 Hello, my name is Jason Davis and I work in Cisco's developer relations team. Normally, I'm giving technical discussions about network management, automation, orchestration, or network programmability, but today, since the open source summit has a diversity and empowerment track, I'm coming to you to talk about faith as a form of inclusion. So today's talk, Keeping the Faith, your team can benefit from interfaith inclusion and diversity. So here's the agenda. What's this faith stuff about anyway? What are the benefits in accommodating people of faith as a manager or a fellow employee? You might be interested in forming an interfaith network or community at your company, so I'll share some tips there. Invariably, because we are so diverse, there are bound to be conflicts and differences. How do we deal with those? That's another topic of discussion. Since we're at open source summit, we probably appreciate a bit of coding now and then. Have you thought about inclusive language in your code? Well, there may be a faith consideration when you're naming those variables and function calls. Finally, we'll talk about building an interfaith calendar, which will help us be more in tune to the holidays and observances that people of faith observe. The Savanta Comres Company and their faith research center states that religion and faith play a hugely important part in many people's lives all around the world. Decisions about money, time, family, voting, healthcare, relationships, work, and many other important parts of daily life are often affected by deeply held beliefs, some of which are consciously attributed to a religious affiliation. This totally resonates with me as I'm driven by my faith in my daily activities and the decisions I make. Consider this. We work 40-hour weeks. Oh, wait a minute. We're in IT. 65-hour weeks. So we're spending over 2,000 hours per year with our colleagues. We have break room chats. We go to lunch. We might travel together and attend company or customer visits. And maybe we do conferences like this together. There are holidays, personal, corporate, national, and global events. There are politics and health situations. How do we not get a sense of someone's personal beliefs? Do we engage? Do we avoid? Many businesses have set on a path of inclusion and diversity, and they tell us work is a safe place to be ourselves. Cool! But as a person of faith, do I self-censor or do I really bring my whole self to work? Is there true diversity if only a few forms of affinity are discussed? So we mentioned that faith, religion, and belief play a big part of people's lives. Let me share a personal story about why I believe this. And this is just one of hundreds of examples I've experienced. In my first job out of college, I worked for a systems integrator, building the network monitoring and operations for a large manufacturer. After several years, I got to a team lead role, and I was responsible for several locations with this customer. They asked us to build a monitoring portal or a dashboard so that the customer could see the availability and performance of their network. Now as a network operations lead, I had access to a lot of cool network management tools, but they're really more for administrators. So we knew that we needed to develop something that was more read-only access, but could still give them a sense of how well the network was running. As it sometimes goes, our executive view dashboard project ran over and over, and the customer's executives were getting frustrated. So they asked us to deploy a monitoring solution in the next couple weeks, or we would be in breach of our contract. My manager said, Jason, I want you to go to Kirk's office and install that HP OpenView software on a server we put there. And I was a bit shocked. First, like, wow, the guy's got a server in his office. That's cool. And I said, well, that will definitely give him a view of the network, but it's really an administrator's tool and not something for the casual observer who doesn't have a strong networking background and understanding. And the boss said, I get it, go do it. And I said, boss, I really think we should look for an alternative. He could really mess things up and accidentally change or break something. He looked at me and said, Jason, just do it now. I said, OK, I made my comments. He heard my concerns. We moved on. So I went to Kirk's office and it was a ways away, and it took me 30 minutes to drive out there. Took a couple hours to install and configure the monitoring software on the server in his executive office. And I did some preliminary checks, and I could see the whole regional network with all the manufacturing plants and development centers offered to give Kirk quick training on how the monitoring solution worked. But he blew me off and he said, I'm busy. I think I can figure it out. I have some important work coming up. Could you just please leave? So I left. As I was driving back to the home office, I get a call. Jason, there's a big outage going on. We need your help urgently. How quickly can you be here? I'm like, I'm still 25 minutes away. I'm still driving. But I just installed some monitoring software in Kirk's office. So I'll head back there since it's quicker. Call his admin and let them know I'll need access to his office again in a few minutes. And I turn around and I go back. Once I get to Kirk's office, the admin waves me through and Kirk is still there looking a bit frustrated. He knows about the outage. And I asked to use his desk and pull up the monitoring software, but it's already open. And the core network device that was central to the outage was already highlighted. Were you doing something with this app and this device specifically? Kirk was saying, well, yeah. I remember you guys talking about this new expensive router all the time. So I thought I'd take a look at it. I was poking around the menus of this app and I saw this show routing table option. Instantly I'm cringing because I know this device is a core router and it's going to have a huge routing table. So Kirk said, I selected that and I waited 60 seconds. Nothing. And I try again. I wait a minute. I try a third time. Nothing. So I gave up. And I realized that he had queued up multiple data requests for huge volumes of data and it cranked the CPU of this device way up. And in those days, there were no control plane protections on the device. So if you told it to do something that caused the CPU to go up, it did it. If you ask multiple times, it obliged. The device decided getting a routing table list and report was more important than actually routing. So we had to wait for the request queues to flush and get back to steady operations and this was a totally self-inflicted issue. So I left frustrated and I spent the next 30 minutes on my drive back home office praying. I'm acknowledging that I'm frustrated. I'm feeling like I'm not heard or respected at my job. I feel my contributions and expertise are not being used well and I pray for guidance and wisdom. I ask for a change in my circumstances and I get back to my office and have a quick incident wrap up call and I'm still a bit frustrated but I'm feeling centered now and I notice that one of the Cisco account managers is on our floor. I'm like, why is he here? They never come to the operations floor. They know coming down here, they will get more work than anything. They usually only go up to the engineering level and try to hawk the latest gear to the engineers. The account manager sees me and makes a beeline to my desk. Can we go talk somewhere? And I'm like, sure. We find a private office and he's like, Jason, I don't know where you are in your career here but if you would consider coming to Cisco, we really need someone like you with your network management expertise and operations experience. I was floored. This is exactly what I was praying for not more than 15 minutes ago, a change in my circumstances. I felt doors closing and other doors opening. Now here I am 20 years later, a distinguished engineer at Cisco and I feel God had a purpose in my situation as he has in many, many others. So this is just one of many reasons why I believe. Let's move on to company and employer obligations as it relates to people of faith. We should recognize that there is a difference in how government deals with issues of religion and how an employer is obligated to. The first consideration is Title 7, the US Code as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 where we see employers are prohibited on discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. Many of us are familiar with these protected classes and are following these policies with no problem. The next question is, are there any other obligations for an employer beyond employment discrimination? Once they're in the company, how does religion or faith need to be considered or should it? Something to consider is that Title 7's protection extends to discrimination on the basis of religious observance or practice as well as belief. Unless the employer cannot reasonably accommodate such observance or practice without undue hardship on the business. So, does your business have a dress code or uniform? If so, then you need to be contemplating religion and faith-based aspects that may include hairstyles and dress. When we think about faith and religion, there are many ways it's observed. This chart from Wikipedia shows just some of the faith group categories they measured in the United States. Let me be the first to say this is not about a popularity contest. What I'm trying to show is the variety of faith groups. In fact, it's been my observation that in IT our percentages for different faith groups are different from the overall population. And it can be expanded into even more nuances. The Pew Research Center segmented the Protestant faith into even more specific groups. All this to say, there will be a variety of beliefs in your company and that will reflect a diversity that should be considered. As we think about supporting people of faith and recognizing their diversity in the workplace, something that we see is that people of faith are driven by a moral code that is part of their faith. Some have a belief that is based on good works and their blessings are reflected in how good their actions are. Others believe in more grace-based worldview where their blessings are a gift and that they cannot earn it. And there are other worldviews out there also. The opportunity is understanding those fundamental motivators. They are learned and experienced and many times they are shared by family, culture and location. And as we learn and understand the differences we can appreciate the different contributions and perspectives of our employees and coworkers. There are benefits to our company in supporting an interfaith community. The community can assist in forming corporate policies that help all the employees. One of those would be like prayer and reflection rooms. At Cisco, this is an opportunity for our group to work with our workplace resources team to ensure that every third or fourth building on a campus had a prayer and reflection room. These rooms are used by our Muslim coworkers for their regular prayers but also by others when they want to have a private prayer, quiet time and preparation or response to the day's events. I use these rooms and several other people of a similar faith as me do also. Work assignments. Do we have policies or guidelines in place for managers and how work assignments should be handled? If we have, again, a Muslim coworker that has shared that they are observant to Islamic customs, do we consider how they might struggle working at installing some system at a pork farm? Do we schedule work indiscriminately without contemplating someone's religious holidays or observances? Do we have guidelines to help us handle abuse of those accommodations because it goes both ways? As far as social media engagement goes, a lot of our companies like to be visible on social media. Then do we have an interfaith advisory board and do we consult with them when preparing to send out social media messages? Do we consider inclusive language or how different people of faith might respond to the public messaging? Conflict resolution is an important aspect and skill that's needed in many aspects of our jobs, especially as leaders. We'll talk more about this special circumstance related to faith concerns in a little bit. Charitable giving. People of faith are pretty charitable. We may have policies about what recipients of charitable giving can or cannot be matched by a corporate charitable program, but we may also learn some aspects of charity from people of faith that can be applied more broadly. Having an interfaith calendar is also an important consideration, so we can be mindful of faith-based holidays and observances. This community can help in the forming of the calendar and in understanding the accommodations that are special to each event. In consideration to the pandemic over the last couple years and the creation of vaccines last fall, did your company respond to vaccine availability? How were religious accommodations handled, or weren't they? Could it have been handled more sensitively and efficiently if policy was formed in consultation with an interfaith advisory group? Did we acknowledge that some Catholics had faith-based conflicts because of the belief that the vaccinations were derived from aborted fetal cells in the church's position on abortion? How about faith as a form of whether we should get vaccine or not? Some faiths do not approve of vaccinations. Do we know if there are Dutch reformed congregations or faith-healing denomination members to consider in our employee base? Now, as with many aspects of human interaction, there's bound to be some situation where human resources gets involved. There is an understandable reaction to people of faith. Some people, if we don't understand it, maybe we feel it's better not to engage and not stir up the pot, as some might say. A subtle warning here is that lack of engagement or corporate support may appear as disinterest at a minimum, or to those who are prone to controversy and conspiracy, it might reflect an even more worrisome behavior. Building up an engagement model and having HR ambassadors with the interfaith community is necessary to ensure this diversity and affinity group is being heard. The nice thing is that since people of faith are usually driven by a moral code, that's pretty upright. We might have less situations that trigger HR engagement unless they're related to religious discrimination. People of faith are charitable and their example should be viewed positively. We talked a bit about how some corporations may have a charitable match giving through their own trust, but that may also restrict match based on different conditions. The faith need to understand the matching funds policy and helps to understand any reasons for why their preferred charities may not be eligible. Beyond that, some people may find that they have extra resources to share and are looking for a way to maximize their giving and minimize how much taxes reduce their gift, or they may prefer to have less restrictions on their giving and prefer not to use corporate matching programs. A donor advice fund is a charitable investment account for the purpose of supporting charitable organizations you care about. You can contribute cash, securities, or other assets to a donor advice fund, and they're generally eligible to take an immediate tax deduction. The donated funds can be invested for tax-free growth, and you can recommend grants to almost any IRS-qualified public charity. A contribution to a donor advice fund is an irrevocable commitment to charity, and the funds can't be turned back to the donor or any other individual or used for any other purpose other than grant make to those charities. So the fund administrator takes your input for allocating the funds, and does the administrative work on your behalf and tracks all of the paperwork, which is a wonderful thing if you tend to give to many different organizations. You can choose to be anonymous or not. You want your charitable donations to be as effective as possible when you give, and donor advice funds are an increasingly popular charitable giving vehicle in the United States because they're one of the easiest and most tax-advantageous ways to give to charity. We have observed a lot of situations over the past couple years in our interfaith community, and they've been able to help our other coworkers, especially if they're looking for hope through faith. Think about the health concerns that we've had over the pandemic, social and civil unrest that are rooted in racial strife, financial concerns, job concerns, tragic events. These are things that our communities can help about. So some of the benefits of that interfaith network to employees are related to learning about other faiths as a form of mutual respect and understanding, a resource to find others of a similar faith which might help increase yours. Sometimes we travel for business and having a resource to look as a reference what other places of worship are there. I'm looking for another church or synagogue or mosque as I travel out of state and out of my familiar area, or maybe I'm looking for other coworkers that I would like to worship with. We might be able to build lists that would help people when they're traveling. And also an increased understanding of the parallels with other faiths. For example, there is some shared scripture in origins with the Abrahamic faiths such as Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Let's talk now about forming an interfaith community. It's challenging but possible. You may find as many companies do that you won't be able to have an interfaith group specific employee resource group or network that is supported by the business. However, a broader concept of an interfaith network would be supported. The way we formed at my company is the interfaith group is corporately recognized and supported by HR. We have an executive sponsor, a budget and recognition in the employee portals along with other affinity groups. The interfaith network serves as an avenue for people interested in learning about other faiths in an open form sense. But it's also a springboard for someone that wants to look for other people of similar faith. In those faith specific groups that aren't corporately supported, individuals can talk more deeply about their faiths. Think of it like having a politics group. The company may not be willing to support individual groups of Democrats, Republicans, progressives, independents, communists and libertarians, for example, but they would be supportive of a multi-political group. I suggest that you look for faith group leaders to represent their individual faiths and ask them to present on the holy days and observances to educate others. Collect the dates of those faith-based holidays and observance. Distill it down to the most important dates by faith group and ask what special accommodations may be needed like people need to be considered about having parties because others are fasting or maybe some time off is needed. At my company, we encourage the corporately sponsored interfaith community to do the shared learning across those different faith groups. Again, the faith specific activities such as prayer groups or scripture studies and other specific observances are done at the faith group level. And we've had an exception when our work from home restrictions lifted and people were able to return to office, the interfaith community sponsored a prayer walk around some of our major campus locations the day before we reopened. We agreed that people would join in groups that reflected their faith group and we encourage them to pray for our leaders, our managers and supervisors, building support personnel, cafeteria workers, our country, families, etc. Encouraging faith specific branches that have more in depth and open discussions allows them to feel more at ease when they may not be comfortable with talking in a more open forum. But it requires establishing some communication policies and ensuring that people understand any restrictions about proselytizing. We like to have regular meetings to share the interfaith holidays and observances and sometimes we have ad hoc meetings to address any corporate or social event concerns such as unfortunately a few weeks ago there were some major shootings in the United States so our interfaith group met to discuss that. There is a benefit that your interfaith network can have back to the employees and to the company. You can offer up that the interfaith network to your corporate leadership as another form of counseling resource or benefit for employees who desire that kind of assistance and are looking at faith as a way to approach their concerns. We talked about prayer and reflection rooms and helping with establishing work assignment policies. We should also help to encourage establishing a policy about swapping holidays for religious observances that aren't federally or corporately recognized. You may have employee organizations, socials or new hire meet-up events. Ensure that your interfaith network is represented along with those other inclusion and diversity groups and you may find that initially word of mouth is where you get your initial membership but participating in the visible corporate events will also drive interest and membership. If your company is doing in-person events or large corporate meetings encourage them to set aside a multi-faith prayer room and this provides a good resource for our Muslim co-workers to participate in their daily prayers without having to scramble for other space. And for folks that don't have the Muslim faith but still look at prayer as a very meaningful part of their faith journey, this is a great place for them too. Consider it a benefit like we do for nursing mothers. Helping people that are reaching their limit in situations that conflict with their worldview that is a great thing for us to do in helping to deal with conflict. Helping to seek to understand the situation that gave rise to an emotional response and also how we can share scripture or sacred writings in a multi-faith conscious way. There are some faiths that have wonderful encouraging scripture and there are some scriptures that are more about admonishment so we have to be careful and multi-faith conscious when we're sharing scripture. We need to make sure that we get intent from both sides of a difference or a conflict or a disagreement. That disagreement does not instantly mean an inability to work together but we need to make sure that both sides are engaging in a sincere and ingenious way. Agreeing to disagree is a beneficial state of compromise. Now with respect to inclusive language we need to show sensitivity to the community of faith and not all situations are visible to our customers but some are and you may have heard about some sometimes they can hurt your brand if they're severe enough. This situation from 2008 resulted in Sony delaying a planned game release because of concerns raised by the Muslim community about musical lyrics that were embedded in the game. It may serve your company well to have product reviews done by an interfaith advisory group before final product commits and before changes become burdensome and before they definitely become public. From an internal code or even device configuration and naming convention do we have protocols in place to ensure we're not disrespectful or using irreverent terms. I was involved in advising a customer who had a global configuration setting as a user-defined parameter that was offensive to a certain group and they were going to be hiring someone in that group and wanted to quickly make a change across thousands of devices before the new employee started. By developing a plan and an ability to scan code and device configs we can prevent the last-minute scramble to address issues like this. The open community GitHub project GetWoke and GitHub co-pilot program may be beneficial to you. The GetWoke project will allow you to scan through code repositories for a list of known and even provide custom supplied words and phrases to provide more inclusive alternatives. Now that said we want to be careful, respectful and inclusive but not every situation is an intentional slight and some people of faith may not consider the terms offensive. It's about being aware and sensitive to the other's perspective. Don't approach errant references and microaggressions from an assumption of bad intent. We truly don't understand the heart or the intent of the person. So let's consider a lack of awareness and education in a spirit of collaboration and relational restoration. If there's a pattern of conflict and intentional disrespect then you can escalate how something should be addressed. There are some benefits to having an interfaith calendar. Managers and supervisors may be unaware of faith-based observances and holidays. Some may require accommodations like time away and others may call for sensitivity when people are fasting. Realize that March and April and December are months with several highly observed faith events like Holy and Easter, Ramadan, Christmas. Developing an interfaith calendar is a useful resource for being prepared. I would like to encourage you if you have already thought about it or are forming an interfaith group to plan for next year's National Day of Prayer in May. Consider the impact we can have coming together across faiths and companies being thankful. Praying for healing, restoration and prosperity. We started our group using this website's interfaith calendar. The link and QR code are supplied here. And now we're working on a program with a chat bot that will automatically post a message about the holidays and observances in a weekly summary that goes out on Sundays. In this way, people can be informed about what's coming and may be able to prepare more adequately. And something we all might benefit from is how do I acknowledge this holiday or observance? Is it happy XYZ? Or is it a more solemn observance and greetings don't apply? Having that insight helps employees relate better together. Finally, in closing, thank you so much for joining today and considering how an interfaith network can benefit your company and the employees. I found another purpose with my job beyond just the technical consulting. I also have an opportunity to advise co-workers who are interested in matters of faith. And I hope you will too. Approach people of faith in their diversity affinity with the same respect and interest you show for them that they wish to have with yours. Respect is a powerful interpersonal and team-building value. And I encourage you to do it. Thank you for your time.