On a cool September Saturday morning in Dallas, hundreds of employees and their family members gathered at a local hotel to give back. They came to package meals for Stop Hunger Now, a non-profit with the goal of ending world hunger. It was for the annual Day of Service, during the 2016 ERG Conference.

Jamika Doakes spent the better part of 2016 planning the Day of Service, in her last role as the Southwest Regional Lead for the Community Engagement team. Our Community Engagement team helps provide opportunities for employees to engage through various causes: volunteerism, mentoring and giving.

Hear what went in to planning the record-setting event in this month’s Life at AT&T podcast, as we recognize National Volunteer month in the U.S.

#14 Thank you for calling AT&T by Life at AT&T

If you go to some place or event labeled as “AT&T,” our Corporate Sponsorship team had a hand in making that name happen. On this month’s episode of the Life at AT&T podcast, I got special access to AT&T Stadium to talk to Deborah Buentello about our sponsorship of the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic.

We talked on game day, just before kickoff. On this month’s podcast, you’ll hear what goes in to getting to kickoff – a point Deborah describes as “a really proud moment.”

It starts with a dish farm and ends with a satellite signal to your home. On the latest Life at AT&T podcast, I took a tour of our DIRECTV set-top box testing lab. That’s one of the locations where hundreds of AT&T employees work hard to make sure customers of our premium, satellite-based DIRECTV service get what they’re paying for.

Listen in to take a tour of the testing lab with Tim Leung, who leads a team of software testers, and Steve Lin, who leads a team of hardware testers.

We deliver 99% worry-free signal reliability with our premium, satellite-based DIRECTV service. That means customers are getting a TV service they can depend on.

So, how can we guarantee that?

I recently stopped by one of our broadcast centers, the Los Angeles Broadcast Center (LABC), to hear from some of the employees who help make that signal reliability possible for our satellite-based DIRECTV premium service. In this month’s Life at AT&T podcast, listen in as Jomel De Leon and John Gaitan take us on tours of their respective areas of the LABC.

DIRECTV NOW is our new over-the-top streaming entertainment product, and it will soon be out in the market. Simply put, customers will be able to use DIRECTV NOW to watch live and on-demand content on many of their devices – TV, smartphone, tablet, etc. – anywhere with an internet connection.

Earlier this year, DIRECTV NOW was just a good idea. That’s when our user experience teams get to work.

In this month’s Life at AT&T podcast, you’ll get to hear how important customer input is in designing our new entertainment products. Danielle Hammond is one of our customer testers and Bethany Fenton leads the design team behind our new DIRECTV products.

It’s election time in America! It’s time to pick our nation’s top leaders.

Don’t worry, I haven’t decided to take a turn and start talking politics. Instead, I’m using the election as a timely hook to talk to some of our leaders. Some of our female leaders, to be precise.

In this month’s episode, we went coast to coast to interview three women with “Vice President” in their titles, including:

• Caroline Leach – VP, Customer Experience and Marketing Analytics

• Eliska Paratore – VP, Human Resources

• Joan Marsh – SVP, Federal Regulatory

Hear what it’s like to rise to a leadership role at AT&T as a woman, and their advice for young women looking to do the same.

Since it’s back-to-school time, for this month’s Life at AT&T podcast, I’m taking you inside a classroom. Listeners will get to experience a boot camp for new hires in the Technology Development Program (TDP).

Follow along as Logan Klein from AT&T Technology Development hosts a gamified training on Agile. His job is to teach teams across the company how to use Agile, a development methodology that a lot of our IT teams now use. He also explains why, for him, TDP “was a completely positive experience.”

Listen to the show now below or wherever you listen to podcasts. Find it by searching for “Life at AT&T” on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app.