More than 800 Cisco Systems employees, including 600 from HR, formed teams of four to eight employees from 139 cities and 36 countries in the networking equipment giant’s first “HR Breakathon.” The idea developed when Francine Katsoudas, chief people officer at Cisco, last year collaborated with her peers to find “how we could ‘break’ HR, how we could do things in a new way,” she said.
Each team had to come up with an idea, produce a short video showing how the idea would work and lay out the steps to get it started. The payoff for Cisco: 105 ideas, including on talent acquisition, paid time-off and workplace design.