Organisational OverviewPepsiCo has a full employee count of 3000 though with a high ratio of part-timers, their FTE is 2400. Working without a centralised work function, there are around 28 HR professionals working across the business with accountability both to their HR Management as well as State Based Site Leadership Teams. The States themselves have full accountability of individual implementation of programs and whilst ideas and successes are shared, each State is autonomous in deciding the resulting action and what that will look like.

PepsiCo is primarily city based within each state though does have a number of regional employees typically working in Sales Representative type positions.

PepsiCo have an above average number of employees with high length of service – 40% of employees over 5 years and 20% of employees over 15 years of service.

The culture internally has historically been one of ‘banking leave’ and prior to the campaign launch, the focus on leave taking was simply from a statistical/reporting analysis presented and left to the States to manage as deemed appropriate.

PepsiCo initially commenced the No Leave No Life Program at the end of 2008 and 12 months on, though having achieved some significant successes, understand they have a long way to go in both ensuring employees well-being through the taking of leave, as well as through reducing their internal leave liability.

Business Case The need to address PepsiCo’s leave taking behaviour was identified when the current Work Life Quality program instigated a 100% turnaround in retention which in turn caused the existing leave statistics figures to jump significantly. It was realised at this point that a focus was required on Leave as a stand-alone initiative and a priority, as well as individual and ‘actual’ measurement on Leave Liability.

The PepsiCo leave policy is 20 accruable recreational leave days per employee, each year. A Paper Based system is utilised for leave / requesting holidays.

Prior to implementing a NLNL program, quarterly emails were sent to managers detailing leave balances of their teams however this was viewed as simply a tick and flick exercise with no impact to actually driving leave taking behaviour; reports were not being enforced nor communicated. The Work Life Quality Program and the Leave Campaign were initially implemented as two separate programs until it became common sense that the two were merged having a complementary end goal.

With high instances of longevity of service, there was also the need to focus not only on having employees recognise the need, and actually take their annual leave but to also implement an ongoing awareness campaign to start to encourage the use of previously banked leave.

Implementation ProcessThe approach to the Leave Program for PepsiCo was one of enablement, both to managers and employees.

After conducting relevant research through employee surveys, manager feedback and trend analysis on leave data, this was then presented to the Executive Team for buy-in.

Initial communications to the wider business was sent by HR using resources from the NLNL website. The communication style was deliberately open and honest, presenting what the actual liability balance was and what that money could be used for internally if released.

One of the first initiatives addresses was to enhance the manager leave reports. These were previously sent quarterly with raw data and have now been upgraded to reports sent monthly that include trends and summary data.

Along with the use of the NLNL collateral, PepsiCo HR team saw a critical aspect of the success of the campaign as their ability to be creative in their approach to it. A Safety competition was launched where children of employees were asked to do a drawing of what a family holiday meant to them. Given the emotive positioning of the competition, this was successfully leveraged for promoting the NLNL campaign. The ‘Learnings’ for PepsiCo within their NLNL Program are in the areas of Change Communications and Planning. The initial communications for the program came through HR however whilst internal corporate branding of

No Leave, No Life Case Study

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communications is recognised as important for acceptance, it was seen by PepsiCo that take-up and absorption of messages were reinforced through the actual delivery of the communication messages through partnership between Directors, Senior Executives, Functional Managers and HR.

PepsiCo see great planning as the key to the success of the program. A few of their more experienced managers took up the mantle of the program and devised a detailed plan for their own departments with ‘ideal leave periods’, ‘block out periods’, and ‘grey area periods for additional signoff’. Recognising the impact of such a tool, the HR team used this information to design a template for the rest of the organisation and this was seen as one of the catalysts for greater uptake and leave activity.

Support leveraged from NLNL was specifically around the branding of communications, promotional ideas, discount offers and holiday ideas magazines. The ongoing program will incorporate sharing of NLNL magazines to inspire employees on possible destination and holiday ideas, updating of the annual leave calendars, further themed ‘quarters’, as well as working with managers to support their accountability and communication of leave balances with their teams. Their plan also will also incorporate co-branding with NLNL collateral to embed the leave message.

OutcomesThe NLNL program has run for just over 12 months though is viewed as having no end date; this being just the ‘start of the story’. PepsiCo are only now seeing a change in their internal culture around leave taking behaviour as well as the encouragement of it and are excited by the continuation of this integral part of the HR plan.

At commencement of the program in 2008, the initial feedback was ‘defensive’ however when emails from the CEO and managers followed; a top down implementation approach, the take-up skyrocketed.

By far, the largest success story that PepsiCo has seen is through their goal of having each employee take their 4weeks of leave per year. At the commencement of the program, the organisational average was 2.3 weeks per year with only 21% of employees taking 20days leave per year. This has, incredibly, doubled to an average of 3.92 weeks per year in 2009, representing a 41% uptake increase. Whilst these figures are exciting in themselves, PepsiCo recognise a ‘step change’ process and the next target will be to start to eat into the balance liability with the long term goal to have all employee leave balances below 20 days per year outstanding.

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Sample Leadership Presentation