Can data drive culture? PepsiCo is betting on it.
The food and beverage company's HR team is focused on prioritizing the employee experience to support retention across its U.S. workforce of roughly 300,000. While instinct and empathy are key ingredients to creating programs that build community and loyalty,
"Data can be overwhelming, but what you do with it is what matters," says Dannii Portsmouth, VP of HR of PepsiCo's west division. In her role, Portsmouth leads talent and performance management and
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To offer a robust employee experience, Portsmouth and her team have created systems and touch points to help employees feel supported throughout their tenure at the company; from career growth and leadership training to feedback on managers, data helps Pepsi understand what's working, what's not, and how to improve. Portsmouth recently chatted with EBN to explain how.
How do you approach building a culture that will not just attract top talent, but keep those workers engaged and happy in the long run?
The employee experience is critical — and it has to be great not just during the attraction stage but each and every day of the employee life cycle. We sort it into three buckets, the most significant of which is an employee's interaction with their leader and if they feel seen, included and developed. The second bucket is their team, and how much they feel a part of that team, if there's a sense of belonging. And the third is the environment — whether physically in one of our offices or in a virtual space — and how easy Pepsi can make it for them to access work and all the things that go around that, including our benefits and our purpose.
How do you make sure that employee experience stays healthy?
We have a clearly articulated people plan built upon five areas we need to prioritize every day. The first is that employee experience, the second is about winning culture and helping each individual understand what their contribution is to the overall goals of the organization, and both celebrating and having honest conversations when we're not where we should be. The third element is diversity, equity and inclusion. It's something that runs deep for us, it's not a slogan. In the West Division in particular, we have an inclusion council made up of 11 employee resource groups. The fourth element is leadership, and how we can continue to invest in the leaders that we've already got, in their capabilities and as a community. And finally, the fifth element is talent. We're looking to have more rigorous assessments of talent. We're very good at collecting data at Pepsi, and we're focusing on how we can use that to build differentiated development plans.
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How do you get a pulse check on how each of those elements are working, especially at an organization of Pepsi's size?
We use a tool that measures employee sentiment, and it's really focused on employee feedback on a daily basis, and we get the results once a month. We can see comments about what people love, colleagues who have been helpful to them, and of course all the things that may need to be fixed. It gives HR a chance to follow up on those issues.
We also measure, on a monthly basis, turnover in our first 90 days, turnover in its totality, how much overtime people are working, and the level of onboarding completion. And all that translates into a score that we can monitor building by building, as well as across the organization. We have a lot of data!
With all that information, how do you prioritize a to-do list and turn feedback into action?
It's a great question, and one we've struggled with at times. We first take a step back. We've spoken to employees, people who've left us, people who accepted jobs and didn't turn up to understand why. So we do a lot of diagnosis. And we then created an employee experience toolkit that stretches from before onboarding through onboarding and career development.
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What are some of the ways you support career development?
We make a concerted effort to move people before they're quite ready, because we believe in them and know we can put what they need around them to support their growth. We have a program called Aspiring Leaders Development Program that folks can apply to, and that's how we generate 70% of our frontline leaders. So folks apply, and we take them through a series with a cohort, because that concept of community is really important — we don't want anyone to feel like a leader alone. Not everyone makes it through that program, but of those that do, some people are immediately ready to manage, some people might need a bit more time, and others may say, you know, leadership is not actually what I thought it would be and I'm no longer interested.
Once people do become managers, how do you make sure they continue to grow?
We measure our managers and their bonuses based on how well they've performed, how well their team is developing — has everyone on their team had a development conversation this year? We have something called the PepsiCo Way, and it's seven attributes and behaviors we expect people to be role modeling. And we invite employees to rate their managers and talk about what their strengths are and what their areas of development are, and that helps us focus on cohorts that are struggling to develop their people. And so again, our intention is to have clear data that helps us diagnose the problem, and then address the problem.
