Key Outcomes
Why Calix partnered with Great Place To Work
Five years ago, Calix recognized a unique opportunity to accelerate growth by transforming from a hardware company into a platform and managed services company.
While many organizations react to change, Calix proactively pivoted its business model. This shift was rooted in a vision-driven purpose and long-term strategy, not just survival.
The company was growing rapidly, from a few hundred employees to a few thousand, which meant they needed to also scale their culture.
Calix knew that big, challenging shifts were coming, but how could they pivot their business and make difficult decisions while maintaining employee trust?
Challenge
Supporting a growing team during a time of big transitions
Calix’s new business focus meant having to overhaul their entire workforce — hiring new people with new skillsets for the new product line-up, which also meant letting go of nearly a third of their workforce.
Calix’s founder and then CEO also saw what was needed for leadership to strategically write the next chapter in the company’s growth. This was done with intentionality by bringing on board a successor to develop and mentor for a period of time before making a CEO transition.
Even with such an intentional and transparent transformation of their business, it still meant intense disruption for Calix, with new employees coming in and others leaving, on top of management changes and shifting priorities.
“We were developing, inventing, and making the plane while we were flying it,” says Parul Kapoor, chief talent and culture officer at Calix. “We had employees doing jobs they weren’t hired for. We needed to ramp up and make our learning and development very, very robust.”
Adding to the challenge was that Calix is a remote-first international company, which meant maintaining a consistent employee experience not just among new workers, but across locations, time zones, and cultures.
Solution
Use Trust Index data to ensure a growing remote team feels connected
With such a large and widespread team, Calix relies on the Trust Index Survey to listen to employees around the world.
The company already prioritized communication through a variety of channels, including all-hands meetings, weekly newsletters, and leadership offsites two to three times per year, but the Trust Index was a way to ensure a consistently great experience for all.
“We use the Trust Index to know the pulse of the employee base, no matter where they are, what geography they work in, which time zone they work in,” says Parul.
This data is used to pinpoint gaps in the employee experience. For example, based on Trust Index feedback, Calix realized that their DEI programming was very U.S.–centric — focused on buckets that made sense to that population — but wasn’t translating to the global population.
Another issue Calix identified was its connection to employees’ communities. The data didn’t just show that employees wanted to give back, but clarified how they wanted to do it.
“It is our most improved item in this year’s Trust Index Survey, simply because we took the feedback, went back to our employees, and really understood what they wanted,” says Parul.
Great Place To Work research shows that giving back fuels employees’ sense of purpose, which is a key factor in how likely employees are to stay long-term with an organization. By spotting this opportunity through the data, Calix had a clear instruction for how to improve that sense of purpose.
“We have now put together a framework which enables any employee to give back to their communities that they serve, in the formats that make sense to them,” says Parul.
Outcome
A more transparent, agile workforce
It’s incredibly difficult to go through a major transformation like Calix did, but by collecting and responding to employee feedback during the difficult times, they’ve been able to not only maintain a positive company culture but improve their agility because of it.
Calix had a clear view of the company’s direction, but it was thanks to their transparency and careful listening that employees felt they were equally part of the journey. Rather than rely on surface-level feedback, Calix dug deep, creating focus groups covering demographics, regions, and functions, so they clearly understood what employees were saying in their feedback.
When they discussed the results at their all-hands meetings, they not only shared the actions the company was going to take, but also discussed the things the company couldn’t act on and explained why, so that the feedback loop was transparent.
The result was high trust in leadership and a better sense of purpose for employees. According to Calix’s 2024 Trust Index results:
- 84% of Calix employees believe management would lay people off only as a last resort, compared to 62% at a typical workplace
- 92% of Calix employees feel good about the ways the company contributes to the community, compared to 67% at a typical workplace
- 82% of Calix employees say management involves people in decisions that affect their jobs or work environment, compared to 53% at a typical workplace
- 87% of Calix employees feel their work has special meaning and is more than “just a job,” compared to 59% at a typical workplace
These efforts and results are writing the playbook for what remote work can be — something that hasn’t been done before, says Parul.
While many employers are considering return-to-office mandates, Calix is holding firm in its remote-first culture and using concrete data to ensure employees feel seen and heard, no matter where they are.
Calix’s advice for getting your leadership on board
The employee experience can sometimes be a hard sell to upper management that is primarily focused on business objectives rather than the day-to-day.
To get their buy-in, Parul says you need to build trust. Her advice is to do that by tackling leadership’s priorities before anything else.
“There are some critical things that the leadership team thinks of as table stakes,” she says. “Get those done first. When those table stakes are taken care of, that’s when you open the opportunity to have discussions at the higher level.”
It’s also crucial to show leaders the ROI, such as how the employee experience connects to increased innovation.
“If any leader out there is saying that culture isn’t your biggest competitive advantage, then you have to tell them that they’re literally giving their biggest competitive advantage to their competitor,” says Parul.
“These programs aren’t successful if they’re driven by HR — they’re successful if they’re driven and embedded in the business strategy.”
