Cisco, a company flirting with a $200 billion market cap, isn’t shying away from systemic racism and social inequality — deep-rooted problems that typically go ignored in the technology industry. The fight for social justice isn’t entirely new to the company, but it’s coalescing around these efforts as a clarion call for widespread reform, going so far as to adopt inclusivity as its core mission going forward.

“We want to harness the ingenuity of our people and create technology that has a positive impact on the lives of others. And we want to invest in our underserved communities around the world to help the most vulnerable in our societies, and to progress social justice wherever possible, and to encourage our ecosystems to get involved,” said Stella Low, chief communications officer at Cisco, kicking off a virtual panel of the company’s top executives assembled for this week's Cisco Live event.

“We’ve seen anything but an inclusive future in recent months. It’s clear that the pandemic is affecting and impacting the most vulnerable in our communities. And also over the last few weeks we’ve seen some awful examples of injustice and inequality playing out in tragic circumstances, both leading up to the murder of George Floyd and unfortunately since then as well,” she said.

“So are we kidding ourselves that a corporation can actually make a difference?” It’s a question that will continue to be asked as technology executives speak to these issues and try to effect positive changes, and one that was posed to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins.

“We sure hope so. I think the world needs us to,” he said. “Our technology fundamentally connects people and actually opens up opportunity, and then we layer on top the other things that we care about and take an active approach in helping to deliver opportunity.”

The vision calls for a combination of technology, “our hearts, and our corporate social responsibility efforts, our community efforts,” Robbins said, adding that Cisco can facilitate significant improvements in equalizing opportunity in education, health care, and jobs at Cisco. 

“We need to get more of the underserved communities connected, we need to spend more time creating opportunity, and I think technology can actually help do that,” he said. Cisco has also more recently used technology, algorithms specifically, to ensure pay parity and promotion parity, Robbins added.

Cisco is fortunate and privileged to be in a position where it can quickly transition its entire workforce to accomplish its responsibilities remotely, said Liz Centoni, SVP of emerging technologies and incubation at Cisco. “But what has also come up is that the inequities in terms of access to health care, access to education, the digital divide has just been so much more pervasive and we’re seeing that more than ever. So our teams have rallied around this purpose of, how do we bring technology to be able to solve some of these big problems?”

Some of those efforts are aspirational and others are already underway, including the creation of effective methods for privacy-centric contact tracing, remote patient monitoring, remote visits, and care team coordination. “What are the longer term health care solution that we can bring to get underneath some of these social determinants in terms of who has access to care for underserved communications, and also securing reliable access not just to the connectivity but patient data that’s so critical because this data is actually in distributed places,” Centoni said.

“We have the technology but, more importantly than ever, our teams are rallying around this common purpose of being able to do that,” she said. 

The global pandemic has also informed Cisco’s ability to hire talent from a more diverse geographic footprint. “If we really believe that people working remotely have been incredibly productive, it changes our mindset about where we can actually hire talent, particularly in the United States,” Robbins said. 

He didn’t provide specifics about the actions that Cisco will take, but he did say that Cisco is committed to hiring and promoting black people to top leadership positions at the company. “We’re now working on a whole set of actions that we are  going to take to do our part internally and externally on helping drive social justice, helping reduce inequality, helping drive opportunity, particularly for our black community inside and out,” he said.

“We are committed and we are going to drive toward it. We’re working on all the actions that hopefully help us achieve that,” Robbins added.

Racial equality in the workforce is something Cisco was striving for before this crisis reemerged, he said. Early this year, Cisco embarked on a series of efforts with its black employees to better understand their experience, determine what Cisco could be doing better, and create an environment that fosters opportunities in a comfortable, safe, and happy environment, he explained.

A group of 18 black leaders from different levels in the organization sat together to share their experiences while Robbins and Cisco’s entire leadership team listened. “We just listened and it was incredible. To be honest it was absolutely incredible, and the insights that we gained, the proximity that we actually achieved relative to how they feel.”

Some of the feedback was positive, but it also underscored challenges and “bad things” that people didn’t previously recognize at large, Robbins said. The outcome of that session was a 100-day sprint with multiple actions Cisco took to engender racial equality within its ranks, he added. “That actually positioned us better to deal with what we’re dealing with now.”