Episode Transcript
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Hello, everybody, and thanks for tuning in to this episode of Metrosite. I'm Beth Schultz, vice president of research and principal analyst at Metrogy. And with me today is Roxanne Bisbee Davis. Roxanne is senior director for people, research and intelligence at Cisco, and I'm so excited to have her here with me today to talk about her approach to employee experience and her role at Cisco. Welcome, Roxanne.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: Hi, Beth. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: So let's get right started, right offensive. Now. I can't recall ever having run into anybody else with a people research and intelligence title. So let's talk about that a little bit.
Got a few questions around that. Let me start with two. How did you come by that title in the first place? And then what does the people research and intelligence role entail?
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Thanks. So this role, the title has kind of come in over a variety of different things in which we've been honing. What's the work we really do, and how are we supporting the humans at work? And so we know that research is pivotal to us, and talking about the people and the focus of our research is always them. That's where the people research part came into it and then the other part that came through. It's more than analytics. What my team really aims to do is help us reveal the answers to some of our most challenging questions at work. So we want to be able to do that through measuring experiences at work reliably. And of those things that we can measure, we want to be able to understand what matters most. And then how do we embed sort of that intelligence into our people, practices and systems? So ultimately, we honed in on the words based on the work that we've been doing to be able to formulate the itself.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Okay, so it's very perfectly descriptive, I guess you would say, right?
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: So, Roxanne, you mentioned your team. So how many people on your team?
[00:02:24] Speaker B: I have 30 people on my team. We span across a variety of IO psychologists, applied researchers, data scientists, storytellers, and then, of course, the great individuals that help us run the research and stay organized within it.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: That's fantastic. So many different types of expertise.
So where does the people research and intelligence organization fit into Cisco's kind of broader organizational structure? Is it an HR function, or does it sit somewhere else?
[00:02:57] Speaker B: It does. So the way that we're organized, we have an organization called people, policy, and purpose here at Cisco. And within that, we have our peopleandcommunities.org, which would be what would traditional HR organization look like? But as you can see that concept of people is something that we focus a lot on within our language. And so this role has sat within what would be traditional hr.org since its inception.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: Okay, so you said people, policy, and purpose, right?
[00:03:27] Speaker B: Correct. And we're in the people section of.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: It, and you're in the people section. Okay, great. So we chatted earlier, Roxanne, and when we did, you mentioned that Cisco takes a strength based approach to employee experience.
Can you share with our listeners what that means and then tell us how your group ensures that it's successful with that kind of strategy?
[00:03:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you for the question. So, as a strength based organization, we like to focus the way that we go about our conversations, the way that we help enable our leaders and our teams to think about people differently than some traditional practices might think about low performance first instead of thinking about high performers first and the rest. It's the perspective of helping people hone in on what they get the most energy from, where they have the most excitement from the work that they do, and to be cognizant of that in their daily practices so that they can do more of that, and to have those open conversations with their leaders. What my team does is research that continues to support the why? Why do we do this? It's in the intelligence that comes out from the interactions that our leaders and teams have with one another. We're able to, through some of the technologies that we utilize and the rituals that we have in the organization, hone in on the practices that whenever a leader meets with their team member, every time they ask for attention, and that they are having the conversations that curate the discussions around what the employees need, what they like doing, what they don't like doing at work. It helps elevate them feeling like they're playing to their strengths at work, and then what we know about playing to strengths at work. It happens to be one of the strongest drivers of our best teams within the organization.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: Can you give us any more examples of how strength based employee experience works in practice?
[00:05:29] Speaker B: Sure. So I think it's a multi pronged approach, starting with the employees themselves, the people at work. It's helping them have the language and hone in to the work that they do. So there are a couple things that I like to help. Whenever new individuals come in and we talk about strengths, it's helping them realize what are the things you're good at and what are the things you like doing? That's the stuff you want to do more of. And so how do we give them the language to articulate that to their leaders. So that's all through the practices and the systems, and we have some tools that help help them be able to do that.
Conversely, you might be really good at something, but it doesn't give you energy and you don't like doing it. I determine that to be much more. And if we think about strength based culture, that's kind of more of a weakness, right? You might be good at something, but if you don't like doing it, don't do it as much as possible.
It might be something you need to do. Then when we think about the leaders. So having the conversations, to have leaders structure work around how they're employees, so how do we educate them to have the right team conversations? Be aware of, I might be really good at one thing, and a colleague of mine might not be as good and not enjoyed as much. And so how does a leader see, okay, how do I take this person here and help take some of the work from them, give it to the person who really likes doing it, and then do some trade off activities in there and continue to help employees hone in on that? In addition, when we think about processes and programs, I really like to have us focus on what does great look like, not what does bad look like, but what does great look like and talk a lot about great. So if we think about our best teams at work, what do the best teams do within the company and how do we share that with all the other teams so that they can learn from it and see how they can attribute that to their team so that they can be better?
[00:07:40] Speaker A: It's such an interesting approach because it really makes employees and their managers and leaders really pay attention to not only themselves, but then how the whole team is doing, what makes them work together well as a team, I would imagine.
[00:07:55] Speaker B: Right? Yes. And one of the things that we find and continually find and every bit of research that I run into or that we're conducting or as we go through, and it's sort of, we weren't even looking for this. Attention is really pivotal as humans, particularly in today's work environment. If you're asking for or bidding for attention, and if you do or do not receive, it really does have an impact, whether that be to yourself for your own well being, or your team members for your well being, or just trying to get work done, your leader for trying to have clarity in the work that you need to do. That asking for and receiving of something has been really instrumental in us understanding how everybody is working and how we can use that to help advance, like, the strength based conversation.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
So let's move on to another topic.
Cisco is such a large company, right. How do you go about gathering data from employees for your people? Research.
And I want to know, okay, so how do you do that? But how do you do it in a way that makes sure that everybody's voices get heard? The insight you deliver is actionable, and the actionable data gets acted on accordingly.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
It's not a small task, I will say that. And we approach it from a multi, like, very different ways that we go about this. So I've been doing this work in the company for about 16 years and have been here a little longer than that, and we've grown into this being a muscle within our organization. So let me start with that. We're around 85,000 people, and what I realized about a decade ago is we start having, like, broad conversations, and we end up serving. At the time, it was the right thing to do because we were still learning. We served only a small part of the organization, which was our top level executives and, say, corporate programs. What we wanted to be able to do is a multi pronged approach so that we could get the right information to the right people at the right time. Right. So when we think about data from that perspective, so as part of our intelligence, we deliver different things. We have a part of our motion that goes where our leaders get intelligence directly from their team members. So we don't run an annual survey. We have an always on engagement platform that allows for our leaders to launch a survey at any time of their choosing. But we do ask for them to do it at least once a quarter, and they're able to get that intelligence delivered directly to them. And it's only for themselves, for the leader to see. And then we have them share that with their team members. That data is used in aggregate for us from a research perspective, but we never look at it from the individual leader. Right. It's the way that we create the protectionism of the team advancement.
And so they're getting their constant sort of information, and we're feeding them discussion points that they should be checking in with their leaders, and it's very much so is guided for them, for leaders that may need that.
On another angle, we also want to be able to still serve the top leaders within the organization, to understand what the experience of working in the company looks like, how are people promoting the company? And so on a quarterly basis, we do a representative sample of a quarter of our population. So we do have a commitment that at least once a year, you're going to be asked to share your voice about your experience within the organization.
And so we send this survey out, like I said, to a representative sample of the company, and it allows for people to share very. We asked what we call neutral valence items, something that doesn't steer them in. What's great, what's bad. The question is, you know, tell us about your experience of working at Cisco right now, and that allows for them to share anything that they want to. And then we use the art and science of natural language processing to analyze that, and that gives us curated information to be able to feed into different parts of the organization. Hey, this is an emerging topic that we see coming up, or this is going really well for us right now. Let's see where we can help extrapolate the goodness from it and capitalize on that.
We also do research, so there's topics and things that we want to understand more of. For example, when the pandemic hit, we had. We had been focused for quite a while on understanding and helping our people from a mental health perspective, but we expanded that to a full well being perspective, and so we started helping understand what did it mean from a wellbeing, from a personal and social perspective within the company. Sometimes we're curious about the relationship of leader capabilities or our connection to the strategy and the organization. How are we feeling about the hybrid working environment that we're in right now? So depending on what it is, we do a quarterly survey. As part of that same survey that I talked about, where we're looking at the experience, we try to keep it low tax in the same timeframe, and we collect intelligence there, and we partner with. So, you know, we're focused on sort of like the human interaction activity. We also partner with our IT organization in helping understand what is the experience of humans from a technological part within the company, so that, you know, it's realizing that not one team needs to do everything, but how do we bring intelligence together to create a better story for our leaders to have a full understanding that is taken back in a variety of different ways? It might inform the way that we advance a new technology that's being supported or maybe sunset a technology that maybe isn't working as well, and our people have talked about it, or it might inform new programs. So from the wellness work, we've really looked at the understanding of well being. We've really looked at how much more we can bring in to support from a wellness perspective in the company. And then, of course, to be able to help our executives just have a pulse on what's going on and where do we need to focus based on emerging topics?
[00:14:21] Speaker A: Well, you know, you started out your answer by saying it wasn't easy, but it doesn't sound like it's easy, but it sounds like you guys have really put a lot of thought into it and made it a very thoughtful process.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: We have, and we're fortunate that we have leadership within Francine Katsudas and Chuck Robbins. They care a lot. All of our executives do. But the two of them have really spearheaded the perspective of, like, we want to know this and the investment into this team and the work that comes out. They make time for it. They make time for understanding it. With Kelly Jones as our head of HRT people officer, that is something that's part of the conversation our team has leaned in on. When they have questions that come to them, they fact checked and they validate with, is this actually a thing, or is it just a few people talking about a thing? So, having that rigor that we put into place really do help us make data driven decisions.
[00:15:20] Speaker A: So you mentioned Chuck, which I think our listeners will, will recognize as CEO Francine, what is her title?
[00:15:27] Speaker B: Fran Katsudas is the head of our people policy and purpose organization.
[00:15:31] Speaker A: Okay, great. Okay, so from Metrogy's 2022 employee research, employee experience Research, I should say, you know, we know that companies are starting to place high value on the ability to pull behavioral and usage insight from their collaboration tools. Webex, of course, you know, and the goal there is to improve the employee experience. So were you influential in developing or kind of pushing the development of Webex collaboration insights, you know, and also, how are Cisco employees themselves benefiting from the use of collaboration insights?
[00:16:12] Speaker B: That's a great question. So we are a large organization, and my team focuses on the interactions of the humans within the workplace. So what's happening within Cisco? Those learnings can be. Have been utilized and can be used in partnership with the incredible team in our Webex development organization that is bringing the technologies and thinking about how do we curate information that will be helpful for the people within the company to be able to do their jobs better, to understand how their, you know, the interaction with the technology can help, which I think is so pivotal for us, especially when we think about the current working environment around hybrid and the hybrid tool technology that's there, so not directly related. The individuals in that space are so incredibly bright, and they are thinking out the longer future about where our customers can be supported. But also, how do we get to that curated information both in the aggregate from a company perspective, but at the individual, for the people within Cisco, of course, we use all the tools that we have and are offering out to our customers and within our Webex teams, which is the place in which we interact with one another as our chat area and able to launch our meetings and all of that. There is the whole, the insights about behaviors and where we have that being utilized is in the conversations. If I think back to the part where we're talking about the attention, it's another place in which you can understand what attention is being paid. How quickly am I getting to my meetings? Am I always late? Am I always on time? Am I using video appropriately?
What are my behaviors within this interaction of work so that I can figure out what works best for me and the environment that I'm in. So it's a great reminder for that and to be able to pull those insights up. And it's fun too, because it brings in additional parts about where you might have missed.org announcement, for example, and someone's title might have changed or something is happening within the news. It curates that for you based on your network. And that's been really helpful for me because sometimes I miss things and it's a little reminder it's such a large.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: Company, it is easy to overlook things. Yeah, collaboration Insights is a great asset to have.
Let's look ahead to 2023. What's on your strategic agenda?
[00:18:43] Speaker B: A lot.
Just was talking with my team this morning about second half of the year planning, and because we are our fiscal year, we're just in our second quarter now. But as we end out 2022 and go to 2023, a couple of the places that I am really focused on, particularly around just our purpose, it's one of those, you know, we have a, it's in our title with people, policy and purpose, and it's a big place for Cisco to think about how is the work that we, what, how is the work that we do within the company able to impact the rest of the world in a positive way? And our purpose report was just released, and to be able to see that impact helps remind us of the continual parts of the work that we can do internally to be able to help support the external world. So that's always in the back of my mind as part of that, what can we do internally? It's understanding the hybrid working environment in a little bit more depth. You know, we've been a company that's been hybrid for a very long time. I've been working from home since 2005. And so, you know, being a remote employee isn't necessarily a new thing. We've had a lot of flexibility in the company, and we advocate for that. Understanding flexibility for people are important, but there's still business need and work that needs to get done, and there's parts of job that do require for you to have time in the office or with others. And so trying to understand, what does that look like? How is it different for our engineering teams versus our sales teams versus our customer service teams?
You know, how can we help support and understand them differently and to get to that strength based conversation that says, hey, engineers, we may not do a blanket policy because that. That just wouldn't work as a company, you have policies that help support it. But what is the intelligence that will be able to help us help our teams work to their best in the new environment that we're in?
[00:20:50] Speaker A: Okay, sounds like you've got a lot to look forward to for the coming year. So we have covered a lot of ground here today. But is there anything else you'd like to share about how Cisco approaches employee experience that we haven't touched on yet and you want to leave listeners with?
[00:21:11] Speaker B: I think the thing that I would touch on is realizing that, in my view, and what I have experienced being a researcher for as long as I have, is that the people at work are the most important asset that we have. And, you know, that's not meant to be a sterile term, but really thinking about them as the individuals we're serving when we're talking about policies or programs or how we're approaching what needs to get done and keeping them front and center. And so having that data driven, researched approach is something that allows for us to have that be a part of the conversation always, instead of just, I had a great idea, or, I saw this happen over at this company, let's just do it here. We pause for a moment. We pause and say, is this really something that our organization needs? Is this really something that's going to work here? And having a team that can answer those questions and to be able to say, yes, we know for sure is really helpful and just something that keeps us out front and being able to keep Cisco and the people at work front and center?
[00:22:30] Speaker A: Well, Roxanne, I think that's a great place to leave off. You shared so much great information.
I learned a lot about how Cisco approaches people, policy, and purpose. So thank you very much for sharing and thanks all of our listeners for tuning in. Until next time, take care, everybody.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: Thank you.
