Hello everyone. Welcome to Cisco's webinar on Human Capital Management with Jefferies. I'm Heather, your Webex Host for today's event. On our today's panel we have Francine Katsoudas, Executive Vice President and Chief People, Policy & Purpose Officer at Cisco. From Jefferies, we have George Notter, Communications Infrastructure Sector Analyst and Will Atchison, VP, ESG, and Sustainable Finance Strategies. In a moment, I will turn the session over to our speakers but before doing so, I have a few housekeeping notes to cover. Please note this meeting will be recorded. Should you have any questions throughout the session, please ask them in the Q&A panel, which can be found at the bottom right of your screen. Also, please take a moment to fill out the survey, which will pop up as you exit. Your feedback is very important to us. With that, let me hand it over to the Jefferies team to get started. Hi everybody. This is George Notter from Jefferies. I lead our firm's equity research efforts in the Communications Infrastructure Sector. Thank you very much for joining the call today. Today we're pleased to have Fran Katsoudas with us. Fran is the Chief People, Policy, and Purpose Officer at Cisco Systems. Fran leads an ecosystem of folks at Cisco, comprised of people and community, corporate affairs, workplace resources, government affairs, and country digital acceleration. Fran has been with Cisco for 25 years and prior to her current role, she's been in a variety of HR functions across the company, engineering, service provider, all sorts of places. Welcome Fran, to the call. We appreciate you taking the time today. Thank you George. Okay, great. For today's call, the focus here is Cisco. This year the company ranked no. 1 in the rankings for 100 Best Companies to Work For. It's a poll done in collaboration with Fortune magazine and an organization called Great Place to Work. You guys can certainly, we can talk about how the poll works but we thought it was a great opportunity to have Fran come on and talk about how Cisco has done so well in the rankings and how Cisco focuses on human capital management as a company. Obviously, it's a really important area and certainly we are very interested in learning more about. Also on the call we have Will Atchison, who works at Jefferies. Will helps run our efforts in the ESG space. Will can introduce himself also, given the firm's efforts in ESG and human capital management, we're excited to have Will and Fran here to talk about human capital management and what it means to Cisco. The agenda for today, we're gonna talk for about 60 minutes. The call is scheduled for 60 minutes. We're gonna have hopefully time at the end of the call for questions. Folks can type in questions and there's a chat box in the interface that you used to log into. You can type in questions anonymously at any time and certainly feel free to do that. We'll take those questions at the end. With that, I'll hand it over to Will and Fran, t hanks very much guys. Great. Thank you George. Look, let me just reiterate what George said. We're honored to be having this conversation. Cisco has been leading the human capital charge in many aspects and this is an increasingly important topic to investors and corporates alike. With that, let's dive straight into the conversation. How does human capital management at Cisco fit into the broader purpose, the corporate strategy? Thank you Will and I'm thrilled to be with all of you. I think this is such an important conversation and I think our understanding of human capital management has evolved both in the industry and at Cisco. Will— I'll step back for just a moment and share that the analytics, the insights that we have today are so much better than what we had historically. They give us insights into the best of human capital practices, the best of people engagement. They help us to understand the connection to purpose and that allows us to be so much smarter. I think all of us wish that this space was so easy and there were like, five things you needed to do. It's not that way because there's such an important connection between your human capital strategy and your business strategy. For Cisco, I would say that our journey really started about seven years ago and it was when we started to put people front and center in everything that we do. One of the things that we did very early on was we talked to our leaders around their best teams. We wanted to understand where they saw amazing performance within the company. At the time, they had given us 100 teams. We studied those teams and we studied a control group and we could see a difference between those teams that were producing and incredibly effective versus those teams that were not at that same performance level. What was so fascinating about that was it taught us that leaders that were incredibly close to their teams, leaders that saw the strengths in their individuals, teams that had a significant amount of trust and teams where they really understood not only the strategy of the company but what success looked like on their team, were outperforming in every way. The other AHA for us was those teams also had the best inclusion. Will, I think it was one of the most beautiful examples of where your human capital strategy, your approach to leadership and team intersected with inclusion in a way that we could see that. What ended up happening was that became the philosophy for a lot of what we do today at Cisco as it relates to leaders and teams. Fantastic insight, t hank you. I wanna dig a little bit more specifically into how does Cisco rank number one on the best places to work? The reason we participate in Great Place to Work is because the majority of the decision on ranking comes from our people's response to a survey and it's anonymous which I like. Great Place to Work also made a very important move about six or seven years ago, which was they started to focus on the experience for all. What that means, Will is that if one of your demographics, let's say women, were scoring a lot lower than men that really brought your scores down. I thought that was really important because what we have to do is be the best Cisco for all employees. At Cisco, we talk about the full spectrum of diversity and ensuring that all of your people feel like they belong t hat's why we participate. It's our employees' feedback that has really helped us to get to that number one spot in the U.S. and to really climb. When I first stepped into this role, I remember I think we were in the low 1990s and I remember being really worried about the experience and where we were going. When I peel back the layers and I focus on the experience, I think what has contributed to our movement and the improved experience for our employees has really been a lot of the transparency that we have as a company. I remember back when we were, I think 1992 we had a very transparent discussion with our employees about what we were hearing from them and what we had to improve upon as it relates to our leadership, our communication, how we needed to really think through some of the offerings around development. Inclusion was another really important topic. I think the transparency in saying, "Hey, I know these things are not where they need to be. We need your help to improve," was a big part of the shift for us at Cisco. Those key tenets around transparency and communication and inclusion and just that dialogue, I think helped us to navigate the last few years in a differentiated way as well. Something that Chuck Robbins has been so thoughtful about is just driving the real conversation with employees. As an example, it was a few years ago that he sent out his email to employees on mental health and just saying, "Hey, mental health is health, and we're here for you, and if you need support, please let us know." What happened as a result of that, Will, was our employees came forward with a ton of their stories, a ton of requests around mental health support which we started to action immediately. It created a real conversation so that employees could share what they needed personally but they could also start to share from a business perspective what they saw that wasn't working, the issues that they thought we could improve upon. I think that's how these things come together to really impact not only the experience but your business performance. Great. Look, I wanna dive deeper into that mental health initiative, right? 'Cause it's something that I think is a little bit unique for Cisco or at least we're not hearing about as much at other companies. I s there any data you can provide around those, any that you feel are particularly impactful? Yeah. It's interesting because when I talk to my peers just to share this, we're all thinking about it, I think we're all worried about it. We have been focused on mental health, I think on the last few years, something that has been easier for a lot of companies to talk about is well-being. For many companies, when their employees went from working in the office to working at home, the start time and the end time just started to bleed. You saw people spend a lot more time at their desk working. We realized that the commute time was something that actually helped us transition at the beginning or the end of the day. I think there's been a tremendous amount of learnings. From a mental health perspective, recognizing the pressures, the stress, having avenues for our people to talk, helping to really ensure that again, we are talking about what is on our people's minds and to a certain extent, almost allowing them the luxury of focusing on the day-to-day by helping them take care of those things that are quite heavy has been important for us. What it meant was from a human capital perspective, looking at the benefits that we provide, ensuring that when someone wanted to talk to a mental health practitioner, they could talk to someone who had shared life experiences. That was something that we started to amend. What we also found for our employees was that in many cases when they were ready to have someone perhaps support their teenager, the wait time for a practitioner was three-four weeks and that's really painful when your child is in distress. One of the offerings that we provided was an advocacy group to really help our people get to a practitioner very, very quickly. Those were some of the things that we learned but again, I think the key point here is that you wanna have that dialogue. You want your people to be able to tell you hey, this isn't working. We need support, w e need the system to see us differently. The only other example that I would share, and I think it's important because there are big things that you can do and there's little things that you can do that go so far. At the beginning of COVID, we did a couple of things. One, we had a mental health practitioner join our company meeting and Dr. Zane is still with us today. At every meeting, if people have a question about stress, mental health, how to handle an issue or the pressures, she's there. What we're signaling there is that there's no separation between your business strategy and questions that you have on the security business, and a question that you have about, "Hey, I'm struggling with sleep," or how I handle this issue that I'm dealing with. The second thing that we did and this was an idea that one of our employees brought forward was someone shared with us that sometimes it's really hard to step away even when you're on paid time off. The suggestion was maybe the whole company takes a day off from time to time so that we can all step away and you're not worried about like, what meetings are happening while you're gone or how many emails are you getting. At Cisco, we have something called Day for Me, and the whole company shuts down. I think we've done about 10 of them so far. It's a great way for the whole company to take a break because we call it Day for Me, I think people also think about what will recharge me, what will refuel me, what am I most passionate about? There's something really beautiful about that thought process for our people as well. Great. Y ou're—i t's interesting, right? That commute home and that commute in really did kind of change your mindset. I remember those first six months of the pandemic. I can tell you maybe 20 minutes of what I did and it was all work. One of the things I think you highlighted and I think is important is this idea of signaling that this issue matters. Cisco and the company cares. B eyond that what is Cisco doing differently? 'Cause there's a lot of companies who are trying to get this number one ranking. Yeah. T he first thing that I would say is that, I think you have to question everything that you're doing. I think you actually have to question those things that are working even and ask yourself, are they still the practices and the programs that will take us forward? Are they practices and programs that will help the company and our people to transform? There's a fluidity in this space that again, I think makes it fascinating and also makes it hard. So these are some of the things that we're doing differently. We introduced a concept a few years ago called Conscious Culture and it was a belief that every single employee owns the culture. As the chief people officer, I don't own the culture more than anyone else and the same is true for every member of the executive leadership team. When you have that belief set, it's everyone's role to really focus on how we are better in our day-to-day, how we are better within our teams. Something that we realized in Conscious Culture is that you have to focus on the environment, you have to focus on your values and your principles and you really had to focus on the real day-to-day experience. The realization that we had is you can talk about your values but if your day-to-day experience with your leader and your team isn't there, it's not meaningful. We thought it was really important when we talk about the environment to drive a different level of transparency. What we did, which I think is still rather provocative in the industry, is that we shared with our employees all of the data regarding the employee relations cases that we had as a company. Our people could see how many cases came forward on topics like harassment and discrimination and negative behavior. We shared what we did in those situations, how many people were coached, how many people had a formal warning, how many people were exited and why. It was a way for us to really drive this dialogue to be clear with our expectations. Also to share that we're all learning. In some cases there was negative behavior but with coaching and really transparent dialogue, a leader or a team member could learn and move forward and have a great career here as well. I always remember the day that we shared our employee relations cases. Our head of ER shared, of course in an anonymous way, specific issues that had come up. I remember in that moment feeling almost the shock in the system that we were so transparently sharing this information. After the meeting, I remember a leader came up to me and he said, "I saw something yesterday and it's the second time that I've seen this occur in a meeting and it's not right and I'm gonna do something about it and I'm gonna have a conversation." That's something, Will where I feel like it's a heavy lift. There's risk associated with this as well, but I think what our people see is the level of transparency. Yesterday I had an employee come forward to me and via Webex chat say, "Hey, I don't think my manager is living the values. What should I do?" I said, "Okay, this is who you can talk to about that. Thanks for bringing that forward. Let's step forward and just kinda figure that out." That's what you want in your culture i t makes you better. That's an example of something that we're doing that is pretty different. I think it's important, again to just say that our people fuel a lot of our best ideas. This concept of Conscious Culture came from an employee, who saw a situation where she felt we could be better and you want that channel. That listening and that transparency, I think it's the heart of a lot of what we're doing today. You were not joking about the transparency there. That is fantastic and sounds like there's a lot of psychological safety at Cisco and I applaud you for creating that culture. Look, so we've talked a little bit about the transparency, how you're doing this? Can we talk a little bit about how you might measure this or track progress? Specifically, h ow do you use employee engagement surveys? How do you use culture consultants and other potential resources? Yeah. It's such a great question, I think all of us in the industry right now are listening in different ways and I think that is really, really good. If you go back in time, I don't know if you remember this but it's really funny. A lot of companies would have the annual survey and you'd put the annual survey out and then it would take like, a month and a half to get the survey back. You'd read the survey and then you're trying to remember what was going on when the survey went out and it just wasn't moving as quickly as the business. The most important thing now is that your listening has to be always on. This is also a beautiful example of where technology can help. At Cisco, we have a multi-pronged approach to listening but to your question, really the measurements that help us to understand where we are. Some of the things that we do, in every meeting that we have with our employees, we're able to take as an example, chat. We're able to take questions, w e're able to run it through sentiment analysis. It gives us a good understanding of people. What are the emotions? Where are people at? I can go into a meeting knowing, gosh, our people are hopeful, they're annoyed, they're worried. That as a leader, is so wonderful because I can say, "Hey, I know you're worried. Let's talk about what's going on." From a measurement perspective, something that we have done at Cisco for over five years now is that our employees check in with their leaders on a weekly basis. When they check in with their leaders, they share their priorities for the week that connects us on the work. They share their love and their loathe from the previous week and they share the extent to which they're playing to their strengths and the extent to which they feel valued. We measure the number of employees that are checking in. A measurement that I think is even far more important is when an employee checks in, does their leader read the check-in? That's attention and leader attention is everything. Will, I can correlate attention to retention. If a leader is not reading their employee check-in, there is a very high probability or a higher probability that that employee will become a retention risk. When you can connect the dots that way, it really drives behavior. The other thing that we look at, we have a survey that we do on an ongoing basis called The Real Deal. It helps me to understand how our employees are viewing key issues around the way in which we operate. It allows me to understand their connection, how they're feeling about their work. That's something that I can measure and correlate to performance as well. The other thing that we do is every leader on a quarterly basis runs an engagement survey. This is different and people ask me, "Why don't you just have the engagement survey go out to the entire company at the same time?" There's a difference when your leader says to you, "I wanna know how you're feeling about our team. Do you feel there's trust? Do your teammates have your back? Are you optimistic about the mission of the company?" We do that. Th at's something that I can measure as well. I hope that what you're hearing is that, there are so many different ways that we listen, that we correlate some of the listening to either performance, to inclusion, to overall engagement, that really guides us and it's just something that has to always be on. Got it, t hank you. Look, you've highlighted a lot of the importance of leader attention, the idea that people should be leading, and engagement. S ince COVID, we've really had a change in how companies operate, right? There's remote, there's hybrid, there's in-office. Can we talk a little bit about your perspective on those and how does that play into human capital management? Yeah. It's so interesting because I think we— across the industry and across industries, I think we've had this really fascinating dynamic, which is it's so binary. Are you hybrid or not? It doesn't work that way. I think what we have to look at first is the work. I think the more sophisticated we can be about the different types of work and then the ways in which we do that work best. We'll get to the solutions that are best both for the business but also for our people. As an example, what we did at Cisco over a year ago is we provided our leaders with a toolkit so that they could talk to their teams about, gosh how have they been doing fully remote? What are some of the learnings that they've had about the work? What's better? Perhaps what isn't as good in the way that they're working? Are you a morning person? Are you an evening person? How do you wanna work? How do we get the best from you? From that dialogue, teams figured out how they wanted to work. What that means is that at Cisco, there isn't a prescription around how teams work. There's a request for teams to have this discussion, to really look at the impact and then reassess, and continue to tweak and learn from all of these different phases of work. What we're finding is that over the last two and a half years, very different behaviors and habits have formed and some of them are really good, some of them, not so much. We just have to figure out like, how do we navigate through that? Something that we've been saying recently is that being remote for two years taught us that you don't actually have to come in to work. It leads to a really important question, which is, "Well, then when do you come in?" I think now at Cisco, every single leader is an event manager. These event managers have to really think about is the team connecting? Do they need to be face-to-face? Am I hearing from everyone? How do I bring the team together? These are the things that we're doing. I think the other thing that I would sa and this is a really cool example of what we're doing, not only from a Cisco perspective but for our customers as well. In Webex, as an example, there's an area called Personal Insights and within Personal Insights you can see the number of meetings that you're taking on a weekly basis. You can put in, "Hey, on most days I'd like to take meetings from 8 to 3, and then I'd like to use a few hours to do some work." Based on that, you can see how you're doing. You can also see when you set up meetings outside of someone else's work time. You have the ability to see who you spend your time with. When I'm coaching people, a lot of times I say like, "Who are the people that you need to be spending your time with to be most effective in your role? Take a look, i s that where you're spending your time?" I think the tech is also making us so much smarter. M y thoughts here are focus on the work, focus on what brings out the best in your people, know what brings out the best in yourself and then use insights to hold yourself accountable. That's how we're navigating through I will tell you, it is not perfect. I think there's a lot of discomfort in some cases around the fact some of our leaders wanna see their people more and we're just navigating through. I think if you focus on those big questions up top, you're gonna figure out the right way to do it. Oh, great insight. It's interesting to me 'cause a lot of people point to at home potentially making— mid-level management slightly less valuable but it actually sounds like it's the opposite. They have to be engaged, t hey have to be tracking, t hey have to proactively reach out to people. I think that's a great insight and very differentiated from what we're hearing. Look, let's talk a little bit about best practices for training and development of your workforce, right? The human capital asset, we're constantly told it's the most valuable part of the company. How do you make sure you're getting the most out of it? Yeah, the first thing that I would say is that, I think before a lot of people felt like you go to school, you get your education, you start working and you're done. You may change roles or you may grow and there's something we have to break here. That is, first of all, there's gonna be different paths into the company. There are some people that will come in straight from high school. There are some people that will come in without a college degree and that's gonna be okay because in this new world, training and development is gonna happen all the time. I do believe that it has to feel a lot more bite-size. I do believe it has to be something that the business prioritizes and I'll talk about that here in just a moment. I think we all know how it is when we hear about all of the great training and development offerings that our companies have and I think we all feel this way. When you see an email coming out talking about this great session and you struggle to figure out, can I do this? Can I make time? I think there's even some people that wonder like, is my leader okay if I step away for a couple of days and do this work? Something that we are experimenting with and we started this last May, is a concept that we call Illumi. It is where we actually set aside approximately, I'd say about 12 hours at the start of a quarter for the entire company to go through training. The cool thing about it is that you get to choose what it is that you take. It's everything from leadership skills, it can be going deeper into your specialty. It can be some work from a team perspective. When I think about some of the sessions that were really popular this last May, growth mindset was something that was really important. We did a session on purpose that I think was really meaningful for our people in talking about company purpose, your own purpose and how they come together in a very meaningful way. Making the decision for the company that we're going to do this week makes it okay for everyone to take some time to focus on their development and you're signaling something that is really, really important. What we plan to do as we move forward is to tie that training to the business cycle. As an example, Cisco's year-end is occurring in about three days. The next session that we will do in September is going to be really all about some of the planning that we do as an organization, some of the motions that we're going through and helping our leaders really raise their proficiency in helping our teams understand why we do a lot of what we do. This to me is a very different approach, I think it's important. I think the only other thing that I would say, of course is that all of us have to become so much more focused on skills. I think from a human capital perspective, we made skills too hard and we created way too many of them. As a result of that, what would happen is a company would go through a skill set assessment, you'd finish it and then you'd feel like skills have moved. I mean, something that we're realizing is that our business is transforming so much faster than our skills and our capability to understand what's coming. The more that we can simplify skills, the more that we can use technology. We're moving in this direction from a Cisco perspective. We're going to create amazing career paths for our people. I think there's a nice win-win there too. Yeah, no, look, we're halfway through this and it's already become clear that this is a very thoughtful, it takes time, it takes resources, and again, we have to be very thoughtful for this. I think some corporations or some companies are missing this. L ook, you've created this great human capital, you have great management practices in place, and then you couple that with the idea that there should be a lot of skills trained while you're working. How do you go around hiring? How do you source talent, right? Is this blind hiring? Are there assessments? What are tools you use to make sure that you don't ruin the secret sauce that you've created? Yeah. I think against the backdrop of the Great Resignation, most of us are doing a bit more hiring than we were in the past. What you realize is that on the one hand, it's intensive to be hiring even if that's just 2% or 3% more than you had in the past or what you had planned as a result of attrition. But the second thing that you recognize is, my goodness this is a transformation lever, and this is an opportunity. If you're attriting and I'll use Cisco data, I think this year we'll attrit probably about 12% of our employees. If you're attriting 12%, it's an amazing opportunity to really think about the skills that you need for the future and look at this as potentially a great way to leapfrog as a company as well. I would say this is another area where the level of experimentation always has to be on, w e are a believer in blind hiring. Specifically, we had tremendous results in Asia Pac on blind hiring. What it did for us was it helped us to understand some of the skills and capabilities that were a little bit more transferable than we understood. It helped us to understand that there were some companies that we never thought would be great pools of talent, that actually we learned once we removed universities and names. That's what blind hiring is from resumes that there were new motions that we could build. I would say one, that was incredibly helpful and especially in a technology area where what you really want to understand are really some of the raw skills and the capabilities t hat has been helpful. The other thing, and I think startups do this really well, is that in startups, you find that your leaders are always out there understanding who's the best and brightest. They're not just relying on recruiters to do that. Something that we have done at Cisco is we've asked our leaders to really be thoughtful. In a startup, if there's only 25 people, 50 people, 100, every hire is so significant to your success. I think even at scale for Cisco, like that mentality is important. How do we help our leaders build their skills and capabilities around networking and those places where they can also meet amazing talent? The other thing that we're doing is we're going after skills and talent that honestly we never saw before. We're part of a great coalition called OneTen that helps us to get to Black and African American talent. We have made a commitment as a company to really increase our hiring. This was a huge opportunity for us. What we're seeing is that some of the talent that's coming in, as an example, is coming into our technical assistance center, which becomes an amazing pathway into an engineering role or other services roles. Really looking at different pools of talent, I think, makes Cisco better. You have to have this always-on motion. You have to remove some of the requirements, like college degrees and know that you're just gonna get the best and brightest. It does mean that you, as a company, have to invest more in helping people because this could be their first role where they're learning how to work in a corporation and on teams. We can do that, w e know how to do that. I do think if I look at all of the areas from a human capital perspective, this is the one where in five years, I think we have gone through three pretty significant evolutions. I think it and it's important, I think we will continue to do that. Something that we're doing at Cisco at the moment is we're trying to build a little bit more of a muscle around that internal movement. Right now we're working and having our recruiters put more focus on helping internal people get to their next role at Cisco. I think that together with really going out to diverse pools of talent will be a game changer for us as we move forward. Got it. Look, we've talked a little bit about investing in employees, training, retention, et c.. O n the human capital management side that we've been traditionally focused on as investors is compensation, benefits, stock-based compensation. Can you provide some perspectives or color around how that works into your human capital management? Yeah, absolutely. You know, the first thing that I would say is that I think I saw a study, I think it came from Gallup, that said that. I'll bring the number down because I wanna make sure I'm getting it right. It said something like 85% of Chief People Officers felt really unprepared, in the compensation area with the dynamics of inflation and the Great Resignation going on. It's interesting because while your levers are pretty consistent, the thoughtfulness in how you leverage those levers and understanding what your people want, I think is so important. Let me start by saying there's an important role here from a listening perspective and maybe I'll start at the employee level, and then I'll move up to the executive level. From an employee level, the always-on listening, I think is incredibly important. What we heard as an example from our people at the beginning of the year was that, "Hey, cash in hand at this moment with inflation is really more important to us." Together with our people, we made some tweaks to our levers to get them some of the cash a little bit faster. That was something that 85% of our employees said was really important to them. We're always thinking about the behaviors that you drive. You always want people invested in the long term. You want them focused on their current performance and you want them recognized for exceptional work. Those are some of the tenets that we look at. I do think we can be a lot more flexible in this space and I think that's a little bit of what we demonstrated to our people. We had a leadership meeting two days ago, and my team was laughing because when you have a meeting on compensation, typically no one's satisfied on compensation. Everyone is gonna want more, I think our people just really appreciate the direct conversation about that. Now, as we move into leadership, what you want from a compensation perspective is you want to ensure that you are compensating your people against the biggest goals that you have as a company. As an example, our leaders all have an inclusion plan for their organization. It only makes sense that our leaders now are held accountable too. Are they meeting those goals? Are they meeting the goals that we have around sustainability as a company? This is newer for us but again, I think it's a really important motion. We constantly work to try to get the balance right. I think our people appreciate knowing too, what we are holding our executives accountable for. One of the areas where we took, I think a really big step forward and I'm so proud of the team, is around our social justice actions. We published our social justice actions, our commitments. As an example, within those commitments, what you see are commitments around representation, around hiring, what the organization should look like. I'm really happy to say that at this moment, we're outperforming all of those goals. What we're doing is we're changing some of the systems. Compensation is one of the levers in how you do that. It's not the only lever but I think it's important for us to talk about it that way as well. Yeah, great insights. W e always want more but it's not the only lever as you highlight. We found the same thing in our research. Look, you already touched a little bit on the Great Resignation but I was wondering if there was any additional perspective. Then also as you're looking forward, right, are you adjusting your human capital management because of this Great Resignation? Or are you leaning more into your already existing, very thoughtful, very well-liked approach? I think you always have to evolve. I think the Great Resignation challenges us. I think it's hard, but it's good for us. I think it's really good for us to constantly challenge whether or not our practices will be sufficient as we move forward. I want our people, not just my team, to constantly pressure test that. Yesterday, I received an email from an employee coming off of the compensation meeting that was so thoughtful and there were like eight or nine points that he had about how we reinforce some of the behaviors. You know, I feel like maybe he should join the team but that's what I want. I want everyone thinking about it that way. If I look at the Great Resignation there were so many different dynamics. I think what we saw, especially early on, a lot of employees were asking like, "Is it worth it? Like, with everything going on, how do I wanna work? Where do I wanna be?" Will, I do think that was a moment in time. I think then what happened was the market became so hot that people were receiving offers that were so compelling that it gave them the opportunity to really question where they wanted to be, what their goals were from a compensation perspective. What we found at Cisco and I think this is so very important was that the attrition could have created an opportunity for more people externally to come into those roles or it could create an opportunity for us to promote our own people and to take a bet on them and to recognize that if we don't take a bet on them, the market will. What we saw during the period of the Great Resignation is that in one year, 30% of our people were promoted t hat is a significant increase for us. I would do that again and again and again because you're betting on your people, you're giving them a chance. Maybe in some cases that promotion came a quarter before we thought we were going to do it. I think what it does is it keeps your people committed, it keeps them growing. It creates this amazing environment of people that are looking at the work in new and different ways. To me, that was one of the big takeaways of this era, is that you're gonna have to bet on your people. The other thing that it did was it reinforced the basics. I mentioned earlier, if your leader isn't paying attention to your team, the data tells us and I think we've all had this experience, we know this, your people are gonna feel like they're not a priority, they're not valued. We were able to go back with our leaders and just help them and remind them that with all of the things that they have on their plate, this is one of the most important things that they can do. I do think it also created an environment, I think this is an opportunity for us, where we have to do a better job of having the career discussions with our people. Not just about the next quarter or two, but two years from now, where do they wanna be? I think those conversations are everything. I think this work has helped us a lot. Last year our attrition was 9% and the tech average was 19%. This year I think we'll end at about 12% and the tech average is about 22%. That's meaningful. I want us to stay below because 12% is still a lot for us and I think it puts a lot of pressure on your leaders and it's something that we'll continue to really learn from. I think those takeaways about the basics, those takeaways about making bets on your people and career are the biggest takeaways. Got it. Fantastic delta there relative to the tech community, so bravo. Look, we've already kind of hinted at this, but we're trying to understand what does Cisco collect to really measure and evaluate human capital, engagement, inclusion, retention, and 'cause you pointed out it's so important, leadership attention. Yeah, t hat's absolutely right. I mean, those are the key levers that we look at. S omething we haven't talked about as much is the role of purpose in all of this, Will. One thing that we have recognized as a company is that the focus on purpose, I do believe brings a level of engagement of our people. This year, 82% of Cisco employees participated in giving back to the community. That is an incredibly high number. What that does is it creates, I think an environment where our people are looking at the communities. I think it gives them context, I think when you do that, I think you have bigger perspective. It creates this element of servant leadership which I think is so incredibly important in the environment. When you have those things, I think you create an environment that is low ego, which is so incredibly important for the work. Because when it's not about me, when it's about the work and how I can be best for my team, you produce so much more. Yes, to your point, we look at all of those factors. We look at the extent to which our people are volunteering and participating because we understand there's power there as well. Great insight. Look, we've gone through the 10 questions. We've had a couple come in, though so I'd like to highlight a few of these. I'm just picking on order because we're running out of time here. What is Cisco's number one challenge with human capital management? Yeah. I think our number one challenge and we see this in the Great Place to Work survey as well, is that people wanna understand more and more, what do I need to do to get to the next level? I think that focus on promotion velocity is good. I think we need to be more clear with our people, what they need to do from a performance perspective and then the roles that they can move to. I think this is one of the next big opportunities for us and it's a bit of an unlock. As you would imagine, if I'm an employee and I don't know what I need to do to get to the next level and someone calls from the outside and says, "Hey, we have this role at the next level," it becomes so attractive. I think we owe it to our people to drive more clarity around promotion velocity. I think that's one of the biggest opportunities we have. Got it. Yeah, no, that would be incredibly important as a worker myself. Look, the other one that's come in is what. If you could list a couple of quantitative metrics that you'd like the SEC to require to be disclosed by companies, what would they be? That's such a good question. I think right now where we are focused is really on some of the key metrics around sustainability and some of the work that is going on right now. I think you know this but we have made a commitment to get to net zero Scope 3 by 2040. We're so proud because recently our plan was just reviewed, and the science-based approach has basically said, "Yep, good planning," and we want that. I think for us, for the planet, the more that we can look consistently in this space, I think it is incredibly important. As you would imagine, the other place where I just feel like the more that we disclose and share the better we're gonna be is really around our diversity. I think that has driven a lot of tremendous improvement across the industry, and we have so much more to do. Again, company by company, we speak different languages, we talk about different metrics. Some of the consistency that I see now I do believe will make the workplace such a better place and then when you look at sustainability, really have an impact on our future as well. Got it. Yeah, we would agree, obviously. You know, I focus on ESG and sustainability, so we would agree. Look, out of everything we've discussed today, I just wanna wrap it up. We're running really long on almost an hour here. Out of everything we've discussed today, what is in your view the number one driver of you being ranked number one in the Great Place to Work list? And then what has you very excited for next year you think is gonna help continue to drive this? If I had to net it out, I would say direct, transparent, two-way communication is at the heart of the progress that we've made and the progress that we have to continue to make. I will tell you Will, I always am worried about like, for us keeping on this trajectory of improvement. I think it's so incredibly important and it's a funny feeling when I was talking to one of my peers a few days ago. We're ranked number one in the U.S., and I still see there's so much we have to do. I think one of the gifts of being in this place is it allows us to ask the question, how does a best company respond to this issue? I think the more that all companies can ask that question, it pushes us to increase our expectations, our baseline, maybe to even challenge what we once viewed as a good enough metric t hat's what I would say. I will tell you, I stress a lot about okay, we've done well. How do we just continue to drive that improvement? Yeah. Look, for what it's worth, we spend a lot of time on this issue of human capital and human capital management, and you are clearly a leader, c ongratulations. Look, we're wrapping up on the hour, so I just wanna take the time to thank all of our participants and thank you for your time, Fran. With that, I'd like to hand it back over to Heather to make closing remarks. All right. Well, I'd like to thank everyone for attending the session. We hope you found it informative and valuable. A special thanks goes to our speakers today. Again, please take a moment to fill out the survey, which will pop up as you exit. I I hope everyone has a great day and goodbye. Thank you.