5 Ways We’re Reimagining the Way Cisco Employees Work

Sixty percent of offices will move to a hybrid environment, with fewer employees working in the office and many more working remotely from anywhere on any given day, according to Forrester. Hybrid work at this scale is uncharted territory and the stakes are high to get it right, especially with talent retention more challenging than ever today. I am proud to be a part of an organization that is innovating the tools and services that will allow Cisco to do just that.

Our vision is to build an inclusive and engaging digital work experience through frictionless interactions and empathetic employee journeys. We aim to simplify and streamline the way we work, communicate and collaborate, using a technology ecosystem that’s optimized for learning, fun, wellbeing, and prioritizing our inclusive culture.

These are the principles guiding our work:

1. Design thinking: We have a great partnership with the Workforce Experience design team that embraces design thinking to research and define the challenges Cisco employees face, to test ways to solve these issues, and to inform the best solutions. To understand our charter, we have held whiteboard workshop sessions with more than 80 participants across 30 organizations and evaluated employee journeys from hire to retire identifying their wishes and wants. Proof of concept studies, mass iterative prototyping, A/B testing, telemetry analytics, and external research also guide our work.

2. Supersized self-help: We’re all more tech-savvy than ever before. That’s why making it easier for people to self-help, whether they’re at home, in the office or somewhere else, is essential. New and long-time employees alike know that self-help can be challenging and frustrating. We are working to change that. One example is the way our employees request, download and order applications and devices they need to perform their jobs. We redesigned our apps and device store experience with a modern experience like the Apple and Google App Stores. Whether you’re a new hire or even if you’ve been at Cisco for 20 years, employees have a simple and easy place to find, download, order, and easily self-provision their technology solutions.

3. Working smarter and faster: Search is our go-to self-help resource for finding content, support, people, and much more. We have reimagined search to let us work smarter and faster. Cisco’s employee search capabilities offer a cloud-native, AI-powered experience with personalization and bite-sized answers to simplify the complexity of our massive content ecosystem. It also features a recommendation engine that lets you discover options and services related to your queries. And it won’t remain static: through AI/ML, its knowledge base will continuously be informed by employee feedback and other inputs to evolve and grow.Our People Directory has also been modernized to connect employees to their peers and organizational structure in a more inclusive, empathetic way. No longer just a place to find a colleague’s title and location, it provides insight into who they are – from their preferred name, name pronunciation and pronouns to their working hours, out of office and more. Directory will become like a digital icebreaker for new conversations, setting us up to engage in a more human way with our peers right from the start.

4. Simplify and consolidate: Our vision is to simplify every aspect of the workday. And that’s what our new Next-Gen Intranet is all about. It will give us consolidated access to all the information and resources we’ve mentioned above – and more — in one place, providing an interactive, intelligent, connected and personalized experience. Instead of jumping from platform to platform, we’ll have a central “bridge” with a modern UX that integrates into our daily workflow, connecting us to search, help, people, applications, devices, and much more.

5. Measure and change: By consistently analyzing key performance indicators to measure the experience of Cisco employees across all of these new tools and services, we’ll be able to understand what’s working and what isn’t. Measurement will influence new changes to ensure that we get hybrid right, both today and in the future.

Our employees are the currency that fuels Cisco’s purpose. Our mission is to keep us all focused on meaningful work by minimizing and even eliminating the stresses that take joy out of the workday. We are here to make the Cisco employee experience the best that it can be.

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