Empowering Employees Through Disaster

Kelly Jones, chief people officer at Cisco, talks about how HR leaders can improve communication and well-being support during crisis situations and life-altering moments. 

By Maggie Mancini

In the wake of crisis situations or natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires, organizational leaders are tasked with responding to the immediate needs of their employees, providing resources and aid to support those experiencing life-altering moments. For Kelly Jones, chief people officer at Cisco, this means embedding crisis management and transparent communication into the culture of an organization and ensuring that employees feel psychologically safe and comfortable reaching out to ask for help when they need it. HRO Today recently spoke with Jones to discuss Cisco’s approach to supporting employees during disasters, and how HR leaders can keep their workforces prepared for the worst.  

HRO Today: In the wake of the recent hurricanes that devastated portions of Florida and North Carolina, how can HR leaders proactively address natural disasters and keep their workforces prepared for crisis situations before they arise?  

Kelly Jones: When we look at crisis response, we think of it like a three-legged stool in how we respond to it. It’s a balance of proactive and reactive. In this three-legged stool, we have the employee side and how we support our affected employees during crisis. We’ve got the larger Cisco crisis response, figuring out how to restore the communities that we work with. We have a deep well of partners around this. And then the third—my favorite—is the Cisco-on-Cisco side.  

The response to the hurricanes we’ve had recently has been hyperlocal, and there are Cisco employees in those areas. We have a huge site in Raleigh, and our employees rallied around that community. I had someone on my team who literally loaded up her car with diapers and formula. She has a young child, and her first thought was that they can’t access anything. What about diapers? And she loaded up her car and drove down there.   

When we think about supporting employees, we look at it through the lens of crisis as a spectrum. It can be an individual crisis—something happening in someone’s life that’s more personal—or a large-scale crisis. We try to support all of that. We have a strong commitment of care around our employees, and we activate a specialized network to ensure all our employees are safe.  

About once a year, we do a test with our employees to determine how effective we are at reaching people. We are asked to tell Cisco if we’ve received a message they’ve sent, and then we are prompted to update our emergency contact information, because we want to know where all our employees are.  

When something happens like a large-scale disaster response, we activate that network to find out how our employees are and if they are safe. Once we determine that they’re safe, we start to determine what each employee needs. Our response is highly individualized. We try to speak with each employee and understand what is going on with them and what is going on with their families, because there is some variety in what people need. Sometimes, it’s connectivity. Sometimes, there are things we can do on the benefit side. What mental health support services might they need? Do they need to be temporarily relocated? Is it a security issue? Is it a critical time-off issue? Is it a legal assistance issue? There are a lot of things that can fit in that bucket.   

We don’t take a one-to-many approach. We try to take a one-to-one approach, because everyone’s needs are different. When we think about the number of things that have been happening around the world, between hurricanes, political crises, gun violence, all these things require a different level of response. No matter what the crisis is, we tend to go in that way.   

HROT: Going along with that, what strategies can HR leaders leverage to maintain communication with employees during emergency situations?  

Jones: Your disaster plan should always be ready before the disaster, because in the middle of a crisis, there are so many other things that you’re working on. One thing we’ve done is try to learn from our response to a disaster or crisis. We always do a postmortem to figure out how it went, what worked, and what we missed. Was there something that popped up during this that wasn’t in our plan, that we need to add to our plan? We think of it like an expanded playbook, and if we have eight chapters, we may need four in this particular disaster, but we’d rather have all eight of them so that we’re ready to go when it happens.   

We’ve built partnerships and an ecosystem with local agencies to help us respond pretty quickly. Because as much as we are well-intentioned and incredibly people-focused, we also recognize that we don’t have the answers to everything. We don’t do everything perfectly, so we want to make sure that we have a learning mindset when these things happen, so that if we do have something we could do differently, we implement it next time.   

The other thing I think is really important is when you think about what your company can uniquely do in a crisis for your employees and for the community. I mentioned access, because that’s our business at Cisco. When a community goes through a crisis, you think about food, water, shelter, baby food, diapers, all those things. But connectivity is equally as important, because connectivity is how all these agencies coordinate on the back end to ensure that they know how employees and individuals communicate with their families, to make sure they know what the community needs. It also is, even more importantly, how employees and individuals communicate with their families to make sure they know what’s happening on the ground and what they need. Leaning into whatever that unique thing is for your organization is helpful for uplifting the community.  

HROT: How can HR leaders help support employees’ well-being needs in the aftermath of these crises?  

Jones: It’s easier if you already have an established well-being practice. My biggest piece of advice is focused on well-being and mental health. When we think about mental health, sometimes people get it confused with mental illness. Mental health is like physical health. Mental health is a foundation to well-being. And so, treating your mental health and your well-being each day helps in times of crisis. We think of it more like vitamins than we do medicine. Overall well-being for our employees is something that should be a focus every day. When something like this happens and we must activate some of these programs, what we like to do is make sure our employees know that the support is there and make it easy to access.  

It’s about making sure the conversations about mental health and well-being are happening all the time, so when disasters happen, people feel comfortable and have the psychological safety with their teams to ask for help.  

I think employees are looking to employers to provide a level of safety and security in an increasingly unstable world. And so, how we show up in these moments that matter around crisis, with well-being, is really important.  

HROT: How does Cisco provide support for its employees during natural disasters and other life-altering moments?  

Jones: Leaders set the weather around how safe people feel to ask for the well-being resources they need. There is a culture around safety and trust that if you are doing the right thing within your teams and focusing on this concept of psychological safety, when you’re in these moments where you need it, people are comfortable asking for it.  

A big lesson we’ve learned over the last several years is that well-being is something you have to do a little bit every day, and you have to make sure that your employees feel safe and comfortable asking for it. Well-being and well-being resources are not static. They’re very dynamic, and so it’s really important to have robust listening within the ecosystem of your employees to know what they need. If you ask people, they will tell you what they need in times of crisis. We have a pretty robust listening system that feeds into how we develop these programs.  

The benefits we have today look a little different than the benefits we had a few years ago when it comes to well-being, because we’re always looking to see what people need. What’s changing in the world? What do we know through our sensing and listening data that might be critical for us to add to our portfolio of benefits and well-being, so people can bring their best selves to work?  

Kelly Jones is the chief people officer at Cisco.