The Los Angeles Post

Transitioning New Employees Into Keysight’s Social Impact Culture — One Site’s Volunteerism Journey

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Hamish Gray, Senior Vice President
 At Keysight, community engagement has been part of our DNA for 80 years of our existence. As a growth company, with next generation technologists, high value experienced employees as well as employees from acquisitions joining the company’s culture regularly, I have been asked how we successfully transition new teams and employees into Keysight’s social impact efforts. I believe diverse community opportunities along with more formalized local engagements by global site management teams have been key in maintaining our commitment to supporting local communities throughout the company’s growth. In this post, I will share a specific instance where this strategy has successfully supported transitioning employees into Keysight’s social impact culture while building a sense of company unity, specifically through an acquisition.

Diverse Opportunities, Local Engagement

In a past post, I discussed Engaging Employees through Diverse Volunteer Opportunities as one way to drive employee volunteerism. This approach provides the flexibility for our workforce to align personal passions with their capability and availability for community engagement. In addition, we employ a more formal method that’s managed by company site teams to engage employees in their local communities and across teams located at each site. Utilizing both approaches has proven to be a successful strategy, particularly in bringing employees of acquired businesses into the cultural fold of Keysight volunteerism.

One Site’s Volunteerism Journey

Take for instance Keysight’s acquisition of Ixia, which resulted in its Calabasas, California headquarters becoming a new Keysight office. At that time, employees of Keysight’s existing office in that area moved into the previous Ixia headquarters building as well. This provided an excellent opportunity to test our volunteer diversity and local site engagement strategy in a newly blended workforce. What we found was that it was a success not only for the community but also for employees, helping build a sense of company and local office unity!

The site’s “volunteerism journey,” as they refer to it, began as one-off events driven from various functional areas and teams to test the engagement interest of the blended Keysight employee base. Non-profit maintenance work, food bank support and STEM education volunteer activities provided options for different ways to positively support the local community.

As interest grew, the site leadership team took the next step by forming a Community Service Committee to consolidate and coordinate events and offer them more broadly across employees at the office. Formed just this past September, the committee has already implemented their first site Keysight Day of Caring in October.

Keysight’s Day of Caring are programs implemented at many of our offices worldwide and are focused on bringing multiple employees across functions together for a full day of local community volunteerism. For the Calabasas site’s first Day of Caring, they focused on senior services. The single-day event saw a large group of Keysight employees – half of whom were from the original Ixia business — work together at a local adult care center providing stimulating and engaging activities for seniors with cognitive or physical impairments. Along with providing snacks and hand-written personal notes of inspiration, participating employees played games, sang and did crafts with seniors at the center.

The event was a tremendous success in expanding the site’s volunteerism engagement to Ixia team members and across the site’s functions, while benefiting the local community. As Larry Lerner, Keysight R&D senior manager at the Calabasas site, noted to me “the enthusiasm with which employees – both long-time Keysight as well as those that joined from Ixia – have embraced community engagement is a great testament that volunteerism is alive and well here in Calabasas.”

As the executive responsible for Keysight’s acquisitions integration and corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs I am pleased to see our volunteerism approach being validated by the smooth integration of the Calabasas site’s blended workforce into Keysight’s social impact culture.