Cisco believes it is our responsibility to conduct our business in a sustainable manner, with respect for our employees, our partners, our suppliers, our stakeholders, our shareholders, and the communities in which we do business.

We invest significant time and resources to help ensure that our activities and policies are consistent with and promote our goals, initiatives, and business values. Our Sustainable Business Practices (SBP) group works directly with Cisco executive leadership to continuously improve our corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and programs, and engages with our global stakeholders to evaluate our CSR performance by assessing our social, ethical, and environmental practices and policies.

Cisco’s Board of Directors oversees the impact of the company’s policies and activities on our responsible business management and overall CSR performance through the SBP group, as well as through various CSR issue-related councils, project teams, and embedded businesses processes.

 

Supporting Integrity in the Workplace

We believe that each employee at Cisco is individually responsible for maintaining the highest standards of ethical behavior. To that end, Cisco strives to ensure employees have access to information, resources, and guidelines in support of each employee’s own good judgment, to provide employees with the skills to evaluate individual situations and take the appropriate action. Violation of a Cisco policy, guideline, or practice could result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment.

Internally, we ask all of our employees and our subsidiaries, as well as members of the Cisco Board of Directors, to commit to ethical business practices in their work lives, and to reaffirm that commitment by reviewing and agreeing to abide by the Cisco Code of Business Conduct. All employees are required to acknowledge the Code of Business Conduct each year. Developed by the Cisco Ethics Office, the Code of Business Conduct won Cisco recognition by Ethisphere Magazine as one of the “world’s most ethical companies” in 2008. The Code of Business Conduct, or COBC as it is known inside Cisco, has been designed to deter wrongdoing and to promote:

• Honest and ethical conduct, including the ethical handling of actual or apparent conflicts of interest between personal and professional relationships
• Full, fair, accurate, timely, and understandable disclosure in reports and documents that Cisco files with, or submits to, government agencies and in other public communications
• Protection of Cisco’s confidential and proprietary information, and that of our customers and vendors
• Compliance with applicable governmental laws, rules, and regulations
• The prompt internal reporting of violations of this code
• Accountability for adherence to this code

An example of how we integrate ethics training and support for human rights and fair treatment of workers in the workplace can be seen in our Workplace Rights guidelines.

 

Ensuring Ethical Sales and Marketing Practices

As we do with our general employees, we offer our sales teams guidance and support to ensure that each business transaction is conducted ethically, responsibly, and in compliance with both local laws and Cisco’s policies.

Approximately 80 percent of the company’s revenue is generated through our partner companies. Partner companies are evaluated before being invited to become a Cisco partner—a vetting process that includes background investigations of the company’s principals and investigation into the company’s current and prior business dealings.

In addition, partners are asked to sign and abide by contracts that outline Cisco’s acceptable business practices, as well as the company’s obligations to abide by all relevant laws and regulations.

Cisco’s Distribution Review Board—consisting of the vice president for distribution in the relevant channel, company legal advisors, representatives of our Brand Marketing team, and members of our finance organization—reviews and approves all partner contracts at the time of initial signing, and each time the contract is up for renewal, to ensure compliance.

Cisco requires our distributors to submit point-of-sale data for inspection by Cisco on a regular basis. In addition, Cisco partners and resellers receive online training in Cisco’s policies and procedures, as well as support by Cisco’s legal team and Human Resources staff.

We strive to protect and actively enhance the personal dignity of our employees and the communities in which we operate. We maintain a specific corporate policy on human rights and other codes and policies addressing human rights for our employees and suppliers.

With regard to our products and the customers of our products:

• Cisco does not customize, or develop specialized or unique filtering capabilities in order to enable governments to block access to information.
• Cisco sells the same equipment with respect to all functionality relevant to human rights concerns.
• Cisco is not a service or content provider or network manager.
• Cisco has no access to information about individual users of the Internet except if network administrators provide it to us in the course of our providing services for our products.