Activision Blizzard Hires Former Disney Exec To Help 'Fix' Its Broken Culture

Activision Blizzard, still reeling from its recent legal and workplace troubles, has hired somebody to try to fix its broken culture.

The brand-new position of Vice President, Head of Culture has been given to former Disney executive Jessica Martinez, reports The Verge. Her job description includes a focus on "growing and implementing" the embattled studio/publisher's culture strategy, as well as reworking its learning and talent development efforts.

Her experience is what made ActiBlizz hire her. Before landing her new job, she spent 14 years leading Disney's strategy, operations, communications, and employee experience. As such, she will be leading the company's learning and development team during her tenure.

According to Martinez, she aims to bring a renewed focus to ensuring that Activision Blizzard's business becomes "human" again, as per a post announcing her hiring on Blizzard's website . This means that she has a tough mountain to climb, considering that the company's workplace have been nothing short of inhuman according to recent allegations.

In a lawsuit filed by the state of California last year, the company was implicated in allegations of workplace and sexual harassment - particularly the women and minorities. Some employees even referred to the workplace as having a "frat boy culture." Here's an excerpt from the story of an employee detailing this culture:

"Female employees almost universally confirmed that working for "Defendants" was akin to working in a frat house, which invariably involved male employees drinking and subjecting female employees to sexual harassment with no repercussion. "Cube crawls" in Defendants' offices were common and male employees proudly came into work hungover. Similarly, male employees would play video games during work, engage in banter about their sexual encounters, talk openly about female bodies, and make numerous jokes about rape."

This new hire is part of company president Mike Ybarra's efforts to rebuild people's trust in Activision Blizzard, as laid out in a blog post early this year.

Activision Blizzard's Recent Efforts To Fix Its Image

The issues with controversial CEO Bobby Kotick notwithstanding, ActiBlizz has been trying sveeral things to get back in the good graces of customers and employees. Hiring Martinez was the latest in their recent efforts to do so.

In the midst of the mainline Activision Blizzard scandal, the company has decided to promote their part-time employees into full time status. A total of 1,100 temporary workers, which includes QA testers, are covered by the mass promotion, This means that they will now have access to official benefits and a steadier income.

Aside from that, pay raises were also given to employees. The minimum wage is now set at $20 an hour, though there's a major catch: this pay increase doesn't include the QA testers who pushed for unionization at Raven Software. Either way, Martinez' job is expected to be a tough one, since the entire Activision Blizzard scandal saga is far from over.

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Written by RJ Pierce