Amanda Diston of Cisco on challenging the market to address social purpose and environmental issues

Watch Amanda Diston, director, international total rewards at Cisco Systems discuss corporations’ responsibility around social and wellbeing issues when purchasing reward and benefits. As part of her session at Innovation Day 2019, she highlights some of the challenges she faced when introducing international policies to improve employees’ wellbeing.

Giving the example of increasing the mental health provision across her organisation, Diston explains how challenging this can be.

“These policies that I’ve changed are across 96 countries, what I’m dealing with is 96 different governments who see mental health from a varying degree. And even some of the big countries that get it, like the UK, are still so far behind in how they fund it [mental health] and how they support it.

“And yet, the insurers and brokers that the big corporates are looking to, to help fund these changes and the evolution of benefits, are not really where they need to be in order to support it,” says Diston.