CISCO CASE

1. Define Cisco business strategy. How is it correlated with HRM?

Before crisis (GROWTH)

 Aggressive acquisition. 
 Focus on hiring 
 Client-orientation
 Employee retention
After crisis (STABILITY)
 Retaining and strengthening team
 Focus on internal leadership development (Cisco University)
 Maintaining customer-oriented culture

2. Describe Cisco approach: effectiveness or loyalty? Prove your answer

 Loyalty-based approach
 taking the soft approach to human resource management, to be more specifically, influenced
more by the Harvard model (Soft HRM is an approach stressing the human aspects of HRM.
It concerns the communications and motivations) → loyalty
 Maintaining loyalty even after firing close to 10,000 people
 Strong retention strategy 
 CEO reduced his salary to $1 to mitigate crisis
 Focusing on employees are treated equally and have equal opportunities to succeed,
regardless of race, gender, disability, or other underrepresented minority status.

3. Name and discuss the peculiarities of Cisco HRM practices. How they support
Cisco’s strategic objectives?

 peculiarities
 promoting more manager-employee dialogue.


 Performance feedback from others working with the employee was built into the
automated performance manage- ment form (ePM). In addition, other development
processes were introduced, such as the Talent Assessment Process (TAP), Leadership
360-degree Develop- ment Feedback (LDF), and Leadership Review Process
(succession management).
 Process of firing people (but keeping them loyal) 
 Different training programs for multiple leadership positions in the company to further
develop their skills for management. 

4. What does Human Capital Strategy mean? Explain main elements of it using Cisco
example.
It involves knowing people are a very important resource for the company. As such, the
company must be very strategic about their continuous growth and development. This strategy
must match the general strategy of the company (alignment)
In Cisco’s case, when the company was focused on aggressive growth, their focus was
increasing their team in an accelerated way. After the crisis hit they, the company strategy went
through a reconfiguration, so their Human Capital Strategy was changed as well. 

5. If we consider current trends in global environment, what Cisco should develop in HRM
to stay competitive?
 creating a pleasant and satisfactory working environment and maintaining "work-life"
balance, which will best generate employees’ talent and potential in return.
 increasing the “organizational effectiveness” such as conducting evaluational process and
building a strong OKRs or KPI in order to make company more effectiveness 
 highlighting employee contributions with new reward and recognition programs and intending
to a company-wide team was chartered to develop a new approach to developing and
leveraging Cisco talent.
 creating a development culture executed through Cisco University via 5 vision of a company-
wide cross-functional effort