Employee community impact

The Community Impact Portal is a key entry point for engaging employees in learning; giving of time, skills, and money; and advocating on the biggest problems facing society. We apply principles of behavioral science to nudge people to take action, such as gifting all new hires a credit to donate to a nonprofit of their choice and integrating easy give-back actions into digital spaces, meetings, and business events.

Employee environmental engagement

In fiscal 2022, we launched Sustainability Central to help Cisco employees navigate the wide range of global sustainability-related content, tools, and sites managed by multiple teams across Cisco. We also initiated a new Cisco Sustainability Ambassadors program to train employees on how to represent Cisco's global sustainability strategy and portfolio to customers, partners, and other external stakeholders. In fiscal 2022, over 60 employees became Cisco Sustainability Ambassadors.

Each year, we engage employees on environmental sustainability topics through a two-month volunteerism and awareness campaign called Earth Aware, culminating in a thought leadership forum on sustainability called SustainX. In fiscal 2022, the SustainX event focused on Cisco's new net zero commitment. Earth Aware included a global cleanup event in which employees picked up trash in their local communities. We also held our first Recycle IT Day since the beginning of the pandemic, during which employees brought in used electronics for recycling. During the event, we collected 128 metric tonnes of equipment from 100 sites around the globe.

We also offer ongoing opportunities for employees to connect with peers who share a passion for sustainability. Cisco GreenHouse is an interactive sustainability web platform that helps Cisco employees find likeminded peers worldwide who want to lead more sustainable lives. In fiscal 2022, 13,500 registered users took a total of 15,600 actions using this platform. One of our Cisco Inclusive Communities, the Global Green Team Network, is made up of 24 employee-led teams with over 1100 members who collaborate in a Webex space year-round to promote sustainability on a local basis. Events hosted by the group in fiscal 2022 include tree plantings, cooking classes, cleanup events, and educational sessions on waste reduction, home gardening, and beekeeping.

Cisco Green Teams envision an environmentally sustainable world and empower their peers to drive social and environmental change. One way they are doing this is by planting trees. In fiscal 2022, Cisco released the Digital Forest app, which encourages people to plant or adopt trees and document their experiences, to over 100 countries. The app's creators hope to encourage users to plant 500,000 trees by 2025.

To grow awareness and inspire employees to contribute to Cisco's circular economy transformation, we publish a quarterly circular economy newsletter (which is now a sustainability newsletter), manage a circular economy Webex space, and have embedded trainings across key groups at Cisco. In fiscal 2022, our newsletter readership grew by 20 percent, and over 5500 employees in the design community were trained on incorporating Circular Design Principles into their roles. We also added the design training to the onboarding process for many of our target groups across supply chain operations and the design community.

Our employees are important drivers of circularity and responsible sourcing in our procurement and supply chain. Each quarter, we recognize Champions of Sustainability—individuals who have proudly integrated our sustainability and circularity goals into their day-to-day roles. These Champions drive circularity through logistics and manufacturing, create streamlined processes for ethical case data, reimagine how we design our products, advance supplier diversity, and uphold Cisco's human rights and safety practices.

Cisco is continually improving our community impact approach and adapting as the world of work evolves. For example, as we continue to embrace hybrid work, we are developing team give-back projects that incorporate a combination of in-person and remote contributions. We are also sharing our successes and lessons learned amongst peers, and exploring new ways to not just meet our employee engagement and positive impact goals, but to continue fostering our purpose-driven, giving culture.

Partnering for Purpose

In 2022, Cisco launched Partnering for Purpose, a new initiative that Cisco Partners can join to positively impact their local communities and the planet. Cisco and our partners joining together in support of a specific cause is nothing new. We have been doing this together for years.

This initiative enables us to bring it all together so Cisco and Partners can accelerate and multiply their collective positive impact on communities worldwide—and on the planet—by leveraging their diversity, scale, and best practice learnings. Partnering for Purpose expands opportunities for Cisco and Partners to engage in purpose-driven initiatives providing enablement, recognition, and collaboration.

Partnering for Purpose is centered around a dedicated hub where partners can explore different themes such as digital inclusion; employee experience and economic empowerment; addressing climate change and environmental stewardship; and critical human needs and crisis response. Partners, if they choose, can explore the themes, actions, and related assets to jump-start their own initiative(s), or simply share with us and other partners the work they are already doing in their own communities.

We will continue to grow this body of work by adding more themes and content to the hub as well as incorporating recognition and collaboration opportunities for partners.