Inclusive Practices at Ciena
Challenge
We want to recruit, develop, and retain talent across Ciena with diversity in experience, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, and sexual orientation. To achieve that, we are very deliberate in our people practices throughout an individual’s employment lifecycle from how we attract and hire to the retention and engagement of people who might not otherwise consider Ciena as their employer of choice.
Action
One mechanism to affect behavior change is to change processes and practices. Removing bias from a process will guide individuals to be more inclusive throughout the lifecycle of an employee.
We are deliberately changing where, how, and who we engage for talent to achieve greater diversity in our candidate pipeline, including partnering with diverse channels such as PowerToFly. This is augmented on our Careers site and reflected across our new Ciena Life stories of inclusion on ciena.com as well as LinkedIn, demonstrating our commitment to inclusivity and exhibiting Ciena’s brand and personality. We also recently released a new a diversity recruitment video dedicated to the topic of workplace diversity.
Our career portal reflects inclusive language, and we are introducing a diverse interview process to include volunteers from employee resource groups who will meet prospective candidates to talk about life at Ciena.
Our inclusive benefits and leave practices, such as family, same-sex and carers’ leave, global wellbeing support, flexible working and flexible paid time off have been in place for many years and we continue to monitor pay equity and provide transparency with compensation ranges.
Our most recent activity is the launch of a development program for our Black and African heritage colleagues, which covers all aspects of business, financial and personal development
Outcomes
We have been invited to a number of career fairs in partnership with diverse group participation (PowertoFly, HBCUs and beyond) and sponsored several hackathons that have led to an uptick in intern applications from underrepresented groups. Employee satisfaction remains consistently high as does our level of inclusion, which helps drive stronger business performance, attracts diverse candidates, and improves retention and an individual’s intent to stay.
Quote
Attracting and retaining a diverse pipeline of talent is critical to our current and future success. We will only achieve this through considered and deliberate actions in all our processes and behaviors.