Cadence Design Systems Case Study

The 7,000 employee at Cadence Design Systems didn’t need to see their company’s name on Fortune magazine’s most recent great places to work list to know they had it good. The salaries and perks were generous enough to keep about 40 percent of the staff happily in place for more than a decade—a remarkable retention rate for a company located in the hiring hotbed of Silicon Valley.
A volunteer with the Anti-Cruelty Society.An employee at SSPR, a Chicago-based public relations firm, spends time with a canine friend as part of her volunteer work at the Anti-Cruelty Society.

Still, the executives at Cadence, a San Jose, Calif.-based firm that designs semiconductors, realized that they needed to do more than just keep their current employees satisfied. They also had to engage the next generation of workers. Since the average employee age was 45, HR leaders decided it was time to bolster the
Of all the generations, Millennials are especially concerned with maintaining a healthy work/life balance—or at least with smoothly integrating their personal and professional lives—and volunteering on company time helps them do that. “We don’t do programs just for Millennials,” she says. “But they are always top of mind.”

Although the company’s corporate volunteer program had been on the books for a while, it wasn’t being used because the company had failed to publicize it. About a year ago, Dunn began working with Cadence’s senior executives to promote the program via e-mail, posters and a series of employee information meetings. Managers were instructed to reassure staff that no adverse effects would come from taking advantage of the benefit. To the contrary, both workers and the company would gain from employees’ doing so.

The push seems to be working. In 2015, about 65 percent of Cadence’s 1,100 new hires were Millennials. That’s an increase of several percentage points from