Cisco's Employee Advocacy Approach Under Francine Katsoudas

When it comes to finding a place to work, there is little that matters more than culture to modern employees. 

According to Glassdoor, 86% of prospective candidates will check a company’s ratings and reviews before they apply to a job, while employers who boosted their Glassdoor rating by 0.5% saw a 16% increase in apply starts on average. 

Promoting this culture, however, often relies on employees. Social Media Today suggests that company content shared by employees will receive eight times more engagement than original company posts, and research from LinkedIn finds that employees can leverage 10 times more social media connections than brands. 

But building employee advocacy programmes in practice can be challenging – particularly in the modern workforce, which now has up to five generations working alongside one another. 

While this level of age diversity can offer a range of perspectives and ideas in the workplace, each generation has a slightly different relationship to social media and promoting their workplace online – making designing an employee advocacy programme that works for everyone a challenge.

The needs of employee advocacy programmes have also grown more complex, with many organisations looking to develop employee-led brand-building initiatives, rather than simply resharing content. 

Many organisations are responding by developing upskilling initiatives and resources to boost staff confidence in using social media for promoting the employee brand, incorporating gamification into advocacy programmes to motivate younger employees and focusing on culture development to create workplaces employees naturally want to champion.

Why aren’t employees posting?

Each generation has slightly different hesitations when it comes to participating in employee advocacy programmes. 

Older generations will often prioritise autonomy and privacy when it comes to social media, while younger generations may see sharing company content on their personal social media accounts as inauthentic. 

Research from Hinge Research Institute also reports that 75% of employee advocates say they have received no formal social media training from their employer – meaning that staff are often both unmotivated and uninformed on approaches to employee advocacy. 

In order to better empower staff of all generations, many leading companies have developed more robust employee advocacy programmes to empower their staff – such as Cisco. 

The company’s #WeAreCisco employer brand focuses not just on sharing corporate messaging, but amplifying unique voices across its global workforce of more than 80,000 employees. 

On a company level, many of the posts Cisco shares across its social media platforms under WeAreCisco is employee generated content (EGC), and features snapshots of working life – such as home offices, team outings and volunteer work. 

The company also hosts a dedicated blog for employees to write accounts of their career journeys and professional highlights – helping to better humanise the brand for prospective talent 

Employees who are looking to post on their personal social media platforms, but feel hesitant about getting messaging right also have access to a wide range of resources. 

The company’s centralised advocacy tool gives staff access to pre-approved posts on culture or product news, which can be scheduled directly onto their social media platforms.

By creating avenues for personal storytelling, the company has created opportunities to promote its employee brand throughout its multi-generational workforce. 

Much of this hinges on having a culture of inclusion – which Francine Katsoudas, Chief People, Policy and Purpose Officer has championed throughout her tenure. 

Having a culture where employees can have a positive experience – which Francine has previously referred to as the company’s “conscious culture” – creates an environment where employees want to share their experiences and naturally act as an advocate for their company’s brand. 

“It’s this culture that empowers our people to tackle the biggest challenges and opportunities,” she shared in the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility report. “It creates an environment where we can develop cutting-edge solutions for our customers, thereby helping them to overcome their toughest obstacles.”

Training a network of brand ambassadors

Through this inclusive culture, Cisco provides opportunities for staff that can simplify advocacy and improve engagement, such as leaderboards to gamify social media usage and upskilling staff to be ambassadors for the brand.

Utilising this wide-ranging network has also played a key role in how the company hires.

“We say at Cisco that we have 84,000 brand ambassadors,” Kelly Jones, Chief People Officer at Cisco, shared in an interview with Fortune. “We recognise that it’s not just the recruiting organisation’s responsibility to bring talent here.”

To achieve this, the company introduced training around “becoming a talent influencer”, on LinkedIn, she says – with a particular focus on senior leaders looking to build out their teams.

“When we have our leaders be the voice of the role they’re hiring for; it’s more effective,” shared Kelly. “So we’ve taught our leaders how to better use the platform.”

Kelly also explained that the company has encouraged teams to blog about their work at a technical level, which is designed to attract top talent because “they want to understand the cool work that you’re doing”.

But while she said that the company “really put a focus on enabling our leaders to own the narrative,” employees are not obligated to take part. 

“We don’t go at this from the standpoint that everyone must do it,” she said. “This is about working with the willing, and the willing are definitely there.”

Through this employee advocacy programme, Kelly said that the company reduced its time-to-fill for roles by approximately five days.

“Everyone worries about attrition and attracting and retaining that top 20% of tech talent,” she said. “We find that they stay longer when they come in through our leaders.”