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Employee engagement

To PepsiCo:
The success of our company depends on our ability to hire and retain the right talent. In a world where workplace expectations are rapidly evolving, we need to remain in tune with current trends to retain our workforce. Employee engagement is an important way that PepsiCo stays abreast of current and prospective employees’ perspectives, helping to ensure the company remains an employer of choice.
To the World:
Engaged employees have more fun at work, higher levels of career fulfillment, a better sense of well-being and more overall satisfaction with their work environment.1 Our efforts to ensure that PepsiCo employees are engaged help drive positive interactions between coworkers, as well as customers, consumers and other external stakeholders.
Approach
As part of our pep+ (PepsiCo Positive) ambitions, we’re striving to build a better workplace. To do this, we’re working to drive engagement with our employees — improving how they feel about their jobs, team and company direction. We aim to bolster employee engagement by:
- Establishing shared behaviors through The PepsiCo Way;
- Understanding employee perspectives and needs through feedback mechanisms;
- Celebrating success and expressing appreciation through the Smiles program; and
- Supporting community connections through One Smile at a Time.
PepsiCo's Global Talent Management team is responsible for the company's employee engagement strategy and leads efforts to establish core cultural values and opportunities for employees to share feedback on their experience with the company.
Embedding authentic and shared company behaviors is an important tool in establishing a positively engaged workforce. The PepsiCo Way represents seven employee behaviors that we believe will help to bolster our mission, drive our vision and build a strong corporate culture. These are embedded in processes across the company — from performance objectives to our annual surveys. Additionally, employees can celebrate achievements in each of The PepsiCo Way behaviors through our Smiles program.

In order to achieve our ambitions, we have established various channels for employees to voice opinions fearlessly, one of the seven PepsiCo Way behaviors. These candid opinions are a critical input in identifying areas of organizational strength as well as opportunities to strengthen our practices. Each engagement channel is designed to provide the opportunity to speak up, providing valuable feedback to those empowered to address it. They include:
- Organizational Health Survey (OHS): An annual census survey available to all employees to gauge employee engagement and commitment to PepsiCo.
- Employee Confidence Index (ECI): A pulse check on employee engagement and confidence through sampling conducted three times a year.
- Life cycle surveys: A mechanism that enables PepsiCo to measure employee experience and engagement at key moments in the employee life cycle.
- Managing The PepsiCo Way (MPW): An annual upwards feedback process that enables managers to receive feedback from their direct reports regarding their strengths as a manager, as well as their opportunities for exemplifying The PepsiCo Way behaviors.
These tools are publicized to every level of employee, from frontline to executive. Senior leaders share global communications about the surveys, and posters, kiosks and QR codes help encourage engagement from every employee. Individual survey responses are confidential — results are aggregated and shared with team leaders with five or more direct employees to protect participant anonymity.
Equipped with survey results, we identify opportunities for improvement at both the team- and company-level. Each year, executive leadership and team leaders review the OHS and ECI results and take action based on issues identified in the surveys. By listening to employees through these channels and acting to solve issues raised, we aim to ensure we are providing the best employment experience possible.
In addition to surveys, we have other initiatives to elicit employee ideas on company strategy and direction, such as our crowd-sourcing project, Next Big Idea — an employee-led and -driven online business innovation game that allows employees to collaborate with colleagues around the world to act as owners, voice opinions fearlessly and share their ideas to improve the future of the company, from products to practices. The top three employee teams, as voted by PepsiCo employees, are given the opportunity to present their ideas to senior leadership.
Smiles, our global employee recognition program, helps to encourage and acknowledge The PepsiCo Way behaviors and celebrate success, further driving employee engagement. The Smiles platform allows employees to recognize colleagues for demonstrating The PepsiCo Way behaviors or to celebrate milestones like work anniversaries.
Employee engagement extends beyond the walls of PepsiCo facilities into the communities where we operate. In partnership with the PepsiCo Foundation, we are striving to make a positive impact by giving employees the opportunity to engage with their communities and with each other. Our employee volunteering platform, One Smile at a Time, helps PepsiCo employees give back, instilling a sense of pride and forging stronger connections among local teams and their communities.
Progress
Our 2024 internal survey results show PepsiCo employees feel high levels of pride in working for PepsiCo, are energized by their work and are confident in PepsiCo’s future success. In 2024, 84% of all employees participated in PepsiCo’s Organizational Health Survey. PepsiCo’s OHS score stood at 78% with employee engagement at 80% and employee commitment at 76%. External benchmarking suggests that our employee engagement remains strong compared with other Fortune 500 peers.
In 2024, employees sent more than 1,100,000 smiles on the Smiles platform. Additionally, over 16,000 PepsiCo employees logged over 169,000 hours volunteering through One Smile at a Time. Volunteers contributed their time on issues important to our employees, their communities and the company, including water access, food security and economic empowerment.
What's next?
Looking ahead, we expect to continue engaging employees through the PepsiCo Way, the Smiles platform and One Smile at a Time. We will continue to identify opportunities and implement solutions to improve the employee experience.
To further embed The PepsiCo Way in employees’ everyday behaviors, additional learnings and new methods are being developed as PepsiCo embarks on a path to simplification and understanding. We are striving to improve employee engagement and remedy key gaps identified from the previous years to better embed The PepsiCo Way within our workforce.
1Sun, L., & Bunchapattanasakda, C. (2019). Employee Engagement: A Literature Review. International Journal of Human Resource Studies
Related topics
Employee demographics, Employee well-being, Human rights, Inclusion, Pay equity, Philanthropy
Last updated
August 13, 2025