Approach

Employees want to be listened to. When their aspirations and comments are acknowledged and their career paths supported, employees are likely to be satisfied and motivated to do their best work with our company. We continuously listen to our employees to ensure we are providing the best experience possible. Employee input is ingrained in our core cultural values, known as The PepsiCo Way. The PepsiCo Way represents seven key employee behaviors that we believe will help to bolster our mission, drive our vision and help PepsiCo adopt the mindset of winning with pep+. In pursuing this strategy, we strive to build a Faster, Stronger, and Better company.

In order to achieve our ambitions, we have established various channels for employees to Voice Opinions Fearlessly, one of the seven behaviors in The PepsiCo Way. Each of these channels is designed to provide the opportunity to speak up, providing valuable feedback to those who are empowered to address it. They include:

• Organizational Health Survey (OHS), an annual census survey 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, through which we measure employee experience and engagement at key moments in the employee life cycle.

In addition to surveys, we have other initiatives to elicit employee feedback, such as our crowd-sourcing projects, Have a Say and Next Big Idea.

• Have a Say asked associates to simply Voice their Opinion Fearlessly and tell PepsiCo how they will help to bring The PepsiCo Way to life.
• Next Big Idea is 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 that will make PepsiCo Faster, Stronger, and Better. Employees can participate in any capacity they choose: entrepreneur, expert, or investor. The top three employee teams, as voted by PepsiCo associates, are given the opportunity to present their ideas to senior leadership. This enables employees to share the future of PepsiCo.

For most associates, their relationship with their manager serves as the starting point for their experience with The PepsiCo Way. To this end, we offer tools that help managers to understand how their individual working style aligns with each of the seven PepsiCo Way behaviors. Managing The PepsiCo Way, a feedback process tool, helps managers to receive feedback from their direct reports on their strengths as a manager, as well as their opportunities for growth. Managers are rated on the seven PepsiCo Way behaviors and 21 associated actions in order to further their journey in living The PepsiCo Way while helping PepsiCo become Faster, Stronger, and Better. Through this program, employees rate their manager’s impact, transparency, the meaningfulness of their development conversations, and the likelihood of recommending them to a colleague.

Through our global employee recognition program, Smiles, we’re further able to encourage The PepsiCo Way behaviors and impact employee engagement. The Smiles platform allows employees to give recognition to other employees for living The PepsiCo Way or celebrate milestones like work anniversaries.

As we strive to achieve our pep+ strategy, and to build a Positive Value Chain, we are aiming to provide meaningful jobs and growth opportunities for our people and empower them to enhance their well-being and make a positive impact at work, at home and in their local communities. Employee engagement is a key way to ensure that we can meet our ambitions. We will work closely with the PepsiCo Foundation to identify ways that employees can engage with their communities and with each other.

Progress

Our 2021 internal survey results show that PepsiCo associates feel high levels of pride in working for PepsiCo, are energized by their work and are confident in PepsiCo’s future success. In 2021, 65% of all associates participated in PepsiCo’s Organizational Health Survey (OHS). PepsiCo’s OHS Score stood at a solid 80% with employee engagement at 83% and employee commitment at 77%. External benchmarking from Kincentric, Glint and Perceptyx, covering over 1,500 companies, indicates that our employee engagement remains among the best.

In our OHS survey, perception of The PepsiCo Way improved in 2021 compared to 2020 scores, especially among frontline populations. We designed a special integrated report for our top leaders around The PepsiCo Way (TPW Integrated Report) to enable thoughtful action. To continue our journey on ingraining The PepsiCo Way behaviors we will continue to leverage the Smiles platform, utilize the Next Big Idea, and continue to rely on our strength in leadership to set future direction and meet employee needs. In 2021, employees sent more than 674,000 smiles on the platform.

What's Next?

In the coming year, we expect to continue the general structure and process of surveys such as our Organizational Health Survey and Employee Confidence Index as well as our Next Big Idea crowdsourcing initiative. We will continue to identify and implement opportunities to improve the employee experience.

In addition, we plan to undertake an effort to study needs of different cohorts of our employee base. We believe the last couple of years of the pandemic have changed the nature of work and employees may have different needs. These studies will help define the future of talent needs and employee value proposition for PepsiCo.

To further ingrain The PepsiCo Way in employees’ everyday behaviors, additional learnings and new methods are being developed as PepsiCo dedicates itself to simplification and understanding. We plan to expand the reach of the The PepsiCo Way Integrated Reports to all our managers to drive thoughtful actions. We are dedicated to improving employee engagement and remedying any gaps identified from the previous years to better embed the PepsiCo Way within our workforce.