Paramount Global Leverages Groundbreaking Use of the Salesforce Platform to Measure Diversity Across Productions

The innovative reporting platform is designed to help increase representation by analyzing gender, race and ethnic diversity metrics across television productions

Paramount Global and Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, announced the launch of Paramount’s new diversity reporting platform, which will give the company a more holistic view of the makeup of its production workforce, including Paramount+ with SHOWTIME, BET, CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, and others.

“To produce the best content for a diverse global audience, it’s imperative that the teams both in front of and behind the camera and those who are creating content, reflect our audiences. We often say, ‘what gets measured gets done,’ and this data will help us create a baseline for diversity targets, continue to improve representation, make informed long-term diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments in a measurable way, and hold ourselves accountable,” said Bob Bakish, President and CEO, Paramount Global.

“While there is no finish line when it comes to equality, every company can make progress in creating a more diverse and inclusive workforce and ecosystem by seeing and acting on their data,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. “We’re incredibly excited to support Bob Bakish and his amazing team on their creation of a new software platform that advances equality across Paramount and the entertainment industry.”

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Paramount has been publishing diversity data of its full-time U.S. employees for some time. And while there have been efforts to track diversity across domestic primetime productions because there was no uniform method of obtaining access to production suppliers’ diversity statistics, the process of standardizing, consolidating, and understanding the data from these various sources was challenging and time intensive.

The use of Salesforce’s platform represents the next step in Paramount’s efforts to measure diversity within its production suppliers, which include writers, directors, vendors, contractors, and roles like wardrobe stylists, production assistants, makeup artists, stunt workers, and extras.

To address this challenge, Paramount created a new reporting platform that offers a single dashboard to display diversity statistics of its production suppliers across brands with an eye towards safeguarding the privacy and security of the information. This dashboard and overall framework are designed so that other media organizations and industries can adopt them at their discretion. The platform will also further its Content for Change initiative, which is focused on using data-driven insights to transform its creative ecosystem – from content and creative supply chain to culture.

Paramount’s Human Resources organization, technology and social impact teams, and Office of Global Inclusion collaborated for several months to plan their framework and created the platform using Salesforce’s low-code developer tools in just four weeks. Having already reduced the process of calculating and visualizing metrics from at least two days of manual work to seconds, Paramount is also planning to further automate parts of the reporting process using features including Salesforce Flow. Today, it’s the responsibility of the industry to leverage workforce diversity information as a basis for taking meaningful action. The new diversity reporting platform is fundamental to building a data-driven culture within Paramount and driving systemic change across the industry.

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