Employee community impact

Making giving back a habit is part of what it means to work at Cisco and is an important aspect of our culture. In communities around the world, Cisco employees take positive actions each year to Power an Inclusive Future for All. In fiscal 2016, we set a goal to achieve 80% employee participation in community impact by 2020. We achieved this milestone and have sustained it each year since. In fiscal 2024, 70,000 Cisco employees around the world acted in service of people, planet, and society.

>80% employee engagement in giving back to communities has continued for five consecutive years

Since FY20:

>80% employee community impact participation every year

US$162M raised through employee donations and matching gifts

2.8M volunteer hours recorded

In FY24:

70,000 employees took positive action to give back

US$35M in employee donations and matching gifts

720,000 employee volunteer hours

Our collective actions have contributed to building a culture where serving communities in need has become part of our DNA. Engaging at scale enables us to donate more to nonprofits, respond to more crises, increase volunteering support, and do more good for the world.

We take an inclusive approach to recognizing and celebrating all the diverse ways our employees make a positive impact:

Volunteering
Employee volunteering in person, virtually, and via team events

Donating
Employee donations and fundraisers benefiting global and local charities

Digital advocacy
Advocating to end extreme poverty via GlobalCitizen.org

Environmental sustainability
Employee actions and pledges to promote environmental sustainability

Integrated action programs
Employee action to initiate a corporate charitable donation

Survey sharing
Self-reported employee impact stories

Launched in fiscal 2023, our Community Impact Portal makes it easy for our employees to give back to their communities. They can use it to donate to causes around the world and have their donations matched by Cisco, fundraise for causes they are most passionate about, organize volunteer activities, and get their volunteer time matched with a donation from Cisco.

In addition to the always-on Community Impact Portal experience, we use the principles of behavioral science to nudge employees to take action, such as integrating easy give-back actions into digital spaces, meetings, and business events. We also leverage data insights to provide metrics to employees, leaders, and teams so they can track their participation throughout the year.

We continue to expand our portfolio of offerings, collaborating with our employees to identify innovative new opportunities to fulfill Cisco's Purpose to Power an Inclusive Future for All.

Doing good for the world is doing good for business

We know that employee engagement in community impact correlates to positive outcomes for both employees and the business. We completed a three-year study that examined Cisco employees’ community participation alongside business-relevant metrics such as employee tenure, performance, and promotion. The results confirmed what we have long suspected. Employees, leaders, and teams that engaged in community impact—when compared to employees who hadn’t engaged in community impact—experienced:

• Higher individual performance
• Higher promotion rates
• Lower attrition rates
• Higher rewards and recognition

Employee environmental engagement

With the urgency of climate change growing, and with customers increasingly asking for help with their sustainability efforts, we are encouraging employees to become involved with environmental-related activities now more than ever. Cisco and its employees offer awareness, volunteerism, and giving opportunities around sustainability to our employees worldwide.

In fiscal 2024, we continued to expand Cisco's Sustainability Ambassadors program, where employees were trained to represent Cisco's global environmental sustainability strategy and portfolio to customers, partners, and other external stakeholders. We continued to offer our Circular Design training during the onboarding process for many of our target groups across supply chain operations and the design community. This helps advance our corporate environmental sustainability strategy, which outlines product circularity plans as part of our circular transformation priority.

Each year, we engage employees on environmental sustainability topics through a two-month volunteerism and awareness campaign called Earth Aware, culminating in a thought leadership forum on sustainability called SustainX. In fiscal 2024, the SustainX event focused on Cisco’s corporate environmental sustainability strategy, the Plan for Possible. Earth Aware included sharing ways our employees can reduce their digital footprint and taking a tour of the beehives at our campus in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. We continued our annual Recycle IT Day, during which employees brought in used electronics for recycling.

We also offer ongoing opportunities for employees to connect with peers who share a passion for sustainability. One of our Cisco Inclusive Communities, the Global Green Team Network, is made up of 25 employee-led teams with more than 1600 members who collaborate in a Webex space year-round to promote sustainability on a local basis. In fiscal 2024, Green Team BeLux hosted a river cleanup; Green Team ANZ led our Earth Hour and raised US$3330; Green Team Kenya planted 300 trees; Green Team Bengaluru planted another 200; and Green Team Canada hosted a shoreline cleanup and collected 650 kg of trash. These are just a few highlights of the various activities our employees participate in throughout the year.

Cisco is continually improving our community impact approach and adapting as the world of work evolves. For example, as we continue to embrace hybrid work, we are developing team give-back projects that incorporate a combination of in-person and remote contributions. We are also sharing our successes and lessons learned among peers and exploring new ways to not just meet our employee engagement and positive impact goals, but to continue fostering our purpose-driven, giving culture.