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Hi, this is Mizuki!
It has been almost 1 year since I was selected as a scholar of DUSKIN AINOWA Foundation. Time flies…!
Cisco is one of the US companies I have contacted since last Spring for my research.
They value people from different backgrounds and have put a lot of effort to create a better working environment for employees since they started business more than 30 years ago.
In Silicon Valley, I could visit the headquarter of Cisco and meet Ms. Tomoko Kurosawa, Mr. Chris Figone, and Mr. Andy Smith.
Also Ms. Chinmoyee Deshpande joined the meeting over WebEx, a online teleconference tool by Cisco.
Cisco considered that their business will not be as successful as it is today if they had “diversity” without “inclusion“.
To Cisco, “diversity” is the foundation of working environment.
What is more important is that “inclusion” has to come together with diversity.
In workplace, it’s not hard to put people from different background at one place.
The difficult part is how to integrate everyone in the system to accomplish different tasks together.
It is even more difficult to create a culture which lets all members to respect each other, listen to each other, and value other’s opinions.
“Inclusion” is the most essential key to create values from the different perspectives to the company.
Based on that belief, Cisco had emphasized “inclusion” more, and they called “Inclusion and Diversity”, not “Diversity and Inclusion”.
Moreover since 2014 summer, they has changed the emphasis to “Inclusion and Collaboration” from “Inclusion and Diversity”, because they believe they can make a strong corporate and business result by collaborating with included employees who have different values.
During my research, I have found that major American companies have employee resource groups.
Those groups are run by employees on a volunteer work basis.
It is not included in those employees’ job descriptions.
Cisco has several those groups too.
They name it “Employee Resource Organizations (ERO)”.
Cisco has over 15 unique ERO’s (Asian, African American, Veteran, LGBT, Indian, etc) to celebrate it’s Diversity.
One of the organizations is “Connected Disabilities Awareness Network (CDAN)” which has board members including employees with disabilities.
CDAN organizes events and activities to raise awareness for people with disabilities.
They has a budget from Cisco to conducts those projects so that CDAN can leverage the established process to grow membership and get funding to host social and outreach events.
CDAN tries to have 1 large event yearly and sometimes will co-host with other Cisco EROs.
Right now, CDAN’s focus are
1. Talent
2. Accessibility
3. Awareness
4. Best Practice/Benchmarks
For instance, CDAN
– works closely with human resource department and actively introduce Cisco’s good working environment to wide range of people disabilities.
– develops training programs that help people understand other employees with disabilities.
– contributes to product development to make Cisco’s products more accessible for users with disabilities.
Japanese people might think “It’s nonsense to do volunteer work during working hour!”
Cisco, on the other hand, thinks that employees can build their job skills by working with ERO.
Those participants in ERO get to arrange events, manage budget, and communicate with others, who are working in different fields.
Those skills can be utilized to their regular jobs or when they move to different positions in the future.
Cisco calls it “stretch assignment”.
Since ERO has been very active and created outcomes to Cisco’s own business, the managers are supportive for employees to work for ERO.
I realized that skills and experiences are not always coming from our regular jobs.
By working in different environments and working with different team members from the regular jobs, we could expand our capacity and values of everything.
Also this would help employees to build their loyalty to the company as well, I believe.
To be continued…