. “Since then, I’ve had people reach out for advice or to offer help, so it’s opened a lot of doors for my career.”

Making dreams come true with endless possibilities

Because the Microsoft technology is so easy to use, ESPN has been continually adding to the Career Center and has an extensive vision for the future. Innovation Igniter is a show that was recently launched in the Career Center to feature employees who are doing best-in-class work related to the company’s priorities. The videos are all stored in a Microsoft Stream library, and they all have surveys at the end to collect real-time feedback. “Whether it’s a video from Microsoft Stream or a SharePoint document library, we can get really creative with how we serve content to our teams in SharePoint spaces,” says Falcon.

In the coming months, ESPN plans to use Microsoft Bookings to enable employees to sign up for career coaching, an interview prep bot built using Power Virtual Agents, and a seven-day Career Refresh Challenge built with Power Apps. ESPN also recognizes opportunities to create new virtual worlds for programs like employee orientation and leadership development, through which learning can be individualized, self-directed, and sustained throughout each employee’s journey. The possibilities are endless in a virtual world.

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