change

Culture joins Strategy
for Breakfast
Gianpaolo Barozzi
Sr. Director HR at Cisco
@Gianpaolo Barozzi
The growth of e-commerce and the accelerating need for
personalization of products and services has created a disruption
in the Talent Marketplace and greater power shifting from employer
to employee. To respond to this transition, organizations need to
redefine their culture and how they engage with their employees.
Otherwise, they are at risk of losing both talent and their business.
A New People Deal
Employee Value Propositions won’t do anymore. Lifetime
employment is over. On the other hand, it will be impossible
to build a sustainable and innovative business without engaged
employees. Hoffman, Casnocha and Yeh analyzed this dilemma
in their book The Alliance and started to think of employees as
‘allies’ on a ‘tour of duty’; Cisco launched Our People Deal as the
foundation for a future-ready employee experience and the enabler
of a truly transparent and honest employee-employer relationship.
At Cisco, we introduced this new perspective – an intense focus
on engaging our people by creating the very best employee
experience – through an extensive listening campaign: reviewing
and integrating all the employee feedback data we had, directly
asking our employees through multiple focus groups. We looked at
what people said about Cisco in Glassdoor and other social media,
reviewing and integrating all the employee feedback data we had
and by directly asking our employees through multiple focus groups.
What we learned is that our employees’ experiences were not what
we wanted our people to have. We translated the experience into
‘Alex’s journey’ (Refer Figure 1): An employee’s journey at Cisco
where there were both many highs and lows.
10 | LPS Quarterly