At Cisco, we engage with a wide range of stakeholders including our employees, customers, investors, governments, and communities. Much of this engagement takes place as part of normal business practice, but we also solicit important feedback from stakeholders specifically on issues around our corporate citizenship activities.
Dialogue with our external and internal stakeholders improves our understanding of how Cisco is perceived, helps us evaluate stakeholder satisfaction, strengthens our citizenship programs, and allows us to identify important issues to address.
Cisco's citizenship programs engage frequently with customers, partners, industry peers, and employees to identify critical issues. We also monitor unsolicited feedback from customers through our sales and support desks.
Our Civic Councils, which are employee-led, solicit feedback from our nonprofit partners (recipients of our cash grants and product donations) to monitor the effectiveness of our social investment programs.
External Engagement
Business Surveys
Our annual Customer Satisfaction Survey enables us to get feedback on our customer service and after-sales support, product reliability and innovation, and Cisco's reputation. The results help us to monitor performance, identify areas for improvement, and set objectives for the following year. The survey is conducted online to maximize customer participation.
We also conduct a Chief Information Officer (CIO) Survey to solicit detailed feedback. CIOs serve in one of the most important roles at our customers' companies.
Cisco's annual Brand Tracking Study surveys business and technical decision makers at potential and existing Cisco customer companies. It measures how Cisco is perceived compared to our major competitors in the areas of corporate citizenship, trustworthiness, integrity, employment practices, and community giving. Key results from our Brand Tracking Study are presented below.
Corporate Citizenship Engagement Program
Engagement with external stakeholders is a valuable part of the process by which we identify issues to address. In FY2004, Cisco commissioned an external assessment of our citizenship practices by the firm Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a U.S.-based corporate social responsibility consultancy. The results of the study provided information that is helping Cisco to refine our corporate citizenship strategy.
BSR engaged with external stakeholders including investors, customers, strategic alliance partners, nongovernmental organizations, and governments. Cisco and BSR jointly selected the interviewees with a focus on identifying decision makers within the stakeholder organizations. BSR developed an assessment framework to guide the interview and assist in assessment of the findings.
The following are the key messages obtained from the survey.
Most external stakeholders view Cisco as a responsible company and assume that Cisco is adequately addressing critical areas of citizenship. There were no areas of particular concern that respondents felt were unaddressed.
The external stakeholders consistently identified the following for Cisco to consider in shaping its corporate citizenship policies:
- Transparency and disclosure of information: While Cisco may be actively managing its impact on social and environmental issues, the company may be failing to adequately communicate its achievements. This creates the perception among some stakeholders that Cisco is lacking in transparency and disclosure. This perception has an impact on the credibility of Cisco's claims.
- Supply chain labor standards: Stakeholders expect Cisco to actively manage labor standards in its supply chain and, due to the lack of available information, were concerned that Cisco may be failing to do so.
- Impact on the environment: There is a gap between how Cisco perceives its level of environmental impacts and how these impacts are perceived by stakeholders.
- Relationships with business partners and customers: Many Cisco customers are interested in citizenship and would take advantage of opportunities for additional collaboration and communication from Cisco.
Cisco is grateful for this feedback and has addressed a number of these key concerns within this report.
Internal Engagement
Employee views are of great importance to Cisco. Employees are often our best-informed critics and understanding their views supports our objective of recruiting and retaining the best talent in our industry.
During FY2003/FY2004 Cisco commissioned an internal survey of executives to gauge the baseline for citizenship activity and education within Cisco. The key findings were:
- There is business value to being proactive rather than reactive in citizenship: Citizenship contributes to better business partner relationships, helps attract and retain employees, improves risk management, and benefits Cisco's reputation.
- Cisco needs to clarify its approach to citizenship and communicate strategy clearly: A management framework is needed and concerns about external publication of risk need to be addressed.
- Cisco should integrate citizenship into current initiatives, helping employees to understand how it fits and what the business case is.
- Citizenship is perceived by some employees as being mainly philanthropy: This is at odds with prevailing views outside the United States, where a broader set of corporate performance issues are included.
This engagement was conducted during FY2003/FY2004. Since that time Cisco has responded to the issues raised.
Survey Results
Brand Tracking Study Results 2003
External Partnerships
Cisco works in close partnership with a number of nongovernmental organizations, governments, and industry organizations such as Business for Social Responsibility, Business in the Community (BITC), and the Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum to understand and address stakeholder concerns.
