Empowering Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Qualcomm

Jun 14, 2023 10:00 AM ET

As published in Qualcomm's 2022 Corporate Responsibility Report

Our Company’s success is rooted in the hard work and dedication of our workforce. We’re a diverse group of employees from varied backgrounds, experiences, perspectives and ideas. We strive to be a workplace that reflects the world in which we do business. Our diversity helps us increase our global awareness, create an authentic sense of belonging and accelerates our ability to innovate. We will continue building an inclusive and equitable environment where everyone feels inventive, welcome, respected, valued and part of the team.

To that end, we have created interim goals that we aim to achieve on our way to creating a more diverse workforce. By 2025, we are committed to:

  • Increase representation of women in leadership21 by 15 percent, from a 2020 base year.
  • Increase representation of URM22 in leadership by 15 percent, from a 2020 base year.
  • Increase overall representation of URM by 20 percent, from a 2020 base year.

In 2022, we remained on track to meet our interim goals, making important strides by diversifying our talent pipeline and increasing development opportunities for our employees from diverse and historically underrepresented communities. Our efforts also include expanding our global hiring and recruiting practices as well as readying our current employees for advancement through education, training, encouraging stretch assignments and mentorship. We will also continue to engage across Qualcomm — particularly with leaders, managers and our eight employee networks — to achieve our goals.

Our DEI Policy highlights our promise to sustain a work environment that is inclusive, respectful and free of harassment, discrimination and retaliation. The policy also highlights our efforts to cultivate innovators who have varying backgrounds, ideas and points of view.

We’re proud to be recognized as a leader in inclusion and diversity. Our commitment to DEI includes providing equitable pay to our employees, promoting employee development, celebrating various heritage months and special days with our employees and building and sustaining collaborations with external organizations to provide resources and best practices to support our employees.

To build global momentum in DEI, we expanded our presence in Asia-Pacific and India. This increased representation of our DEI team translated into several successes. In June 2022, we joined The Diversity Charter in Germany, a corporate initiative to promote employee diversity in companies and institutions. The program aims to promote the recognition, appreciation and integration of diversity into Germany’s business culture.

In October 2022, our Company proudly sponsored — and our employees and their family members marched in — the Taiwan Pride Parade hosted by the Taiwan Rainbow Civil Action Association in Taipei. This is the largest Pride event in the APAC region and is an extension of our Company’s decades-long support for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer and others (LGBTQ+) community across the globe.

DEI is also a key part of our internal processes, including the annual employee review process. We train our managers on job-related performance assessment and bias avoidance, broadly gather feedback from managers and co-workers for annual performance evaluations, calibrate ratings across managers and provide performance feedback to our employees. Our open-door policy encourages employees to ask questions or voice any concerns they may have regarding their performance assessment or their compensation. In line with our transparency and open philosophy, we also organize interactive panel discussions around the annual review process to offer recommendations on how employees can advocate for themselves and provide insights into how fairness and equity are ensured throughout the process. Employees are encouraged to join these discussions and actively participate with questions and comments.

“Our employees and their values in the workplace are important to Qualcomm. We see diversity as an opportunity to showcase the talent and individualism of our employees. Being part of this association is extremely important for us and a step in the right direction to promote diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the Company and the world.”

Christian Block, Senior Vice President and General Manager RF Front-End, Qualcomm RFFE Germany GmbH

Learn more in Qualcomm's 2022 Corporate Responsibility Report