Human Capital Management

Investing in competitive benefits, development opportunities and wellbeing initiatives and building a culture to fuel employee success. 

Click through to learn about our 2024 impact in action. For detailed human capital management data, please see our corporate responsibility KPI webpage.

When it comes to employee engagement, top-performing companies experience 23% higher profitability and 70% higher employee wellbeing. To drive those feelings of engagement, organizations must take a defined approach to human capital management, delivering the support, development opportunities and benefits needed to meet employees’ holistic needs.

Today, we are one of the largest U.S.-based private-sector employers, with 140,990 employees¹ across 51 countries. We value our employees and strive, every day, to show that in how we invest in their success. That includes offering well-paying jobs, competitive benefits, effective development programs and a strong culture built on capability and commitment to our purpose.

Attracting and Recruiting Talent

Our efforts to nurture a collaborative, customer-oriented and inclusive workforce start with how we attract and recruit top industry talent:

• People Analytics Capabilities: We analyze trends through executive insights, compensation views, return-on-investment metrics, office presence information and workforce, attrition and movement data to inform decisions related to talent attraction, hiring and retention.
• Data-Driven Marketing: We leverage data insights to identify and engage key job-seeking audiences and drive them to our careers website, where a clear candidate experience makes it easy for people to apply for jobs.
• Hiring and Promotions: At AT&T, we have always had a policy to hire and advance employees on merit.
• Onboarding: We aim to provide best-in-class new-hire experiences to ensure job readiness and continued engagement. This includes delivering job-specific trainings, learning resources and continuous improvements to ensure employees are set up for success.
• Internships: We offer nearly 20 internship and developmental programs to provide outstanding young individuals with real-world experience in, and pathways to, careers in telecommunications.

We are proud to maintain a skills-based hiring approach, which means less than 5% of AT&T roles require a college degree.

Delivering Competitive Compensation and Benefits²

We provide competitive compensation, are committed to pay equity and regularly review and adapt compensation when needed to ensure fair practices that keep us competitive and in line with the market. We also deliver a benefits program that meets all state and national requirements, and which can be personalized to employees’ varying needs. This Total Rewards package is crucial in attracting, retaining and motivating employees, and we pledge to remain competitive and in line with the market. Through it, we prioritize holistic wellbeing by creating opportunities for employees to advance their emotional, financial, physical and social health, wherever they are on this journey.

Emotional Wellbeing

• No-Cost Mental Health and Coaching Resources: Professional, confidential assistance, offered through our Employee Assistance Program (EAP), for employees and their families who are looking for mental and emotional health support or coaching. Employees and their families can access up to 16 no-cost visits with a licensed counselor or coach per year. If care extends beyond this, all providers are in-network for all self-insured health plans. Resources are also provided to help employees build resilience and emotional intelligence.
• Empathy Platform: Bereavement support, including counseling and practical help with administrative tasks, accessible by all beneficiaries of MetLife group life insurance.

Financial Wellbeing

• Engagement Opportunities: Opportunities for employees to participate in educational workshops, events, videos and discussion forums regarding financial wellbeing.
• Health-Related Finances: Flexible spending accounts, health reimbursement accounts and/or payroll deductions for designated employee groups, as well as company contributions to lifestyle wellbeing and health savings accounts.
• Retirement Plans: Various retirement vehicles offered, including defined-benefit for certain employees and/or defined-contribution plans. All full-time U.S. employees are eligible for a 401(k) savings plan with a generous company match. As participants in AT&T savings plans, employees can choose from a range of investment options with varying risk tolerance levels to assist in their retirement needs, with some restrictions. Savings plan participants have access to an investment advisory service with two levels of service: free online tools or fee-based professional account management with an adviser.
• On-Site Financial Support: Dedicated support provided in two locations, Dallas HQ and Atlanta, for overall financial planning and general education on AT&T retirement plans.

Physical Wellbeing

• CarePlus Supplemental Benefits: A program that covers many experimental and expanded services rarely covered through traditional health plans.
• Virtual Primary and Urgent Care: A program that provides access to no-cost or low-cost virtual care for employees and family members enrolled in medical coverage. Our virtual care network of providers is critical to helping our nationwide footprint of employees and their families access high-quality physicians anytime, regardless of where they live and work.
• On-Site Health and Wellness Care: For our headquarters employees, we offer exclusive access to an on-site Health and Wellness Center where they may receive primary care or consult with a behavioral therapist, chiropractors and physical therapists, without the hassle of traffic, to fit around their schedule.
• Centers of Expertise: These specialized programs deliver high-quality, cost-efficient and member-supported care for a variety of clinical pathways. Programs include coverage and guidance for cancer, fertility, digital physical therapy, cell and gene therapies, elective surgeries and sleep for participating employees and their partners.

Social Wellbeing

• Caregiver Time Off: We offer up to three weeks paid time off for management employees to be there for loved ones for qualified situations.
• Family Planning and Support: We provide 24/7 virtual support for all employees for pregnancy, postpartum, loss, adoption/surrogacy and return to work. Management employees can take five consecutive business days off for pregnancy loss/miscarriage. We provide maternity rooms for nursing mothers and breast milk benefits, including shipping breast milk for nursing mothers during work travel. Egg freezing services, surrogacy and adoption support are also supported.
• Paid Parental Time Off (PPTO): We offer up to 12 weeks paid time off for new parents, including adoptive parents. Time may be extended for birthing mothers when paired with applicable short-term disability benefits. PPTO benefits are also available to a portion of union employees.
• Paid Time Off (PTO): Management employees receive 23 or 28 days PTO (based on length of service). Employees also receive sick time, as needed, up to seven consecutive business days. Bargained employees receive PTO, holidays and sick time that have been negotiated with unions.

How We Connect

A strong company culture is key to our success. To build a high-performance culture, we need to work together to affect behavior change across four focus areas:

• Serve Customers First: Making our customers the reason for everything we do and having the power to serve their needs first.
• Move Faster: Stepping up to speed up — owning our decisions and accelerating our actions to make AT&T faster than the competition.
• Act Boldly: Using curiosity and courage to raise the bar — taking smart risks, questioning convention, challenging and being challenged.
• Win as One: Doing the right thing for each other and for our greater good — pursuing success together rather than as individuals or businesses alone.

These four “How We Connect” behaviors accelerate our culture transformation and shape the future of AT&T.

Encouraging Open Communication

To develop our culture, we need to understand employee needs so we can meet them where they are. We maintain an intentional listening strategy to gather information that directly shapes our employee development strategy and helps us establish feelings of support and engagement. It includes:

• Annual Employee Census Survey: Our most comprehensive survey, in which all employees can provide their thoughts. Results are typically shared across AT&T, enabling all leaders who receive at least five responses to create and drive targeted initiatives based on feedback. While working through a year of transition, we opted to not conduct this survey in 2024, but we plan to reintroduce it in 2025. Throughout the year, we remained committed to gathering employee feedback through our other internal surveys, listed below.
• Life Cycle Surveys and On-Demand Surveys: Surveys to assess sentiment at key career journey milestones, such as with seven-day and 30-day new-hire/new-to-role surveys and exit surveys. They enable us to get a sense of how employees respond to similar questions at different career stages. On-demand surveys are often created in partnership with different business units to gather feedback on specific events or topics.
• Compliance Survey: A survey, hosted periodically by our Chief Compliance Office, to gather feedback on ethics, honesty and integrity. Employee responses are confidential, with results aggregated to protect identities so people feel safe raising key issues. We use the survey results to understand employee perspectives and improve programs throughout AT&T.
• Community Engagement Survey: Taken with a representative sample of the workforce, this survey intends to understand employees’ awareness of and engagement in AT&T’s corporate responsibility initiatives. We also conduct virtual and in-person focus groups to elicit employee feedback on community engagement at AT&T. 

Our Culture

To connect all people to greater possibility, we need to authentically show up for our customers, and that starts with how we show up for our employees. We welcome and value our employees’ unique backgrounds and abilities, believing that an inclusive workforce fuels creativity, drives innovation and strengthens our connections with the communities we serve. We are guided by a simple strategy:

Growing Talent Through Opportunities

We help people build meaningful AT&T careers by developing leadership competencies through a range of development opportunities. We emphasize a personalized approach with mentorship, training courses, tuition reimbursement and over 50 nano-degrees and partner degree programs.

Talent Retention

Our work to foster belonging is supported by our Employee Groups — highly engaged, voluntary, employee-led groups that bring people together, promote professional development opportunities and serve their communities.

Employee Groups help foster our inclusive culture by bringing their ideas, their understanding of key issues and the voice of our customers to the table. They also play a key role in helping us deliver better customer experiences, supporting the company to problem-solve and, ultimately, creating better solutions that help us meet our business objectives. All Employee Groups are open to all employees.

Where We Work

We believe in the value of connection and our employees coming together in person to fuel greater collaboration and innovation. Being together strengthens our culture and the effectiveness of our teams in serving our customers. All U.S.-based management employees receive one of two designations — office or virtual — based on their work and the outcomes their teams are driving. The majority have an office designation, with virtual employees primarily being in roles that do not require high levels of collaboration.

Several of our union contracts also allow for union-represented call center employees to apply to work from home.

Prioritizing Learning and Development

Our award-winning AT&T Learning & Development team supports continuous employee growth through new hire training, continuation training for a current role, advanced learning for a potential future role, and mentoring and career development programs. We also deliver content year-round through a custom-built app.

We equip our people with expertise to strengthen our talent pipeline, advance AT&T’s culture and drive business impact. We deliver leading-edge learning and development experiences and develop an expert pipeline of talent through enriching experiences and developmental opportunities.

Frontline Training

We deliver frontline training to business units based on their unique functional needs. For example, Elevate is a tailored solution and consolidated global leadership training program for new managers across the company. This comprehensive training was designed to enable customization to cater to varying business needs, addressing challenges faced by frontline organization managers.

To further enhance our development offerings, we partner with learning institutions such as LinkedIn Learning, as well as public and private universities, to offer leadership courses, career courses and tailored educational opportunities.

We regularly evaluate our programs to ensure they effectively support people in building and retaining the knowledge needed to do their jobs well. To do so, we use a variety of methods and data sources — including learner feedback, knowledge transfer, behavior change and performance results — to identify and implement necessary improvements. For instance, we log employee online training sessions through our Personal Learning Experience platform to help measure training performance and trends.

Opening the Door to Career Development

As well as company-wide initiatives and resources, we deliver programs tailored to specific development needs:

• Leading with Distinction Program: This large-scale leadership development program is delivered to AT&T’s entire executive and general management population. Leaders are educated on the AT&T corporate strategy, financial foundations and leadership capabilities needed to lead. The program serves to align all leaders and drive a high-performance culture. To cement learning foundations, a continuous sustained learning component is delivered over the course of the year. Through post-earnings workshops, leadership toolkits and financial education content, leaders are equipped and empowered to advance learning across the enterprise.
• Management Development Program: Five months of continued development for selected high-achieving, high-potential frontline through second-level employees. Incorporates job shadowing, group collaboration, monthly keynote sessions and an in-person three-day training. Topics include executive presence, financial acumen, agile thinking, project management, succession planning and networking. Level 2 participants can also earn an Agile Leadership Certificate from Cornell University.
• Technology Development Program: Spans 24–36 months and aims to transform science, technology, engineering and math graduates into highly skilled professionals. Participants work on high-priority projects in areas like 5G/fiber technology, big data and full stack application development. Most participants enter as first-level managers and are promoted to next-level roles upon program completion.

Nurturing Continuous Growth

We promote ongoing development, setting clear work expectations and providing regular feedback, coaching and performance evaluations so employees understand how they are doing. Our review process blends peer, manager and direct-report feedback. Employees can also use a 360-degree feedback survey, aligned to our How We Connect culture behaviors, to provide more well-rounded insight. Supervisors are encouraged to give direct reports feedback at least monthly and to hold an annual career discussion, which may or may not occur during formal reviews.

We also provide career guidance through Career Intelligence, a function we have built into the human capital management platform, Workday, to help employees explore potential new roles. Employees can search job profiles, explore required skill sets and how their current capabilities align, and understand potential progression routes within job families. We have also enabled the Workday Career Hub functionality, which takes employees through a series of questions to add existing skills to their employee profile and identify skills they’re interested in developing. With this insight, the Career Hub can then recommend people employees should connect with, as well as skills to develop further to advance their careers.

Respecting Employee Unions

We have one of the largest full-time, union-represented workforces in the United States. Across all international and U.S. operations, approximately 43% of our employees are represented by unions. We have been building strong union relationships for nearly 100 years and remain dedicated to cooperating with our unions — namely the Communications Workers of America (CWA), International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

We value union-represented employees and work to create competitive contracts for them that provide and protect high-quality working-class jobs, competitive wages and leading benefits. We also look to deliver meaningful development opportunities. For example, together with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, we have developed training and apprenticeship programs.

For additional details of our collective bargaining activities and union interactions, see the AT&T Employee Relations webpage.

Human Capital Management Governance

• Board of Directors’ Human Resources Committee (HRC): Oversees human resources (HR) matters and meets several times annually to discuss compensation decisions. The full Board receives annual reports on compensation for top executives as well as periodic updates on other human capital issues.
• Global Marketing Officer and Senior Executive Vice President HR and International: Leads global HR efforts and communicates directly with the HRC and Board.
• Board of Directors’ Governance and Policy Committee: Has oversight over all environmental, social and governance issues and receives quarterly updates from the Vice President (VP) — Culture & Inclusion.
• Benefits Team: Responsible for managing and developing AT&T’s employee benefits program. The Chief Executive Officer and HR senior leaders may also be given authority for benefits decisions depending on the magnitude of financial impact.³
• Culture & Inclusion Team: Spearheads initiatives to help create a workplace in which all employees perform at their best, feel a sense of belonging and drive a deeper understanding of engagement within the business.
• Labor Relations Team: Bargains with union representatives on AT&T’s behalf, including developing competitive contracts for union-represented employees.
• Training & Development Team: Oversees development and delivery of training and development programs throughout the employee life cycle.

Throughout 2024, we remained focused on onboarding the best industry talent and delivering the best employee experience. During the year, our careers website was visited by more than 4.4 million users, resulting in nearly 660,000 applicants. In total, we made more than 15,000 external hires during the year.  

Reinforcing Our Wellbeing Message

Throughout 2024, we launched an internal drive to promote — and celebrate — the small, everyday steps employees can take to advance their own wellbeing. Through company-wide “Good Call” messaging, we encourage employees to focus on healthy micro-actions, from establishing good sleeping habits to leveraging additional AT&T benefits. The message is being socialized across all business levels through various communication channels, such as on-site signage and during annual benefits enrollment.

We reinforced our focus on supporting mental and emotional wellbeing, evolving our EAP throughout 2024 to enhance access to high-quality therapy and coaching support. The EAP is now administered by Lyra Health, an expert in workplace mental health solutions. We also hosted our Stamp Out Stigma campaign once again, encouraging employees to pledge to help reduce stigma around mental illness.

Creating More Opportunities for Professional Growth

During 2024, we invested $117 million in training, with more than 200,000⁴ employees completing 6.4 million hours of training — roughly 32 hours and 32 courses per employee.⁵ This included 2.3 million hours of new hire training and more than 270,000 hours for advanced learning programs. Throughout the year, we invested more than $11 million in tuition assistance. In the past four years, AT&T tuition reimbursement has helped nearly 10,000 people attain higher education.

We believe that for people to advance professionally, they need to be supported by effective leaders. In 2024, we invested in our Leading with Distinction program which trains managers on how to elevate and support their teams.

Assessing Progress

100% of salaried employees, entry-level through vice presidents, with at least three months of service, received a formal performance appraisal in 2024.⁶ Additionally, 118,000 management employees engaged in the feedback process in connection with formal midyear and end-of-year check-ins.

Enhancing the Employee Experience with AI Tools

We offer tools to help employees work more efficiently, effectively and creatively. This includes Ask AT&T, our internal generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tool. During 2024, we continued work to integrate HR content into Ask AT&T, updating HR articles and resources to ensure we are delivering accurate information to the tool. These resources will be introduced to Ask AT&T in a phased approach throughout 2025.

We also developed a training to help more people effectively engage with Ask AT&T. Delivered in three phases, the Ask AT&T Academy training is designed to increase adoption, starting with educating people on key topics such as prompt engineering and what AI is. The next phase explores domain-specific prompts and how employees can use Ask AT&T to identify information relevant to specific business areas. In the final phase, employees learn about how Ask AT&T can support them in their roles by delivering insights tailored to their job.

Learn more about how we are leveraging Ask AT&T in our Innovation & Responsible Technology issue brief.

Continually Strengthening Union Relationships

Since 2022, we have reached 18 collective bargaining agreements with unions. In 2024, we negotiated seven agreements which, collectively, represented nearly 28,000 employees. This includes agreements with the CWA in the southeast and west that cover about 22,000 employees. We are pleased the southeast agreement ended a month-long work stoppage.

Encouraging Greater Engagement

During 2024, more than 33,400 employees participated in at least one Employee Group. These voluntary, employee-led groups exemplify our company commitment to fostering a sense of community and provide occasions for community service. Each Employee Group is open to all employees.

The 2024 Employee Group Conference, themed “Forward Together,” brought together more than 1,300 in-person and more than 16,500 virtual participants from 18 countries.

Our dedicated Employee Groups work to support company objectives and have made significant strides in bridging the digital divide. They organize Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics (STEAM) Fairs, collaborate with AT&T Connected Learning Centers™, distribute laptops to underserved communities, and host digital literacy and cybersecurity programs in schools and retirement homes.