Pepsico People

Through PepsiCo People goals, they will follow people-centric mindset that prioritizes human rights, ensures health and wellness and encourages diversity and engagement - especially promoting women's equal advancement, and offering policies and benefits for working caregivers to attract the talent base needed to grow their business. As a consequence, these strategies contribute to the foundation of a healthier relationship between people and food. “People” definition includes not only employees in the corporation but also all kinds of stakeholders related to PepsiCo value chain such as customers, shareholders, suppliers,…However, in this analysis, we focus on the way they invest in their internal customers in 3 keys aspects: diversity, wellness and human rights.

In 2011, 68% of employees consider PepsiCo as a more favorable workplace than other companies. In 2014, it was gratifying to see the benefits of all PepsiCo “people” investing activities. Notable recognitions include: Hay Group’s “Best Companies for Leadership”, The Best Workplace for LGBT Equality, Universum’s “World’s Most Attractive Employers”, “World’s Most Ethical Companies” by Ethisphere.com (Indra, K,2015) and so on. PepsiCo does a good job investing in its employees because they believe that happy employees are critical to the success of the business.

Firstly, PepsiCo’s Human Right consists of:

• Provide fair and equitable wages, benefits and other conditions of employment in accordance with local law;
• Recognize employees’ right to freedom of association;
• Provide humane and safe working conditions;
• Prohibit forced or child labor; and
• Providing equal opportunity for all employees with no tolerance for discrimination and harassment

At PepsiCo, a production manager can be a woman and a marketing executive can be a bookworm or a tattoo-addicted man because they only consider “people” is the most valuable capital. In addition, PepsiCo respect personal values rather than appearance, family background or individual characteristic and use the performance result as an effective measurement. They also consider employee moral behavior in doing business is the significant factor to protect human right. In 2012, more than 64,000 salaried employees completed the online training and approximately 150,000 hourly employees worldwide received in-person Code of Conduct training (Pandey, P., 2015). From 2012, PepsiCo has underlined the roles of women in their workforce by enhancing Women's equal advancement. In the U.S. based executives, women accounted for 31%. At the PepsiCo Vallejo Biscuit Plant in Mexico City, there is a product packaging line called "Linea Rosa" or "the Pink Line," staffed entirely by women who wear pink vests and operate pink equipment ("La Linea Rosa"., 2014). On the evidence of their recent works, it is obvious to show that PepsiCo highly respects the individual values and performances rather than any types of bias.

Secondly, PepsiCo seriously takes care of Health and wellness of their workforce. One of the most outstanding illustrations is their Healthy Living Program which encourages employees and their families to focus on healthy lifestyles in an effort to “be a little bit better every day.” Healthy Living focuses on four key areas of wellness:

• Eat Healthy (nutrition)
• Find Balance (mental health)
• Get Moving (physical activity)
• Be Well (prevention)

Following these key objectives, Healthy Living runs many health improvement activities for free including: Personal Health Assessments that periodically checking employees’ health, biometric screenings and flu shots, a healthy pregnancy program, smoking cessation program, stress and sleep management programs, fitness and nutrition programs; weight management; and Healthy Decisions (including access to nurses, expert doctors for outside consulting, condition assessments and a healthy topics library). Another program of PepsiCo’s employee wellness enhancement is Healthy Money which helps employees manage their financial fitness. This program gives employee with the tools and resources such as telephone consulting, seminars, workshop or support via email, to help individuals achieve their financial goals. Healthy Money program has solved a broad range of employee financial concerns, including retirement and investing, funding college expenses, and cash and debt management. Due to PepsiCo best efforts in promoting healthy lifestyle in 2014, PepsiCo was pleased to receive the Best Employers for Healthy Lifestyles Platinum Award from the National Business Group on Health (2014 GRI Report)

Last but not least, PepsiCo has invested in Diversity and Engagement strategies in an attempt to diversify their workforce portfolio. They emphasize recruiting and advancing different kinds of talents, gender, color, backgrounds,…for the top to down positions to ensure an innovative and creative workplace where an employee can learn from diverse fields which result in driving employee engagement.

In addition to manage their performance in a board category, PepsiCo has multiple D&E councils around the world that focus on the development of locally relevant D&E strategies. Each of their business units has designed local plans and targets to address challenges in their locations (2014 GRI Report).

The geocentric staffing policy is helpful for PepsiCo in supporting their localization strategy and targeting their diversified products toward different customer segments by diversified team. Moreover, this approach allows PepsiCo to minimize cultural barriers when they have diverse employee backgrounds in doing their international business and gaining competitive advantages through the best talent team (Pepsico’s Strategies For Global Business, 2015)

However, PepsiCo has faced some problems coming from their People goals implementation process:

Anti-union behavior in India: In 2016, PepsiCo has been charged with continuing human rights violations and anti-trade union practices in relation to factories in the Indian state of West Bengal. The union reports, there were “mass dismissals after workers formed a union at PepsiCo snack foods warehouses in West Bengal” http://www.iuf.org/w/?q=node/3852 whereas PepsiCo has claimed that the workers have the right to free association in the form of a trade union. On the other hand, PepsiCo immediately conducted a thorough investigation upon learning of the allegations and had found no evidence of human rights violations (“Stop PepsiCo's brutal attack on fundamental human rights!”, 2013).

Illegal process in laying off workers: Workers in Argentina staged a protest against PepsiCo laid-off over 600 workers in the city decision. The article on the Labour Notes website stated that “In Argentina, in order to close a factory, a company needs to file a “Crisis Prevention Procedure,” which demonstrates three years of economic distress and that steps were taken to try to save the workers' jobs.” But PepsiCo had failed to properly implement the “preventive procedure of crisis” when it made the decision to shut down the plant (Argentine Workers Launch Boycott, Protest Against PepsiCo, 2017)

Is healthy living program successful? The Rand study reveals that PepsiCo invested their money into health care with a return of $3.78 in costs. However, the money spent on lifestyle management, while it did produce many benefits to employees, did not yield profit returns. Therefore, PepsiCo needs to simply invest their money wisely and find less expensive means to improve employee health through their lifestyle changes program (Anthony, D., 2017).