Cisco’s Kelly Jones on Making Hybrid Work Successful

Roula Amire:
Welcome to Better by Great Place to Work, the global authority on workplace culture. I'm your host, Roula Amire, Content Director at Great Place to Work. We are excited to kick season four off today with, Kelly Jones, Chief People Officer at Cisco. Kelly, shares what's on her mind as we start a new year. We also dive into new research around remote and hybrid work and the impact mandates have. She tells us questions people managers at Cisco ask in every check-in, including what did you loathe about your week? I know what you're thinking. What the heck, can I tell my manager that? Well, according to Kelly the answer is yes and she tells us why. She also recommends a book that I've started and has quickly become part of my morning routine. So take a listen and enjoy. Kelly, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you on. There's a lot I want to talk to you about, so let's dive in.

Cisco has been on the great place to work in Fortune list of the 100 Best Companies to work for 26 years in a row, and you've been number one for the past three years. So as we start a new year, I can't think of a better guest to ask what's on their mind than you. So let's together look into the virtual crystal ball. What do you think HR and culture leaders should prioritize this year? What should be top of mind or what issues do you think they should prepare to face?

Kelly Jones:
Well, first of all thank you so much Roula for having me on today. I love this podcast and the podcast format, so I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with you. When I think about 2024 and I think about what we're navigating and I think about culture and people leaders, and boy there is a lot of complexity in the world right now. And so one of the things that is really on our mind is trust, I think is the most valuable currency that we have with our employees. Trust followed by time. The amount of time that our leaders spend with our teams and so how we navigate just in an increasingly complex world and ensure that our teams always understand the why behind any decisions that we make. I think is really important because one of the things I've noticed is whether your employees always agree with you or not on decisions that you're making.
If they trust you and they know that you're doing it with their best interests in mind and that you're navigating complexity and they have a history of knowing that you show up for them, that trust is a very valuable currency for organizations. So I think trust is one of the big things I would say that's on my mind. After that I think a lot about how people I think are still renegotiating their relationship with work and their expectations of their employer. This started a few years ago and I haven't seen any sign of this stopping. And so how this kind of comes into how we think about our people strategies, how we navigate some of the challenging things that are happening in the world becomes really, really important.

Roula Amire:
One of those challenges, which also hasn't slowed down for the past few years is this topic of where people work. We have on-site work, remote work, hybrid work, I think in Cisco's case you just call it work. So everyone has even a different definition, and I'm sure this will continue in 2024. But just coming into the office every day and improve culture, we at Great Place to Work completed a market research study that has those answers and then we're excited to release that soon. But one of the key findings show that there's not one way of working that's inherently better than another, and there's no magic number of days in an office or home that at least to this amazing employee experience. But the data was clear that what makes all the difference is mandates and choice or lack thereof. Meaning employees at companies that mandate where they work regardless if that's remote, hybrid or in the office reported lower levels of productivity, retention, extra effort.

They have poor relationships with their managers, their overall experience is low. But of course all those metrics improve significantly when an employee or their team get to choose where they work and those findings are true of industry. Even in industries like manufacturing where some people work on site and others have the choice of flexibility. It comes down to choice and I know your CO has said the office should be a magnet, not a mandate, and teams can decide if and when they come into the office. So with all that said, can you share how you came to that decision and if people hear those findings. Any suggestions on how to approach this way of working successfully? Any best practices you could offer?

Kelly Jones:
You know what's really interesting, I wish I had a controversial point of view that we could debate today because that's always interesting. But what you just stated about the findings we just finished a three-year future of work study at Cisco where we took all of our data around badging rate, how often people were coming into the office engagement. We looked at promotional velocity, we looked at well-being scores, we looked at indicators of innovation. It was a really broad spectrum, and the intent of that study was really to over the course of three years start to understand how we navigate some of the tensions that you still see with hybrid work. Because Cisco, as you mentioned we don't have a mandate. We were very flexible even before flexible work became a thing. It's been a little bit of a differentiator for us in how we attract talent, how we retain talent, our culture and our collaboration portfolio allows us to do that. There are some things that I think any organization needs to have in place to navigate this successfully.

I think we have a little bit of an advantage because we were doing it even prior to the pandemic. So when everybody went home overnight and started working from home, for us we were kind of already doing it. So we got to focus on how to get all of our customers online, and not just through the technology but through hybrid work practices and some of the cultural pieces that you need. But our hybrid work study, I would say kind of had five key findings and absolutely is aligned with what you just said. People need flexibility and choice, it's crucial to employee engagement particularly during times of change which we're all kind of living in all the time. The magnet not a mandate really came out clear and what we learned that I thought was interesting Roula, is it's not the people don't want to come in. They just don't want to come in and work asynchronously. So it almost puts our leaders in a space where they have to be kind of mini space planners for lack of a better word, and create very intentional reasons to have their teams together.

So what doesn't work is just saying, "Come in these two days because I want to see you." The types of things that work that we've seen are aligned to learning, aligned to collaboration, aligned to different moments and innovation cycles for brainstorming, aligned to celebrations. There are certain moments and certain teams that probably need to be together more than others. So our approach that is saying we're not going to have a mandate just recognizes that teams are unique. Our product development team is very different than my people team, and so they just have different needs and so having an overarching mandate for all doesn't necessarily work for all.

Roula Amire:
Right. So I'm hearing you say it depends on the type of work teams do. If the intention is to collaborate and brainstorm, it's to be together. It's not just to go sit side by side with earbuds in and you can do that in a coffee shop or at home and not talk to anyone. So some specifics I believe you've developed like collaboration commitments and like a hybrid work conversation guide to help this process. Can you maybe tell us a bit more about each of those and how they help?

Kelly Jones:
Sure. We've kind of been evolving this as we've seen the needs of our workforce change and we kicked off with kind of your hybrid work agreement's collaboration document. Which was intended to help our leaders essentially navigate with their teams, how are they going to work as a team? What moments will they come in? But there was also an element of understanding what's happening with each of your employees and I know this will come as no surprise. But one of the things that showed up in our data is leaders are really at the center of engagement. It's the connection to leader and connection to team that really matters and so what we ask leaders to do in this is not only understand based on the work. But also understanding each of the humans on their team and their specific needs, how that comes into what their hybrid rituals may be. And it was a guide basically to take their teams through how do we want to hold each other accountable?

Because this tension between flexibility and accountability, I hear about this a lot from many of our customers. They're still navigating this idea of how do we allow people to be flexible but ensure that they're accountable for the work they need to deliver? So the first guide was really around some of the baseline understandings and then over the last few months, at the end of 2023. One of the things that we actually did is kind of relaunch what we had had as our Cisco people deal. Our people deal at Cisco was kind of our agreement with our employees, what you can expect from us and here's what we expect from you. And what we found was it was time to kind of relaunch that in a fully flexible world where everyone was hybrid. Where we really dug in a little bit more to what we expect of leaders, what we expect of Cisco or what our employees can expect of Cisco and then what Cisco can expect of our employees.

And that kind of covered the spectrum around ensuring that we understand the needs of our employees, ensuring that our employees understand the needs of the business and are able to... In some cases, we may be asking people to come in. You may work on a team where there's a point in time and I'll use my team as an example. We learned early on my leadership team, we can't do strategy virtually. We tried. We tried so many times, and what we found was when we get in a room we move so much faster and are able to have so much richer discussions around strategy. But there are plenty of things we do really well virtually. So anchoring our rituals and our agreements around that is really important. So this has evolved for us. It started with our hybrid work agreements and then more recently launched into maybe I would call it a larger set of agreements with our leaders, our teams and our people in terms of how we want to work together.

Roula Amire:
So let's talk a little bit about leadership, and I'm going to piggyback a bit on how you answered the first question on workplace expectations have changed. Well, people leadership has certainly changed for more reasons than we have time to discuss and workplace expectations are massively different than they were a few years ago. Which impacts how leaders need to show up and support their people or it should anyway. What was once seen as nice to have soft skills have become more must have hard skills, listening, communication, care, vulnerability. Listening has certainly been a theme on this podcast, it's the number one high-trust leadership behavior. We tell leaders they need to listen to their people, but they might not know what questions to even ask. So we suggest leaders start meetings by asking how are you doing? What questions do you suggest people managers ask in weekly check-in and do you see soft skills have become more of a hard skill?

Kelly Jones:
I think 100% soft skills have become more of a hard skill, and I think almost nothing has changed as much as leadership over the last five to six years. What I would say is in our survey recently we actually found it's kind of a double-sided coin. In that leaders really own a disproportionate amount of responsibility in creating connection with teams and at the same time, what our data showed us was they're struggling the most because leadership has changed so much. And I was speaking with one of our leaders, oh gosh I think it was a couple of months ago and they were sharing with me that just the broad spectrum of issues they're dealing with that are personal. And they're starting to feel like marriage counselors and career counselors and dietitians and all the things. I think changing work and people working in their homes and inviting everyone into your home knocked down a lot of these walls. So I agree in that leadership is probably the things that has changed the most. Definitely your question is a good one to start those conversations.

One of the things we try to do at Cisco, so we're a strengths-based organization and you may know that. So we believe that understanding what people's strengths are and having them work within those strengths helps to drive greater outcomes. And so we have kind of a ritualized weekly check-in with our leaders and teams where each week we ask our teams to check in and they answer just a few top line questions that end up driving a live conversation and those questions they're pretty short. One is, did you get the opportunity to use your strengths every day this week? One to five. Were you able to provide great value this week? One to five. Just self-perception, how do I feel about the value that I provided? And then the next thing we ask is, what did you love that happened last week and what did you loathe? And I'll tell you personally, the first few times I answered this I found it really hard. I'm an optimist, I tend to not loathe a lot of things.

Even the hard days there are moments where I'm like ugh, that was hard. It was painful, but here's what I learned from it. But loathe is intentionally a divisive word because what we're trying to find out is are our employees working in their strengths? And when leaders understand when they're truly leveraging the strengths of their employees, they can better direct them to the type of work where we're going to get the best outcome. But we also ask what are your priorities? And that's not a list of tell me everything you're doing. That's what are the big things that you're focused on next week and what do you need from me to be successful? And I'll say that last question is incredibly powerful because everyone in our company up to our CEO, by the way. Chuck, reads check-ins as well, he reads them and responds and uses them to drive dialogue with his teams and what I've seen in my team is when you ask the question, what do you need to be successful?

It actually gives people a moment in a really busy week to pause and think, what do I need to be successful next week? So when I put that question in a team space where you're actually taking a moment and recording it for your leader, you get a lot more deep insights that you can actually talk about in your check-in. But we tend to lean into those questions in addition to what you mentioned, just ensuring that we understand how are you. But really how are you not just the perfunctory, how are you that people sometimes ask and, "How are you? I'm great. Oh, I'm great too." It's the really no, how are you? Starting with the real how are you I think is so valuable.

Roula Amire:
Right. Yeah. Starting with the how are you and then waiting for their answer. Not like, how are you? Okay, good and then you launch in. Okay, with the loathe question. I mean do employees... You definitely have to work in a high-trust culture to tell your manager each week what you loathed about the week. So do you find employees are forthcoming with sharing maybe I'm assuming that means what was hard, what was a challenge, maybe what didn't go well?

Kelly Jones:
Yeah, it's interesting. I hate to speak for all 85,000 of our employees, but I'll share my experience and what I've seen with our teams. I think when we rolled this out initially there was a little bit of a moment of why are you asking me this.

Roula Amire:
Right.

Kelly Jones:
There was that kind of like, why would you ask me this? And almost this fear of like if I say I loathe something then it's going to fundamentally change my job. But I think what's happened over time is our employees have realized that we ask these questions because we're trying to have people working in their strengths. When you work in your strengths you're working in flow, you get higher engagement, higher engagement drives higher productivity. You're in the righteous circle versus the unrighteous circle, which I think everybody's experienced at least once in their life where they're in a role that maybe isn't aligned to their strengths. And by the way, just because it isn't aligned to our strengths it doesn't mean we can't do it. I've done that before, I've had a role that didn't really align to my strengths. I was capable of doing it, but it did not give me any level of energy. It did not help Cisco at the level in which it could because I probably wasn't the best person for it.

But coming back to your question, I think that there's an element of trust you have to have for people to really tell you what they loathed. And I think the time really made the difference in that and people realizing that this is really just to open up the conversation about how do we ensure that you're working in your strengths.

Roula Amire:
And it gives employees a chance to share maybe what's not working with their leaders so they know how to improve things and how to change things versus being surprised and not really knowing what's on your employees minds.

Kelly Jones:
Yeah.

Roula Amire:
I want to make sure we touch on inclusivity at work. I know you have a conscious culture philosophy at Cisco, and it's part of your commitment to create an inclusive future for all. In 2022, you appointed your first social impact officer. Can you define what an inclusive future for all looks like and the role social justice plays in that future?

Kelly Jones:
I think the most important part of that is the for all and when we think about even just conscious culture, when we rolled that out. That was really about a for all, like how is everyone experiencing our culture at Cisco? Recognizing that the experience of the majority might not be the experience of everyone. And so the for all piece around inclusive culture for all, an inclusive future for all I think is incredibly important. And so this was really rooted in our belief that you can be a profitable business and do good in the world. I would actually argue that it's part of your responsibility if you're a profitable business to do good in the world. We have employees all over the world that dedicate their time to helping Cisco grow and so how we contribute back to that I think is very important. And the social impact side of it I think is really key because what that really does is just that recognition of if we have an opportunity to help equalize the experience of the humans, then we should take that opportunity.

And part of it is through our social justice action items, but it also goes a little deeper than that. The social impact office and what, Brian, and team are trying to drive is really a global kind of effort that crosses through both people. But also starts to look at some of the communities that might be left behind and this is something we talk about a lot at Cisco. How do we uplift communities? We believe when we go into a community that, that community should get as much from having Cisco there as we get from that community and so that's really the social justice action items for all.

Roula Amire:
Hey, Better listeners. Want to put your headphones down and meet culture leaders in person? Network and learn from the most innovative companies across every industry? Hear from bestselling authors like Angela Duckworth and the Emmy-nominated actress, Mindy Kaling? Then mark your calendars May 7th through 9th, and join us in New Orleans at the Great Place to Work for All Summit. The can't miss company culture and leadership event of the year. Use the code better2024 to save $200 off registration before April 7th. Find the code and link in our episode bio, see you there. We've talked about several things today, and the theme I'm hearing is as I mentioned you've been on the 100 best list 26 years in a row. To do that, you can't stay stagnant. You have to evolve based on the needs of your people and the changing workplace and that's what you're doing. You're changing the hybrid agreement, you've hired social impact officer. You're constantly transforming and changing and I think maybe when people see you on the list, they might assume, "Well that's because you're Cisco."

You have big budgets and ping pong tables and probably amazing, lots of shiny perks and benefits that make people happy. But I'm curious to hear you talk about what's woven into the fabric of culture that often gets misunderstood or dismissed. I mean, even myself when I first joined I thought I'm going to learn the secrets of great culture and I quickly learned it's the same components that make relationships outside of work, work.

Kelly Jones:
Yeah.

Roula Amire:
You ask someone a question, you listen to them, you make them feel heard and seen, you show up. That's what makes your relationships work and that doesn't go away when you cross over into the working world. It shouldn't, but somehow all those common ways of interacting with each other go out the window when it's work. So yeah, what do you think is misunderstood about making the list? Because it's none of those things.

Kelly Jones:
Yeah.

Roula Amire:
It's not the benefits or the shiny objects.

Kelly Jones:
It's none of those things. And Roula, I love this question and I have to tell you the first time we were announced I was sitting in an audience. I wasn't on the stage, I was sitting in the audience and when they were talking about Cisco, Great Place to Work. There were a group of people behind us and I can't remember what company they were from, I don't think I ever knew. But the fascinating conversation happened where they said, "Well, they have so much money, they throw so much at like this and so many people work on this." And I was thinking, it's two people and it's not even their full-time job that actually work on this piece of it. It has nothing to do with that and I think there's a misperception. Cisco is a big company and I think there's this misperception that there's this huge financial engine. It's not it at all and I found it quite amusing. What I actually find is for us at the center of everything is understanding the experiences of all of our employees.

And so what we've done is we've intentionally invested in people intelligence and our people intelligence team is actually not just data specialists. It's linguistic specialists, it's people who really understand the subtext behind the text. We have a really powerful team in our employee listening space, and one of the things we do at Cisco is we put that at the center of all of our employee design. Because we've learned that when you design with a community not for a community, even if that community is your entire ecosystem you are going to get better results. So we are not an organization that sits around as a people team and says, "Gosh, this is a good idea let's go do it." We don't incubate like that. We incubate through the voices of our employees and we incubate through the voices of all of our employees and understanding that becomes incredibly important. And that's very much woven into the fabric of our people team and how we go about our work and I don't know that people always know that.

Because I think sometimes you look at talent programs and you assume there's a smart person making decisions about the talent programs. The smart people making our decisions are our employees, they're really guiding how we make these choices which I think is incredibly powerful and your comment about relationships 100%. I mean, it's relationships that move the world forward and truly listening. It's listening in relationships.

Roula Amire:
I'm curious, when you as the chief people officer when you're having a hard day what do you do? You are human. I'm looking at you, you are human, you carry a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. How do you create a sense of well-being for yourself when the head of HR... Who would you go to or what do you do to blow off steam, so to speak?

Kelly Jones:
Yeah. I have realized just through many years of a lot of work and a lot of travel that I have kind of a three-legged stool around my well-being and when any one of those legs gets disrupted, it affects the other legs. And those legs are sleep number one, and I am not always the most fun person at a party because sleep is very important to me. Even when I travel I'm that person who carves out the sleep.

Roula Amire:
So you mentioned sleep is one of your three-legged stool must-haves. How many hours a night do you actually need to function?

Kelly Jones:
Oh gosh, I need seven to eight. I know there are those super people out there that are like I sleep five hours and I'm great. I'm not ashamed to tell you I am not that person and I'm also an early-to-bed person. My team gets surprised because they'll ping me and at 5:00 in the morning I'm awake and ready to answer a question and I often get, "Wow, I had no idea you'd be up." Well, yes, but don't ping me at 10:00 because I'm in bed.

Roula Amire:
Yeah.

Kelly Jones:
Yeah, 7:00 to 8:00.

Roula Amire:
All right. What are your other two areas of well-being?

Kelly Jones:
Movement, and movement doesn't mean I have to get 60 minutes of heart pounding 160 degree heart rate cardio a day. I mentioned I live in Colorado, it's sunny 360 days a year here. So for me, it's outside movement whether it's the middle of summer or the middle of winter in my snow boots. I have to have some sunshine and I have to move my body every day. It's a mandatory, and when I go about two days without significant movement I can feel it. Not just physically, but mentally it becomes a thing for me and then the third is nutrition. I think it's really important. Our bodies need to be fed properly, so proper nutrition, eating a healthy diet and getting all the vegetables and macronutrients I need to be able to do the other two things are very important. And then other than the three-legged stool, I've got a dog and I think dogs really help with de-stressing and that's a big one for me.

And I read, boy, I have a long list for you Roula. I also read, I do a lot to decompress. I also read a lot.

Roula Amire:
Okay. Well, let's talk about that. What's a book you're reading now or what's a favorite that you might recommend and when do you read? I'm assuming at night before you go to bed?

Kelly Jones:
I read at night before bed, it is the last thing I do before I go to sleep. Because what I find is it helps me switch channels in my brain and so I read different things at night than I do in the morning. So at night I will read fiction, I will read something that is fiction, something that is a take me out of this headspace. If I start reading something that is too work focused or self-development focused, it doesn't actually relax my brain. So I like to go into something that relaxes my brain at night and then in the morning I... This is really kind of goofy, but I have one book I read every day and that's the Daily Stoic. And if you're familiar with the Daily Stoic, it's kind of just like a mantra for every day that is written the classic, The Stoics, Seneca, Epictetus. It'll have their original saying, Marcus Aurelius, is my favorite and then it will have kind of a breakdown of what this means. It's almost like Bible study for the young, if that makes sense.

We'll read you a verse and break it down and what I find in that is it's a practice and it's a mindset of understanding that there are things you can control and things you can't, and that character is everything and so those are really some of the big premises of the Stoic. So I read the Daily Stoic every morning and at night it's always fiction.

Roula Amire:
How long have you been reading the Daily Stoic in your mornings? Is this something new or for years and years?

Kelly Jones:
I started during the pandemic when a friend recommended it to me. The pandemic were I think really difficult times for all of us and in that feeling of control... Control is one of those things that I think it's a little bit of an illusion how much we actually think we control. If you've ever had a problem and you find yourself thinking about this problem for eight hours, all your brain is doing is trying to control an outcome by recircling this in your head. And so during the pandemic I think everybody was feeling a little uncertain, and I had a friend that recommended this book to me. Yeah. So it's 365, it's kind of once a day and I'm not embarrassed to tell you that at the end of every year I just start back over. Because once it's been 12 months I'm not thinking about January 1 again. So I start it over beginning of 2024.

Roula Amire:
I might adopt this for my 2024, I love that idea. I've just taken that philosophy for meditation, which I picked up during the pandemic of what you can and can't control and you see your thoughts spinning and it's usually wasted energy because you have no control over the outcome. I'm just curious, do you read that over a cup of coffee? Is this just a quick I'm going to... So people might say, I don't have time in the morning to do anything but start my day. You start work, but you're obviously extremely busy. So how long does that take you? How long do you carve out in the mornings?

Kelly Jones:
Yeah. So that is part of my morning ritual. I believe that if you own the morning, you own the day and so I wake up pretty early. So for me, it's not a difficult thing for me to do. It is with my first cup of coffee and I think the things... One of the podcasts I love is Andrew Huberman, and he goes a lot into mindfulness and the neuroplasticity behind things. And one of the things that he talks about a lot is your brain is very fertile. So whatever you plant in your brain is going to grow in your brain and in those first couple hours of the morning you have a unique opportunity to really do things with intention and so for me, it's part of my morning ritual. I would say if you don't count the time that it takes me to actually make the cup of coffee, it's probably 10 minutes, maybe 15.

Because what I will do is I will read, I will think and I will write a few lines down for my day if something really resonated with me and I used to have this I'm too busy to do this, I'm too busy. My classic was I'm too busy to work out and then I always remind myself, there are twenty-four hours in a day. We all make time for the things that are important to us and for me it's really centering and it really helps me navigate just the complexities of the world. So 10, 15 minutes, no more.

Roula Amire:
What advice would you go back and give you younger self?

Kelly Jones:
Oh, goodness. I think the first thing I would say to my younger self is it's going to be fine. Calm down a little bit, don't be so worried about everything. Everything's going to be fine. Stop wearing your shoulders as your earrings because it's not a good look. I think I would also probably caution my younger self around the amount of time that you invest in relationships. Because when you're early in career, there's this temptation to kind of be across everything and when I look back at my early 20s, early in career, I worked a lot. I was a really kind of one-dimensional person, I don't think I was that interesting outside of my job. And although when you ask me what are the things that are most important to you in life, it's my family, it's my friends, it's my husband. It's the things that sometimes end up on the bottom of the list and so I would go back to my younger self and say these things that you care about the most, figure out how to prioritize these things in your life.

I've gotten better about that as I've gotten older, I was not very good at that in my 20s.

Roula Amire:
That's excellent advice. I was at a friend's giving and there was a woman there she was in her mid 30s, she's a lawyer, and her presentation deck was open and she was working on it and I just said, "That needs to be closed. There's plenty of time during the day and also you're going to look back and you need to be in this moment with all your friends." She was the host and she said, "I don't have time. I need to do this and get this to her boss." And I said, "Your boss shouldn't be checking their email." But at that age, when you're younger that's your whole world and you miss out on all that's around you. So I think that's great advice. We've all been there and so anyway, thanks for sharing. Kelly, thanks for being on the podcast. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Kelly Jones:
Thank you so much for having me, Roula.

Roula Amire:
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today's podcast please leave a five-star rating, write a review, and subscribe so you don't miss an episode. You can stream this in previous episodes wherever podcasts are available.