Conscious Culture
We strive to create a culture where all Cisco employees feel safe and can thrive.
What a Conscious Culture means to Cisco
To Power an Inclusive Future for All, we must foster a Conscious Culture within the company. At its core, a Conscious Culture means acting with dignity, respect, fairness, and equity in our interactions with one another. It's a culture in which we model inclusion and speak up when we see behavior that's out of step with our beliefs.
We began to define Conscious Culture in fiscal 2019 as a set of expectations, principles, and measures that we believe best define Cisco’s values, beliefs, and ethos. In a Conscious Culture, we give frequent attention to ourselves and to those around us. When we pay attention to ourselves and to one another, we can see the strengths within all of us and harness them for the greater good. This allows us to design an ecosystem where we can collectively rally together to make an impact.
Conscious Culture has three components:
Environment
A diverse, inclusive environment that positively impacts people, society, and the planet is the foundation of a thriving culture.
Characteristics
Cultures are modeled by
a company’s beliefs, behaviors, rituals,
and principles.
Experience
Culture is experienced through your work, your leader, and your teams.
The “characteristics” component of Conscious Culture includes our Principles, which articulate how employees can live our culture. These principles are:
Give your best.
Show a desire to be at your best and connect with others to share quickly with whomever needs it. Open your mind to ideas from everywhere and anywhere. And use those ideas to build on the possibilities to pour a little drop of love into our customers’ worlds.
Take accountability.
Whatever comes your way, understand it and be personally accountable for its success.
Assume the answer is “yes” and that you don’t need to wait in line for permission. Check the data, but don’t let that slow down taking responsibility. And deliver.
Give your ego the day off.
It’s the best solution our customers need, not the best-protected Cisco turf, so support that solution whatever the background of the person or team who came up with it.
Have the debate and have a backbone. Make your point, then commit to what’s been agreed upon and deliver it with agility and grace.
Take difference to heart.
We become bigger as individuals and more powerful as a collective when we respect and value what makes us so special: our unique, personal differences. Inclusion is at the heart of true collaboration.
Give something of yourself.
A simple smile or “hi” every day is worth its weight in gold, so don’t hide it away. Show care and consideration to your colleagues, our customers, our communities, our partners, and the world we all share. Be worthy of trust. Be an inspiration. Be kind to everyone—even if you don’t like them.
Take a bold step.
Whatever your position, show leadership and courage when it comes to innovating and disrupting. If it is uncomfortable, be secure in the knowledge that shooting for the stars will always be a part of who we are. Together we can figure out how to get there, so let’s dream big.