Inclusion

It is intrinsic to who we are — and who we intend to be long into the future. We prioritize inclusion, recognizing that connecting people of all experiences and backgrounds allows us to improve innovation and collaboration and helps to inform how Cisco recruits, develops, and engages our people.

Our Purpose is to Power an Inclusive Future for All, and by that we mean dignity, respect, and equal access to opportunity across: gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, nationality, religion, veteran status, and all different backgrounds, cultures, experiences, strengths, and perspectives.

In 2020, we deepened our work to create a more inclusive workplace. To make our commitment to community enablement integral to our company's purpose, Cisco created our Community Enablement Beliefs and Actions—the beginning of a five-year, US$300 million commitment to address our biggest challenges and drive lasting, generational change.

In fiscal 2023, we strengthened our top-level commitment with the key appointment of Brian Tippens, Cisco's first Chief Social Impact and Inclusion Officer.

Our vision is to become the global leader in building equitable, accessible, and resilient communities to accelerate business growth and power an inclusive future for all.

Accelerating business strategy

Our inclusion strategies are designed to embed inclusion and collaboration across the business, helping our leaders and people better understand identities, needs, and challenges. These strategies also enable Workforce Strategy to accelerate innovation in the way we attract, develop, and promote talent, positioning Cisco as a global leader in innovation and corporate culture.

Accelerating global talent across all groups

In fiscal 2023, we continued to accelerate inclusion and collaboration in our global workforce, creating the most diverse Cisco ever across the categories we measure (gender, race, and ethnicity)-for the eighth year running. While the year-over-year growth percentages may seem modest, we believe they are leading indicators of success in breaking through challenges that have long plagued our industry.

We attribute these shifts to our holistic strategies for expanding hiring, developing and promoting emerging leaders.

Attracting and hiring diverse talent

Cisco partners with organizations that share our vision for unlocking the potential of all talent. We joined the One Ten Coalition as a founding member. One Ten's mission is to upskill and reskill 1 million underrepresented workers without college degrees over the next 10 years. Since fiscal 2020, Cisco has hired 159 new employees through One Ten.

We help veterans and service members transition and upskill through the Cisco Veteran Talent Incubation Program, preparing them for Cisco Services entry-level engineer roles. We also partner with our Talent Hub team to add recently discharged talent from military bases to our recruitment pipeline.

Talent Accelerators

We use technology to build fairness, equity, and accountability into our processes. Our suite of Talent Accelerator digital solutions leverages intelligence at the point of decision-making to help us find, attract, select, and accelerate top talent. These include:

• Smart Insights, which enables us to benchmark and optimize opportunities for all
• Smart Start, a solution we created in partnership with Textio that helps us detect and mitigate bias in job postings and candidate communications
• Smart Tracker, which helps us identify the best places to find talent
• Smart Select, which helps hiring managers put together interviewer panels to help mitigate bias and increase the odds of hiring talent

More than 12,507 Cisco leaders and HR employees globally have access to solutions to make hiring decisions that level the playing field. We're seeing steady progress for many employee populations.

Fostering innovation and collaboration

We recognize that connecting people of all experiences and backgrounds allows us to improve innovation and collaboration. Our strategies are designed to create a movement-a movement to connect, to better understand identities, needs and challenges across all groups, and to reimagine how we come together and create a Conscious Culture where everyone can thrive.

Connecting across differences

To learn more about Proximity, explore these resources:

• Let’s Get Proximate podcast: Spotify, Amazon Podcast, Pandora, Podcast Republic, Goodpods, Audible
• The Journey and Impact of Getting Proximate
• Discovering Proximity: An Interview with Mayte Marquez Querol

The exponential impact of Inclusive Communities

Cisco's vibrant Inclusive Communities, 31 groups that reflect and support the employee experience, provide unique opportunities for collaboration, employee development, and engagement. Each Inclusive Community drives their own strategy and work together across our global enterprise to drive engagement and create a more Conscious Culture. Inclusive Communities are vital advocates and panners that bring to life Cisco's vision of an inclusive future for all.

One in three Cisco employees is now in at least one Inclusive Community, with 335 chapters in 77 countries, representing over 30% of Cisco's employee population. Cisco's Inclusive Communities are the catalysts for driving culture shift. spawning innovation, and deepening our partnerships across the organization. Each year, they continue to expand their impact on how we attract, retain, develop, and promote talent, how we drive business results, and how we positively impact people in communities across the globe.

Enhancing the employee experience

Cisco's Global Inclusive Communities drive employee engagement and opportunities for belonging through monthly events featuring guest speakers, discussion forums, personal testimonials, and activities that build cultural awareness. These events and programs are designed to create proximity and transform the way we work together by sharing authentic stories and connecting with others who share a similar background or experience, leading courageous conversations and helping to deepen our understanding of each other. Through cross-collaboration, Inclusive Communities create learning opportunities that help bring us all closer together.

Supporting and developing our people

The Veteran Enablement and Troop Support (VETS) Inclusive Community established our Military Career Day event in 2011 to educate veterans on career opportunities at Cisco, and conversely educate Cisco employees on the value that veterans can bring to the Cisco organization. Our October 2023 installment of Military Career Day was our second global event, hosting over 600 veterans across the globe. The Veteran Mentorship Program pairs attendees with volunteer Cisco Mentors. These mentors guide the veteran through the discovery process, educating them on interested parts of the business and introducing them to a network that can help them transition into the business. This hands-on sponsorship process is critical in the military transition.

In fiscal 2024, The Veteran Leadership Program was established to focus on those veterans that may have transitioned out of the military in the past two to eight years, had a strong record in the military as well as at Cisco, but needed focused and tailored leadership development that would help them take the next step in their private sector career.

PRIDE LGBTQ+ & Allies Inclusive Community provides a safe space for employees to make connections, develop their allyship, and thrive in their careers. The community offers various virtual, hybrid, and on-site events each year where members can build their network and develop their skill sets. Flagship programs include the Proud mentorship program offered regionally and the Drive and Amplify series. Through our strategic partnerships and Pride-led participation, members can attend development conferences such as Out and Equal, Lesbians Who Tech and the Diversify Nordics Summit.

Cisco has been recognized by the 2023 Workplace Pride Impact Awards as an ambassador-level achiever with a 78% rating. Our rating is one of the Most Improved year-over-year among hundreds of companies. Cisco was also the Top Scorer by Industry Sector in the Information & Communication Industry category.

Women of Cisco Global Executive Shadow Program provides a unique opportunity for members of Women of Cisco to embark on a transformative journey of personal growth, career readiness, and professional enrichment through a personalized shadow engagement with seasoned leaders. Through shadowing executives in their day-to-day activities and meetings, participants will gain practical insights into various leadership roles, business operations, and decision-making processes. The program aims to leave women empowered with essential resources, including creating their own personal brand. Engaging with executives and their networks helps to build valuable connections for future career opportunities.

When the program was first launched as a pilot project in 2009, 47 shadow members participated. In 2024, the program surpassed 1000 shadow members worldwide, including 993 executives, 47 at the global level. The strong participation of executives demonstrates their willingness to collaborate and share their knowledge, skills, and values. The Global Executive Shadow Program won the DE&I Campaigns/Initiatives in the Training category for Ragan’s 2024 CSR and Diversity Awards.

Our Connected Asian Affinity Network (CAAN) brought attention to the gap in Pan-Asians (East Asians and Southeast Asians) in leadership advancement and wanted to help bridge the divide. Over the past three years, CAAN has raised awareness on these challenges to over 300 Cisco leaders and have provided nearly 70 professional development sessions to more than 2700 community members and allies. In fiscal 2024:

• CAAN saw a record 87 Pan-Asian executives and people leaders mentor 113 employees as part of its Global Mentoring program.
• Hosted the 6th Annual Pan-Asian Leader Summit where over 169 Pan-Asian leaders gathered for a fireside chat with Kelly Jones, Cisco’s Chief People Officer, discussing the importance of supporting Pan-Asian talent advancement.
• 130 Pan-Asian leaders and emerging leaders went through a tailored development program that involves interactive skill-building, executive coaching, and peer-to-peer engagement that greatly strengthens their career potential.

2023 was the Inaugural Cisco Radiate Conference, hosted by our Connected Black Professionals (CBP) Inclusive Community. The conference brought together more than 200 Black professionals at Cisco from all over the world and welcomed more than 100 Black professionals from the community, to develop, retain, elevate, expose, and recruit Black talent at Cisco. This year, Radiate expanded its reach by offering a hybrid program across eight locations globally, impacting 650 in person and over 1000 virtually.

Cisco was named Top 50 places to work for Indigenous Professionals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) two years in a row and provided US$2000 in scholarship donations to the Seven Generations Scholarship Fund. For the fourth year, Cisco was a sponsor of the American Indian, Sciences and Engineering Society (AISES) National Conference to promote Cisco to Native STEM students.

Advocating for what’s right

In 2021, our Connected Disability Action Network (CDAN) Inclusive Community lobbied for Cisco to join The Valuable 500 and commit to supporting a global movement to put disability on the business leadership agenda. In connection with Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2023, CDAN hosted the first-ever Cisco-wide event explicitly featuring disabled and neurodivergent employees, signaling a shift toward being more community centered and neuro-inclusive. The community collaborated with Cisco TV to address accessibility issues that arise when we don't expect disabled people to be leaders and presenters for Cisco. In 2024, Cisco created its first Office of Accessibility.

This year, three employees who are deeply passionate about fostering inclusion—and who serve as the global leads of Native American Network (NAN) and CAAN Inclusive Communities—collaborated to bring to life a formal Indigenous Land Acknowledgement ceremony to Cisco, as a global company, to publicly and permanently acknowledge the lands on which its offices now occupy. This ceremony, which was celebrated at Cisco's headquarters in San Jose, California and Research Triangle Park, North Carolina (with other locations planned), physically and symbolically demonstrated Cisco’s commitment to inclusion and belonging. The team was also recognized as the winner of an internal Culture Champion Award.

Connecting Employees and Impact

PRIDE LGBTQ+ & Allies has 24 global chapters that give back to their local communities through civic, volunteer, and development opportunities. Organizations supported include Habitat for Humanity's Build with Pride, local LGBTQ centers, humanitarian organizations, Gay Games, Pride House at the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and many more. There are three LGBTQIA-oriented Community Impact funds with corporate matching, where employees donate to organizations driving change globally, including ILGA, HRC and various non-profits. Pride engages in strategic partnerships, board service, and Community Impact grants with organizations such as PGLE, HRC, Out and Equal, and Lesbians Who Tech.

With 3200 members across 25 employee-led teams, the Global Green Team Network promotes sustainability in local communities through volunteerism, resources, and training. For example, the Green Team has hosted recycling events for 25 years—with the fiscal 2024 event gathering 3500 metric tons of material.

Driving business engagement

The NAN Inclusive Community, in partnership with MuralNet, provided community connectivity installs for the Zuni Tribe, worked on the Alaska Tribal Libraries Initiatives, and is currently working with Pala Tribe. NAN sent six Cisco volunteers to Alaska and installed Starlink transceivers, cleaned computers, installed video conferencing software, and trained tribal coordinators in 11 Alaskan Tribal Villages. Three remote and nine onsite volunteers inventoried, configured, and installed Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) on homes for the Zuni Tribe in New Mexico. Cisco provided ongoing broadband volunteer support for the Fort Peck (MT) Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, Crow Creek Sioux Tribe (SD), and the Pauma Tribe (CA). NAN is also collaborating with Cisco’s Country Digital Acceleration Team on a Tribal Advisory Council and leading Cultural Enablement Training. As part of the collaboration with Social Justice Action 8, Cisco signed an MOU with three tribal colleges to provide cybersecurity infrastructure to each institution, which allows them to be NIST compliant so they can receive future grants and funding.

In 2021, our Women of Cisco Inclusive Community held its first 'The Bridge' event, which gathered 5000 attendees from 28 countries and 300 companies to discuss bridging the gender gap in IT. They committed to boosting girls' participation in STEM through Cisco Networking Academy's Women Rock-IT program. In 2023, The Bridge introduced the Unified Action Program focused on the intersectionality of inclusion and sustainability. The Bridge aims to invest in STEM youth, fostering innovation and sustainability for communities. organizations. and societies. Executives from several notable companies, such as Intel, Ford Next, and Amazon Web Services committed to The Bridge and the Unified Action Program. This year, Women of Cisco hosted the Bridge event at Cisco Live to discuss the challenges faced by children in underserved schools and taking concrete steps toward creating a more equitable future for all. With a goal to increase diversity in STEM careers, the Unified Action Project, in collaboration with three major Cisco Customers, gave 200 high school students in underrepresented communities the opportunity to apply design thinking methodology to produce innovation solutions for a more sustainable future and were awarded US$50,000 in advanced education student scholarships. This program continues to help bridge the digital divide by increasing the diversity in STEM careers and is contributing to our Purpose to Power an Inclusive Future for All.

At Cisco, we continue to improve the way we support our Inclusive Communities in the powerful roles they are fulfilling to deliver programs that can drive development, business, and social impact. This included bringing over 600 members together for the IC Connect Breakfast at Cisco IMPACT; the Inclusive Community Leader Forum where we brought 500 of our Inclusive Community leaders and champions together for the first time worldwide with in-person networking in five locations; attending the GPTW ERG Summit where 18 of our Inclusive Community Global Leads networked, learned, and were inspired by top industry experts and companies; and hosting the first-ever Inclusive Community Summit where our community leaders and executive sponsors were brought together to reinforce our shared commitment to fostering an inclusive culture, elevating our impact together through collaboration, inspiration, and celebration.

Innovating and expanding our impact

We're innovating solutions to our most critical inclusion and collaboration challenges-and scaling our initiatives to extend our impact across our ecosystem.

Promoting inclusive leadership through sponsorship

In 2017, we pioneered and introduced a groundbreaking initiative, The Multiplier Effect, harnessing the power of sponsorship to transform the landscape of our culture. We call upon leaders to leverage their influence and social capital to actively champion and advocate for the career advancement of talent. Since its inception, 2178 sponsors and 3231 sponsees have participated in this transformative program, driving a future where diversity thrives at every level.

Sponsorship is an inclusive action driven by Cisco leadership expectations. To accelerate the impact, we've set enterprisewide goals for leadership participation at all levels. Over the last four years, 100% of Cisco Vice Presidents have taken the pledge. The benefits of the program are reciprocal, a rewarding journey rooted in trust and respect.

Innovating beyond pay parity

We continue to innovate and expand on our longtime commitment to paying our people fairly. In 2016, Cisco took a national leadership role in advancing fair pay for everyone as one of the 28 founding signers of the White House Equal Pay Pledge. We joined forces with companies across multiple industries to form the Employers for Pay Equity Consortium to help make the promise of fair pay a reality for all employees.

Our Pay Parity initiative is designed to ensure that all people are paid fairly, regardless of gender (globally) and ethnicity (in the United States, as defined by the federal government). Our regular reviews look at key factors that influence an equitable talent environment, from new hire offers to individual rewards, so that we can continue to design and deliver fair, inclusive, and competitive pay for our people.

We expanded fair pay, we expanded our program in fiscal 2021 beyond base salary to include additional forms of compensation fairness such as promotion, bonus, and stock decisions made in our reward programs.

Understanding our diversity through Self ID

In early 2021, we launched Self ID, an initiative that expands the personal data categories that employees can share with Cisco. Employees may opt in to share key aspects of their identity that go beyond government-required classifications, including expanded gender identity, expanded race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, pronouns, and military and/or veteran status. In fiscal 2023, we introduced a pronouns initiative to foster a culture of inclusivity. Employees in 25 countries and territories can now share their pronouns with other Cisco employees in the internal company People Directory, helping us capture the complexity and wholeness of diversity in the workplace.

Self ID is implemented in 39 countries, allowing us to gain deeper insights on topics including fair pay and compensation, benefits, and employee engagement across the talent life cycle. We handle all data that employees share with the highest levels of security and privacy.

Expanding our impact to our suppliers

Fostering inclusion with our suppliers is part of powering an inclusive future for all. We require suppliers to track and report their workforce demographics with the same rigor we do, and, in return, we are sharing our innovations and successful solutions aimed at accelerating inclusion. In fiscal 2024, we launched two new microlessons to our highly effective Building Skills for Conscious Culture training, available to all suppliers.

Driving mindset, skillsets, and toolsets

We're developing leaders at all levels to drive inclusion and create true connection within our Conscious Culture. We thrive when we continue to learn, explore, and evolve.

Our development opportunities are designed to support leaders at every level to build inclusive mindsets, skillsets, and toolsets. Participant feedback suggests that the quality and efficacy of our development opportunities are factors that contribute to people choosing to stay and grow their careers at Cisco. Leadership development program highlights include:

What is it?	How does it work?
What is it?Building Skills for a Conscious Culture	How does it work?This is our foundational inclusive skill development e-learning solution. Available globally for all employees in six languages, the training provides a common language and holistic approach to shift mindsets to mitigate bias and identify harassment at work. Learners see how unconscious bias influences decisions and actions and it provides common examples of behaviors that help some people and hinder others, including how tasks are assigned and who gets heard in meetings.
What is it?Next Generation Leaders (NGL)	How does it work?This is an important leadership skill development program with content rooted in the lived experience of African American/Black and Hispanic/Latinx employees. NGL empowers manager and employee partners to embrace differences, find the strength in their diversity and encourage others within the cohort to fully experience the diverse perspectives of their colleagues.
What is it?DARE	How does it work?This program addresses the professional needs of early-in-career women at Cisco. It provides an array of exercises, activities, and tools to help employees articulate their unique value to the business, build a community of support and influence, empower each other to create bold career visions, and plan to get there.
What is it?JUMP	How does it work?Our program for midlevel women aims to develop world-class leaders, close the gender gap in leadership, and develop and retain talent. Participants connect over three multiday, instructor-led workshops on everything from building gravitas to learning to take risks.
What is it?Cisco Inclusive Communities	How does it work?Our Cisco Inclusive Communities are a critical link in leadership development at Cisco. They create and organize learning and development events and programs for their members and all employees—like our Linkedln Learning/Degreed pathways, CBP's Elevate Series, CAAN LEAP Pathways, and Conexión's ConexTALK series. Our Women of Impact program continues to expand its value through a month of opportunities every March.
What is it?External partnerships and platforms Women of Cisco Global	How does it work?We partner with world-class organizations that excel in areas that align to our diversity development strategies. We have partnerships with organizations including the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), Executive leadership Council, Senior Management Forum, Hispanic IT Executive Council (HITEC), Leadership Education for Asian Pacifies (LEAP), Simmons Leadership Conference, Conferences for Women, YWCA, Out & Equal, Lesbians Who Tech, Vets in Tech, and many others.
What is it?Executive Shadow Program	How does it work? The Executive Shadow Program provides a unique opportunity for members of Women of Cisco to embark on a transformative journey of personal growth, career readiness, and professional enrichment through a personalized shadow engagement with seasoned leaders. Through shadowing executives in their day-to-day activities and meetings, participants will gain practical insights into various leadership roles, business operations, and decision-making processes. The program aims to leave women empowered with essential resources, including creating their own personal brand. Engaging with executives and their networks helps to build valuable connections for future career opportunities.