Social

Investing in our people and working toward a vision of equity and inclusion.

Our investment in human capital

The pandemic tested our ability to support, nurture, and ensure the safety of our employees more than ever before. Citrites responded to our efforts by looking at the obstacles we faced as a community and business, and finding innovative, creative ways to overcome them.

In 2021, for example, we established the Citrix Emergency Relief Fund, which enabled employees to help other employees who faced financial hardship immediately after a natural disaster or an unforeseen personal hardship.

We also continued to leverage our own technology solutions so that our employees could work from anywhere. Our products made it possible to act together even as so many of us were physically apart. We worked hard to keep our teams supported, motivated, connected, and collaborative during a time when many of us felt isolated from each other.

Fostering a healthier, more livable work culture enables employees to do more while feeling more positively about being Citrites. Accordingly, we redesigned our workspaces and redefined how we work to improve employee experience, increase productivity, boost digital wellness, and optimize our entire business.

These choices result from our listening to and engaging employees regularly through surveys, internal communication channels, and other feedback mechanisms. This degree and frequency of communication is one of the many reasons why Citrix continues to be named a great place to work. We were honored to be named to several lists of such companies in 2021:

• The Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For^®
• The Fortune Best Workplaces in Technology
• Seramount’s 100 Best Companies
  
• Seramount’s Best Companies for Dads
  

Ensuring employee health, safety, and well-being

The Citrix Human Resources (HR) team went to great lengths to ensure the health, safety, and well-being of our employees and their families in 2021. In 2021, HR provided employees with a variety of tools, resources, and training opportunities to enable effective off-premises work and help them feel safe and supported during such a stressful time.

We believe that our commitment to employees’ well-being contributes to unlocking their potential. In 2021, we maintained our efforts to promote well-being by helping our employees take control of not only their workday, but also their personal and professional progress.

To counter the anxiety and depression that many employees experienced due to the pandemic, we integrated capabilities within our Citrix Workspace product that helped employees better manage the pressures and complexities of the workday. For example, Citrix Workspace helped us deliver a secure, reliable, and consistent experience that removed the noise and distractions from work, enabling employees to focus, innovate, and create value. Having experienced these benefits themselves, they then took things a step further to make these solutions even better for our customers.

We found creative and effective ways to support employees physically, emotionally, and financially as the pandemic evolved. And when circumstances compelled us to change workforce health and safety policies and protocols, management and leadership kept employees in the loop through clear, continuous communication.

Throughout the year, we kept a finger on the pulse of employees’ shifting needs and concerns through our resilience questionnaire. The feedback we gathered helped us to continually refine our human capital management strategy in response to a rapidly changing world.

In partnership with our global employee assistance provider and other programs, we offered mental health support with various seminars and key speakers. Going forward, we intend to build on the powerful foundation we created with a continued focus on mental health by launching our Mental Health First Aider Program, sustainable work/life balance scenarios, and vaccine logistics and support.

Building on benefits

We continued to offer market-competitive benefits including parental leave, private medical insurance, and retirement contributions where appropriate, as well as choices in flexible work schedules, workspaces and locations, and more. Additionally, in 2021 we enhanced employee benefits to ensure that employees got the support they needed while working remotely.

Talent recruitment, development, and retention

Citrix continues to be considered a great place to work due to our commitment to an excellent work environment, quality benefits, professional development, and fostering a culture of diversity, inclusion, and belonging.

Attracting top talent

Our ability to attract high-quality candidates remained strong in 2021, even after transitioning all interviews to virtual sessions to ensure the safety of our employees and candidates.

New Citrites benefited from our HR team’s identification and implementation of tools and processes that enable virtual employee onboarding without compromising employee experience. We introduced a Virtual Candidate Engagement model to build confidence with candidates who accepted job offers. Hiring managers, recruiters, and HR business partners actively communicated with these candidates and shared next steps. The virtual model then successfully onboarded new hires and created a seamless experience for trainers and participants — which provided a key positive first impression of Citrix. New hires told us that the process was easy and productive.

Building a diverse pipeline

In addition to improving the hiring and onboarding processes, we believe that technology can play a big role in boosting workplace diversity. That’s why we continue to explore data-driven technologies that help to make our talent recruitment and interviewing more equitable by identifying and mitigating biases. For instance, our Textio tool helps to take bias out of job descriptions or job postings while conveying the inclusiveness of our company culture.

In addition, we launched a program with the United Negro College Fund to provide scholarships to 50 deserving students throughout the U.S. More recently, we modified the program to award 20 larger scholarships. We also launched a partnership with AnitaB.org that allows us to recruit at the Grace Hopper conference, the largest tech conference for women and non-binary people. This partnership additionally gave our female technologists access to professional development by attending the conference, taking online courses, and building their professional networks.

Employee engagement

Experience has taught us that emphasizing human capital drives employee engagement. Based on our 2021 Global Employee Survey, our internal Engagement Index Score was 61 percent favorable, significantly higher than the 39 percent engagement level of all U.S. employees per Gallup⁵.

Our employee survey additionally revealed that 68 percent of our employees would recommend Citrix as a great place to work.

In 2021, we were certified as a Great Place to Work for the fourth consecutive year and a Great Places to Work Fortune Top 100 company. Our engagement level is among the top in our industry and continued to improve.

Looking ahead, our human capital management priorities are to be a magnet for performance-driven, diverse talent; to build future-ready capabilities; and enhance business results.

Diversity, inclusion, and belonging

Citrix is fostering an expansive view of diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DIB) that includes people of different experiences, locations, ages, social and ethnic backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, and physical and mental abilities.

At Citrix, our DIB strategy is built on four pillars that empower us to contribute as ourselves to drive the future of work.

To help employees promote a more inclusive work environment and identify factors that foster diversity in the workplace, we launched our new DIB learning program, I AM Citrix, in fall 2021.

Seeing a need to increase Black representation and career pathing within Citrix, in 2021 we took key steps:

Detailed workforce diversity data is available in the Data Index section of this report.

Racial equity

The need for racial justice is ongoing and urgent — and underscores the importance of dialogue and action. Our leaders are committed to making all Citrites feel welcomed, valued, respected, and heard.

Both leadership and employees drove progress in 2021 through many events and initiatives that promote racial equity within Citrix. There was greater collaboration between executives and leaders within HR, DIB, and our Black Professionals Network to advance our efforts.

Daring Dialogues Series

Our leadership embraces a culture of candor, encouraging employees to raise tough questions that can help to improve our DIB approach. Engaging in difficult conversations and openly addressing issues of bias, discrimination, and harassment are critical for employees to better understand allyship and advocacy.

To that end, in 2020 we started a companywide discussion series entitled “Daring Dialogues” that created space for active listening and learning across the organization. More than 5,300 employees have participated in the series since then. While “Daring Dialogues” initially focused on racial and social equity, in 2021 it evolved to incorporate conversations on other challenging topics such as faith in the workplace, mental health, and accessibility for employees and customers with disabilities.

Looking ahead

Employees often are the catalyst behind many of our efforts to address biases and increase racial equity. That speaks to the culture we’ve been working to build — where employees feel empowered to offer ideas on how to make Citrix a better place to work. In 2021, for instance, we introduced a new learning program called I AM Citrix whose goal was to elevate DIB throughout the company. We will continue to foster an equity-based culture moving forward.

Supporting each other is part of what it means to be a Citrite, and in the ongoing fight for racial and social justice, our collective voices can help to effect positive change.

Pay Equity

Providing equitable reward opportunities for all employees is a critical tenet of Citrix’s compensation strategy. Pay equity is so important to us that, beginning in 2021, we updated our executive officers’ variable cash compensation plan to include pay equity objectives, among others. It’s one of our ESG metrics, and we continue to focus on ESG initiatives such as our DIB programs.

Citrix is working to ensure there is no gap in pay for women and underrepresented minorities within our company. We take a holistic approach to pay equity analysis that gives us a better understanding of how to drive systemic DIB change across the organization. Proactively analyzing our talent and pay programs helps us achieve pay fairness and better serve our employees.

Citrix is committed to helping the communities in which we live and work. We raised our annual corporate giving budget to $4.5 million in 2021 — enough funding to support more than 1,000 global nonprofits and enable us to make larger donations to those in our communities who were most in need.

To learn more about how we supported our local communities, see our Corporate Social Responsibility 2021 Year in Review.

Making products more accessible

We continually strive to make products more accessible for those with disabilities. Last year, these efforts included engaging experts to help us develop a plan to improve the accessibility of our digital systems and services, notably our mobile apps, websites, electronic documents, and product software.

The pandemic made the need for accessibility especially acute as so much of the working world went digital not only to conduct business, but also to manage personal lives — from shopping and banking to education and healthcare. It’s vital that Citrix, as a technology company with global reach and scale, enable people with disabilities to have the digital access that the rest of us take for granted. We remain particularly focused on web, companywide digital, online chat functions, and social media posting accessibility.

Expanding supplier diversity 

Growing a diverse supply chain is not only part of Citrix’s sustainability approach, it’s also a business imperative that spurs innovation, encourages competition, and reduces risk. Having a diverse supply chain additionally helps us better understand the needs of our customers and the communities we serve.

In 2021, our Supplier Diversity (SD) program promoted diversity and social inclusion among our suppliers. The SD team focused on identifying diverse businesses with which to engage while measuring, monitoring, and communicating our supplier diversity efforts to our customers.

We maintain close relationships with our diverse suppliers, many of which are small family businesses. Throughout the pandemic, we prioritized, supported, and engaged with these suppliers, and made it a point to pay them even if they temporarily couldn’t supply us. The SD team understood that this was critical to maintaining the supply chain’s future stability — and the right thing to do during a crisis that created great economic uncertainty for so many suppliers.