In tech industry, Cisco is another great corporation that is socially responsible and consider CSR as the core of their business.
Cisco Systems Inc. is an American multinational corporation founded in 1984. It’s headquarter is in San Jose, California. Cisco’s main business is designing, manufacturing and selling network equipment. Their most popular products are wifi routers. If you have never heard of Cisco, check out your wifi router at home, it might be from this company!
Just like most companies in IT industry, Cisco took its time to grow and develop in about first 20 years of it’ life. Only after becoming a large corporation in providing network equipment, that it decided to focus more on it’s own social responsibility.
According to Cisco’s CSR report, Cisco recognizes that creating vale for customers, society and environment strengthens their business. “We believe that Cisco has a responsibility to conduct our business in ways that benefit global communities and the environment, and we believe that our technology is a powerful enabler in transforming lives”, as Cisco’s CEO states.
Cisco’s CSR strategy focus on four large sections:
- Supply chain: working with their partners on ethics in production and labor
- People: focusing on ethics issues in a working place and create chances of development for their employees.
- Society: bringing back to society through campaigns in education, healthcare and other human needs.
- Environment: improving production system to reduce the impact on the environment.
In this article, I would like to focus more on “Our people” section of the Cisco CSR strategy, because in previous posts we didn’t mention much about how companies are being responsible to their own employees.
Cisco understands that one of the keys to a success in business is taking care of their own employees and workers. For a long time, they have been focusing on creating a great place to work, to provide development opportunities as well as a “comprehensive portfolio of employee offerings and differentiated benefits”.
“Our values represent how our employees work together. When we all focus on our values, we’re able to make them come to life for Cisco. That influences out ability to provide great customer service, deliver on out brand promise, and make Cisco a great place to work”. Kanthleen Weslock, Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer.
Below are the main key points behind Cisco’s “Our people” campaign:
- Working together: Cisco is encouraging employees to communicate and be collaborative with each other to achieve best working results.
- A Safe and Healthy Work Environment: Company is providing a safe working environment with focus on health and wellbeing of employees.
- An inclusive and diverse culture: As a corporation with diverse workforce, Cisco tries its best to create a valued and respectful working place for everybody.
- Providing Training and development opportunities: Cisco offers many opportunities in training and development, helping employees in building their career with Cisco.
- Rewarding our people: To encourage and motivate employees, Cisco created the rewarding system with wide-ranging benefits and rewarding packages.
Being constant with the 5 keys above, Cisco reached many remarkable achievements. With Cisco’s efforts in creating a respected working environment, 86% of employees felt that their teams value diversity. By 2013, 89% of employees are proud to work at Cisco. It also ranked number 42 on the Fortune “100 best companies to work for” list.
Those are just a few specific things Cisco achieved by being responsible with their employees, not mentioning the uncountable benefits they had directly on business operations. Good employees has been proven to lead to a successful business, and that is the reason for the growth of Cisco in the last decades.
You can check Cisco’s CSR report here for more information about their “Our people” campaign.
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