The ties between company culture and social impact

It’s often not enough to function as an organization these days. Employees and the customers want to see companies make a positive impact on society. For example, a study from PwC reported that 75% of employees consider the social impact their employer or prospective employer makes is a major factor in where they choose to work. But to make that social action feel authentic, companies need to ensure the work is within the norms and messaging of their company culture. That’s where good communication strategies come in.

At Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference, August 5-7 at Disneyland in California, Julie Lane, head of social impact operations at Cisco, will give a presentation on how organizations can scale their social outreach efforts and share them with their colleagues and the broader public.

Lane told Ragan that when social impact work is done the right way, it can be a major plus for both the business and society.

“Doing good for the world was our goal,” Lane said, “But sometimes that turns out to be doing good for business too.”

Making community giving sustainable

It’s undoubtedly a good thing when a company tries to give back to the community. But making that process sustainable over time is just as important as initiating it in the first place. Doing so takes a commitment to process and communicators who know how to talk about the benefits of the program to leadership to secure continued buy-in.

Lane told Ragan that her team communicates the benefits of any programs it starts with leadership, emphasizing the ties to both the mission and values of the business as a whole. Doing so helps maintain support from the top, which can be modeled for buy-in all across the company.

“We make sure that all of our initiatives have executive sponsorship,” Lane said, adding that each social impact program is designed and communicated about in a tone that focuses on the company’s values first as opposed to any one leader’s, insulating them from any potential leadership changes.

“We’ve had a lot of leadership change,” she said. “But because when you set up initiatives that are multi-year and you have them managed centrally, they live longer than the people that come in and out.”

Shifting language and environments 

Lane told Ragan that Cisco developed its community outreach arms to work within the company’s six core beliefs:

• Technology for good. This means that Cisco creates tech that aims to empower the people using it.
• Curiosity, proximity and empathy.
• Culture of coalescence. This emphasizes the fact that Cisco’s culture is strongest when people from different areas of expertise and backgrounds can collaborate for the betterment of the business.
• Addressing the insecurity of being.
• Commitment to justice.
• Full spectrum diversity impact.

These pillars help ground all of Cisco’s community engagement programs and how they’re communicated both internally and externally. But with major changes in how community engagement programs are talked about with DEI-hostile forces in Washington , communicators need to change their language and tactics in kind.

Lane shared an example of how Cisco had programs launched around 2020 that worked toward social justice goals. While Cisco had to change some social impact messaging to coincide with the new presidential administration in 2025, its cultural values and infrastructure for giving back stayed the same.

“We had a really specific social justice program that we’ve now called Community Enablement,” she said. “We might not be able to use specific words and terms in how we talk about given programs anymore, but we can talk about what the programs do.”

Listening to advance culture

This sort of adaptability in approach doesn’t end with reacting to changes in the outside world. It also applies when communicators listen to the social impacts employees want to see.

Lane shared that Cisco provides a list of nonprofits they give back to, and once a quarter the company takes feedback from employees on what they’d like to see added to the list. This not only helps Cisco identify places where their resources would make a major difference, but it also boosts culture by making employee perspectives feel seen.

“When they go into our tools and they see a certain nonprofit is not there, then they submit and tell us they want it,” Lane said.  “Then when we get enough people saying that they want it, we go back and we relook.”

Lane said that while Cisco has about 7,000 nonprofits in its global donation matching platform, its ethos on giving back is as much about advancing the culture of the company and recognizing employee needs as it is matching a donation on a form.

“It’s not just about matching donations,” she said. “It’s about matching what our employees care about.” 

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.