RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Chuck Robbins, the UNC-Chapel Hill graduate turning tech giant Cisco inside out, says maintaining employee morale is crucial to driving performance – and also recruiting talent.
Having replaced tech legend John Chambers in 2015, Robbins has Cisco on the rebound after making a host of management changes and reorganizing the company with a greater emphasis on software and services, not networking gear.
So in a recent conference call with Wall Street analysts, Robbins deal with the “culture issue:”
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“[O]n the culture issue, we’ve basically I think been amplifying what’s always been a core part of Cisco, but really, really prioritizing it and trying to just create an environment in today’s world where people want to work because it’s an incredibly competitive environment for talent.
“And I guess, the way that we look in metrics – we’ve been focused on communication with our employee’s, clear authentic frequent communication.
“We’ve been focused on giving back. And what we’ve discovered is that we have a lot of employees who care deeply about giving back to their communities and so I’ve told them that our ability to give back and our ability to do the things that they love to do is highly contingent upon us running a great business. And so the two are very interconnected.
“As far as how do we rate it? I mean if you look at every external employer ranking, we’ve moved up.
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“The one — I tell you around the world, Great Places to Work. I think we’re number one in countries around the world, maybe 15 to 20 countries around the world.
“And in the U.S. which is one that just came out recently, we — I think when I became CEO, we’re number 87 in the U.S. And two months ago, we were rated number six. And over 70% of the input for that rate — those rankings come directly from the employees.
“And we obviously watch Glassdoor where we’re above 4.0 and all those kinds of things. So we’re working very hard on it. We think it’s important because of — it’s important because when your employees are happy, they actually do a much better job and help the overall results. So it’s somewhat cyclical.”
