Cisco 1st Global HR Hackathon: more than 800 people participated in person and virtually around the globe (from Sidney to Anchorage) Creating 105 solutions.

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White Paper
March 2016
Feb 2016 1st
Global HR Breakathon:
In 24 HR will never be the same
On February 18th, 2016 Cisco HR ran the 1st Global HR Breakathon.
A global event dedicated to hack those "little-big things" hindering HR from providing the People
Experience we want to deliver at Cisco for our people and ourselves.
From Sidney, Australia, to Anchorage, Alaska, more than 800 people around the globe participated, in
person and virtually. Creating 105 solutions that will accelerate bringing Our People Deal to life at
Cisco.
Contents
1. Cisco HR and Innovation .......................................................................................................................2
2. Why an HR Hackathon? ........................................................................................................................2
3. The Cisco HR Breakathon .....................................................................................................................2
4. What to Break in HR? ............................................................................................................................3
5. The Breakathon by Numbers .................................................................................................................4
6. The Breakathon Outcomes ....................................................................................................................4
7. What we broke .......................................................................................................................................5
8. A Global Event .......................................................................................................................................5
9. Cisco HR Breakathon: a Global Village .................................................................................................7
10. The Breakathon Prize, a metaphor itself..............................................................................................9
11. What’s Next?......................................................................................................................................10
Addendum #1 – Breakathon stages.........................................................................................................11

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1. Cisco HR and Innovation
Cisco HR considers innovation as the key transformational capability to be able to successfully leverage the
exponential changes happening in the business and the world of work – how work is allocated, managed,
assessed and rewarded.
Starting with Our People Deal several initiatives were launched to stimulate the HR innovation mindset and
practice the innovation skills:
 Our People Deal: "We innovate everywhere to create fresh ideas and possibilities. Taking bold risks to
shape the future because we understand every failure is a success if we learn from it."
 HR Strategic Promise: “Innovation: We have an environment of risk-taking and experimentation yielding
forward-looking, ground-breaking solutions.”
 HR Capability: “Innovation: Implement new ideas/demonstrate thought leadership to create value: a new
service, system or process, or enhancing existing ones.”
2. Why an HR Hackathon?
Launching an HR Hackathon provides a key message to all our HR people: pausing for 24 hours from the daily
routine to team-up, think, work and have fun together – to make HR a better place for our employees and for
ourselves. It empowers everyone in HR to fully own their role, the experience delivered to Cisco’s employees and
the future of HR at Cisco.
The HR Hackathon is also a great example of cross-pollination and organizational agility: leveraging a successful
practice from a quite different domain (SW development) and deploying it globally, shows that we can “steal like an
artist” [Austin Kleon] and that a diverse global organization can move like a single team, a swarm.
The HR Hackathon's main objectives were:
 Fulfilling our Strategic Innovation Promise
 Engaging our whole HR Team on innovation by
o Experiencing first-hand that innovation is fun, challenging and brings forward new ideas to future-proof
Cisco and HR
o Applying a practical ideation journey they can leverage and repeat with their teams
 Showing that everyone in HR is not only allowed but expected to contribute to innovation in just 24h
 Bringing together diverse functional HR teams to collaborate and co-create future-oriented solutions
3. The Cisco HR Breakathon
Unlike many other Hackathons, Cisco HR leadership did not provide a specific challenge or problem statement to be
addressed. We trusted that our people best know the experience that HR provides to our employees and leaders.
We wanted to break HR from the inside, leveraging our people's perspectives – without relying to external consultants
and observers. Then…

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Cisco HR launched the first Global HR Breakathon:
24hs to break the hurdles slowing us down in bringing Our People Deal to Life.
24hs to hack those little-big things that stop us from providing the People Experience we would like to deliver at Cisco
for our people and ourselves.
Tagline: “In 24 hours, HR will never be the same!”
A global 24h event hosted in
 9 major locations with a large HR population - Tokyo, Shanghai, Singapore, Bangalore, Jerusalem, Krakow,
London, RTP Raleigh, San Jose, plus
 many other Cisco offices, and
 virtually, strongly leveraging our collaboration technologies.
People collaborated in diverse teams of typically 4-8 members and experienced a practical innovation approach
which can easily be reapplied at any later stage: an “ideation journey” based on 4 simple design thinking steps – “get
ready”, “discover”, “diverge”, “converge” (see addendum #1 for more details).
The teams were looking for tangible, practical solutions to be applicable short- to mid-term in the real Cisco world,
starting from a clear description of the problem being tackled, showing the characteristics and the value of the
proposed solution, and laying out the key implementation steps.
4. What to Break in HR?
The Breakathon participants were asked to break those little-big things stopping HR to provide the People
Experience we would like to deliver at Cisco for our people and ourselves. Hence Our People Deal and the
Moments that Matter were two main reference points to start from:
Cisco’s People Deal Framework Moments that Matter
Information on our People Strategy, Cisco’s business strategy and organization were provided to the participants
as additional references, to have internal and external customers’ perspectives and structure in mind during the
Breakathon’s “discover” phase.

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5. The Breakathon by Numbers
Looking at some of the sheer stats of the Cisco’s HR Breakathon gives an indication of its success:
 Encompassing 16 timezones, 39 countries and 116 cities
 Including 120 teams from Australia to California
 Involving 821 participants overall (HR and other functions)
 Representing 65% of the HR population
 Submitting 105 ideas
Overall Distribution by Region / Mode of Participation Cisco HR Distribution by Region
6. The Breakathon Outcomes
The Global HR Breakathon gave birth to 105 ideas, covering several areas of intervention for HR: talent
acquisition, onboarding, learning and development, teams, leaders and leadership, Paid Time Off policies, culture,
workplace design, connecting people, career enablement, moments that matter, knowledge exchange, etc.
Four Regional judging panels and a global one selected the
most compelling proposals to recognize. Selection was done
according to the following key criteria: analysis, impact,
feasibility, innovation, quality of pitch.
Cisco HR deliberately decided to avoid the concept of “winner”
and any “1st
, 2nd
, … ranking. Huge energy, enthusiasm, passion
and effort was infused in all ideas submitted; all of them will be
reviewed and considered for future implementation.
Following the Oscar-awards approach we decided to recognize
the most compelling ideas in the following categories:
 Best road into the future
 Best idea to bring Our People Deal to life
 Best idea we can implement soon
 The way cool idea

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7. What we broke
 We broke our silos:
By co-creating in cross-functional teams, we exposed ourselves to new perspectives and got to know new
colleagues
 We broke our routine:
By dedicating an entire day to jointly think and innovate, and we had a lot of fun
 We broke our belief to have very unique needs:
By addressing those “little-big things,” we realized that we have a lot more in common than we thoughts
 We broke the “it’s broken and it’s always going to be like that”:
By tackling those “little-big things” and by taking ownership of HR and our future
 We broke cultural barriers and even time zones:
By participating together, as one team, in a single global event, from Sidney to Anchorage
 We broke HR
…and we broke it all! Each and every of our HR practices had two or more teams tackling their themes.
Most ideas were around Learning & Development, Onboarding, Talent Acquisition, People Experience, Teams,
Data & Analytics, Collaboration, Reward & Recognition.
Find here below a word-cloud derived from the idea descriptions:
8. A Global Event
Differently from usual Hackathon - executed in-person, in the same room and location – Cisco HR decided to
acknowledge the global nature of its organization and impact, by deploying a Global Breakathon enabling local and
virtual participation through Cisco’s collaboration technologies.

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People participated in three main ways:
1. Major Cisco Sites
9 sites globally were selected based on our Cisco’s HR population distribution. Dedicated rooms were set
up following the usual hackathon practice. Local launches were done from these sites, where breakfast,
lunch and dinner were provided, facilitators from the HR Breakathon Organizing Team were in the room to
provide live support and manage breaks, with games and activities to stimulate creativity, re-energize,
loosen up the tight muscles, get some fresh air, engage, have fun.
Francine Katsoudas, Cisco Chief People Officer, launched the global Breakathon from our site in Bangalore,
India, and participated to the EMEA Launch through video conference. She provided another strong
message on the global nature of Cisco HR organization, by launching such an innovative event from Asia
and not from our HQ in California
2. Local Cisco Office
HR teams located close to a Cisco Office participated in person in a meeting, connected through our
collaboration technologies to the closest major site, participating to the launch and some activities in the
break that could be attended virtually
A list of the Breakathon activities
(*) Activities available also for Local Sites and Virtual participants through our collaboration and video technologies

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3. Virtual Participation
Cisco HR remote or mobile workers participated in the Breakathon by leveraging our collaboration
technologies: WebEx, TelePresence, Spark, Video.
9. Cisco HR Breakathon: a Global Village
The Breakathon was anticipated by a well thought communication campaign. Communications from the Executive
Leadership Team along with a brief weekly newsletter on the Breakathon provided key information on event and
acted as a teaser. Four sessions of a funny and quick to do quiz were launched in preparation of the event, covering
key ideas related to the 4-step Ideation Journey recommended to be leveraged on the Breakathon day, on average
427 people participated in the quiz sessions, with a peak of >600 single players.
Leveraging our technologies and our virtual work practices, part of the DNA of our Cisco people, HR was able to
perform a globally distributed Breakathon involving 821 people, an amazing example of McLuhan’s Global Village
concept coming to life. The launch strategy was executed according to a follow-the-sun approach: from Sidney local
launch to Tokyo site launch, throughout the globe ending in San Jose, California.

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A dedicated Spark room was set up and used during the entire event as the global communication and sharing
channel. The common always-on virtual place for all Breakathon participants to share messages and meet. The
virtual space
 Connecting all participants
 Providing real time info and updates
 Leveraged to ask for questions and support
 Gathering comments and event’s pictures
During the Breakathon a constant flow of hundreds of messages from all sites and teams gave a great pulse of the
energy and enthusiasm of all participants: announcing their start, sharing pictures, communicating their completion,
sharing their break activities, asking for questions…
The Breakathon Organizing Team was connected and collaborated during the event through a dedicated Spark
Control Room, which allowed them to jointly tackle the unexpected, yet natural, hic-cups happening in similarly
geographically distributed and complex events.
A selected team of Subject Matter Experts was available on call, covering all time zone, in case of need for support
by the Breakathon participants – on topics related to IT, HR Analytics and Ops, Employee Experience, Legal,
Employee Relationship. The Experts on Call were available through Spark, Jabber or WebEx.
Through the use of our Cisco Collaboration Technologies we expanded the time and collapsed the space of our HR
organization during the Breakathon: Albert would have been proud of us 
Two other ways to connect all participants around the globe were the Breakathon Tracking App and social media.
The Breakathon Tracking App is an in-house built simple application allowing all teams to share their progression
in the ideation journey, allowing in room and virtual facilitators to get an aggregated view providing the pulse of the
Breakathon progression, acting as a check on the overall event execution and a “leaderboard” tracking board to
share with all teams.
The Breakathon Tracking App

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Participants were also invited to share their ideas, progress, and pictures, through social media within and
externally to Cisco, leveraging selected hashtags (#LoveWhereYouWork, #WeAreCisco, #HRBreakathin, #HR)
10. The Breakathon Prize, a metaphor itself
Cisco HR wanted the Breakathon prize - acknowledging the most compelling ideas in each Region and globally – to
be a creative and innovative metaphor for what the teams went through the Breakathon: breaking the current to build
something new, innovation and energy joined by simplicity and beauty; innovation seeds flying all over our HR
organization after the Breakathon was over.
As a result the “dandelight” by Studio Drift – a Dutch design firm – was chosen:
From Studio Drift’s website:
The name Dandelight says it all: it is a little light made from a real dandelion. The concept is based on the
same idea as Studio Drift’s most well-known work Fragile Future III: the utopian vision of the amalgamation
between nature and technology. Actual dandelion seeds are attached one by one to a LED, creating a light-
emitting dandelion growing out of its energy source.
Dandelions can be found almost anywhere on the earth, from pristine meadows to industrialized area’s – they even
flourish on the side of the most heavily trafficked highways. Most adults don’t pay special attention to these flowers;
they are generally seen as weeds. However, dandelions are historically prized for their medicinal properties, and
who takes the time to look closely will notice the inimitable aesthetic of its parachute ball. The Dandelight is as
simple as it is beautiful. A little copper stem connects the LED to a battery, which is visibly integrated into the
design and not hidden away as usual. Each piece is handmade and therefore different, but they are quite
obtainable - as a delightful little night light reminding us of our ongoing evolution.

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11. What’s Next?
The awarded ideas have a dedicated HR Leader acting as their Champion and will have a fast review process.
The HRLT Champions will meet with the related awarded teams to review the details of their proposal and evaluate
potential integration in our HR Roadmap. The awarded teams will present their ideas and inputs, go deeper into
their recommended implementation plan and have the opportunity to influence our current and future HR
Roadmap.
All other ideas will be mapped into their
 corresponding HR Practice areas of reference or HR Partner domain
 implementation time horizon
For the submissions related to their area, each HR organization will establish review leads who will provide early
feedback to teams and schedule meetings for deeper review whenever beneficial.
All Breakathon participating teams will have the opportunity to have their proposal reviewed and to influence the
HR solution roadmap for the fiscal year and beyond.
As a result of these conversations Cisco HR is able to create a pipeline of innovative solutions to be
introduced in the short and mid-term as a result of the Breakathon activities.
In case of questions please refer to:
Gianpaolo Barozzi (gbarozzi@cisco.com)
Tom Lamberty (tolamber@cisco.com)

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Addendum #1 – Breakathon stages
Here are the high level descriptions we gave the teams per stage. There were more details incl. exercises included
into the Breakathon kit:
 Get Ready
o Look for the little-big things that stop you to provide the People Experience you would like to deliver.
What do you want our world to look like? What do you want to feel? You know you’re on to something
when you can’t wait to dig deeper.
 Discover
o Immerse into the context. Dig deeper. What are the underlying causes and needs of the problem?
Where is the real pain? What are your customers and stakeholders telling you about it? Challenge the
things given for granted.
 Diverge
o You’ve heard of thinking outside the box. Well, the HR Breakathon invites you to think even further
than that. It is time to take a break from the constraints we are bound to. It is time to see diversity in
action. It is time to have fun and come up with seemingly crazy ideas.
 Converge
o Filter your ideas to come up with the best of the best. And, remember, that even great ideas must
prove their worth. To win, get others to rally around your idea and share their view. Sketch your
solution, mock it up, get on stage, shoot your video and submit it.