Coca-Cola's International Workforce

Like it’s products, Coca-Cola’s employees are found all over the globe. Huw Thomas speaks to Chief People Officer Ceree Eberly about the challenges of directing a truly international workforce.

Despite its domestic image as an American icon on a par with Uncle Sam and apple pie, Coca-Cole is truly an international phenomenon. Walk into a shop or café just about anywhere on Earth – from Azerbaijan to Zambia – and there is a high likelihood that you’ll find a Coke in the fridge. An estimated 94 percent of the world’s population recognize the famous red and white logo, elevating it to the very top tier of global products. In addition to its flagship offering, the company also produces more than 500 other brands, sold in 20 million outlets and consumed by around six billion people.

In effect, Coca-Cola is almost as ubiquitous as water, with a consumer base of staggering international diversity. The company’s people are a mirror image of its customers, working in markets and communities dispersed across the globe. It might be reasonable to expect that managing such a varied workforce would be a major headache for the person in charge. Cannily though, Coca-Cola have got around this potential stumbling block by appointing a HR leader whose international credentials are above reproach.

Ceree Eberly took up the role of Senior Vice President and Chief People Officer in January 2010, the latest upward move in a 20-year career with the firm that has seen her working everywhere from Latin America to Asia to Africa. When we manage to grab a few minutes out of her busy schedule, she is in the process of completing the move back to the US from the UK, where she has been living and working for the past three years.

It was the possibility of such a varied and wide-ranging professional life that was one of the key attractors for Eberly when she joined Coca-Cola two decades ago. “When I came to Coke I was actually looking for diversity of experience and an opportunity to build my career, and I've always wanted to work and live abroad,” she says. “I saw that as a wonderful opportunity. My first boss with Coke said to me, ‘If you just put your head down and focus on adding value and really contributing to the business, you're always going to have an opportunity and you'll never have to want for a job’. 

“My focus has been really learning about our business, being a contributor to the business, but also, when opportunities came my way, being willing to grab those.  As result, I've had just a fantastic experience learning our global business. Living and working on three continents, seeing the world in a very diverse and different way I think has really helped prepare me well for this job.”

In Eberly, Coco-Cola have a people specialist with an unusually strong devotion to the corporate entity she represents. “It comes naturally because I love our brands and I love our business,” she says. “When I'm in the UK I spend weekends going into stores like Sainsbury, Tesco, Waitrose and McDonalds.  I go and just look at our consumer purchasing patterns, I look at what's in the aisle at the grocery store, what people buy, what they drink.  I go into the competition and look at that as well.”

It’s unlikely that many executives of Eberly’s stature spend their spare time conducting independent market research, but it is all part of her background in the company’s business activities. Unlike some HR professionals who have spent their entire careers in the people function, Eberly’s wider range of business experience has given her a much more comprehensive view of the organization. This in turn allows her to run the company’s people function in a manner that more directly benefits the business. “It's not just a nice thing, it's actually essential and crucial to be successful,” she says. “I think that my experience being business focused is kind of the first order of business and really using that as a lens to do the work that I do is probably the greatest enabler for me.”

Business sense

Eberly sees this hard business experience as a vital component of any effective people function. “I'm not talking about just Coca-Cola,” she continues. “I think if you really look at successful HR professionals, they're not what we call personnel administrators.  They're really fully engaged in the business, they truly understand what drives business performance, they work with leadership teams in how to make the business more effective and efficient. They're looking at building a strong leadership capability and talent for the future.  So yes, I would say it's probably missing in some industries and in some functions, but I would say with Coca-Cola that's actually been one of the key focuses that we've had in building our capabilities.”

Eberly gives the example of a recent trip to Tokyo where she recorded a video with the head of the Japanese business giving an overview of the company’s work in the territory. The video covered topics such as the importance of people, what’s being done to build the pipeline of talent and what’s happening around culture and work environment.

“The next day, that was fed live by WebEx to our whole global community,” Eberly explains. “It's part of one of our ongoing initiatives to continue to build up what we call our business muscle.  This involves learning about the business, but also being more effective as professionals in the businesses that we're engaging with.”

Eberly’s recent activities in Japan are just one facet in the ongoing challenge of instilling a coherent company culture in an organization as globally dispersed as Coca-Cola. How do you go about connecting employees who might be separated by massive geographic, cultural and linguistic barriers? “We use the opportunity in the markets that we serve around the world,” Eberly responds. “We're a diverse culture because we're global and I think what we're doing is a better job of building global networks, sharing best practices, using the diversity and experiences in the market really to build a more collaborative and effective result in the market.

“As we build culture, I think one of the ways that we're learning is to take advantage of the things that we're doing around the world.  Knowledge management or knowledge sharing, if you will, is helping to build that culture because we've got great things going on in our local markets, but if you don't share that and you don't share the learning, it's very hard to actually be successful in the marketplace.”

But it is the subject of diversity that provokes perhaps the biggest reaction from Eberly. It is a term that has become increasingly ubiquitous in the corporate lexicon, so much so that there is sometimes the temptation to dismiss it as little more than a checklist item, a piece of business world window dressing. Unsurprisingly, this is not a view supported by Coke’s Chief People Officer.

“Oh, my goodness,” she exclaims. “Diversity is kind of at the center of everything we do.  And it's one of our seven core values and basically it's a very simple definition, it's to be as inclusive as our brand. If you look at that, the definition goes across gender, race, it's how do we actually have inclusion in the workplace and inclusion in our outlets in our markets that we serve? So by focusing on diversity as a business advantage, I actually think that we are benefiting everyone. It's really just a core theme of how we do business. If you look at our suppliers and partners, they reflect our diversity initiatives as well. How you see this in the marketplace is really relevant to me – I'm a mom – and 70 percent of the shoppers out there who go into a grocery store or a retail store are women.

“They're the ones that make the purchasing decisions, so if we don't have women considered in our marketing, considered in the way that we advertise and the way that we go to market we're going to miss a key opportunity and being a mom, I want someone to talk to me about what's important to me.  So if I just make it very simple in those kind of terms, diversity is reflected in every aspect of what we do.”

Troubled times

Though the situation is slowly improving, the last few years have been particularly tricky for businesses everywhere. For many organizations, the hostile conditions have had major implications on the way staffing was approached, implications that were not always welcome. Though Coke hasn’t been completely immune to the effects of the downturn, Eberly insists the impact on hiring policies haven’t necessarily been negative.

“We've been thoughtful in terms of our hiring,” she says.  “Where we need to build capability we've used it actually as an opportunity to step back and look at the next five to ten years of growth.  If there are capabilities and skills we need, different than what we have today, now is the time to step back and say, ‘Okay, now what are we going to do about that and how do we go about finding those?’”

One thing is for certain though; when it comes to a company’s people, even the most difficult conditions are no excuse for retrenchment. “In times of economic turmoil you can't stop focusing on your talent,” states Eberly. “You still have to continue to build your talent, you also have to continue to look at what is happening in the marketplace and it's changing faster than most of us can keep up with. We've actually used it quite strategically to look at really focusing on development of talent and skills that over the next five to ten years are going to be really important for our business.”

For someone who has only been in position for six months, Eberly seems to have an excellent handle on the challenges she faces. In truth though, the role of Chief People Officer is one she has been building towards for quite some time. “It's interesting because the person who left the role actually was my mentor,” she explains. “She's been training me for many, many years, and she actually gave me my first international trip overseas and to Europe. I've been preparing myself through a variety of experiences, and the European experience has probably been the best experience for me to prepare me for this role.”

It all keeps coming back to that global perspective. An organization like Coca-Cola could very easily becomes some modern Tower of Babel, a clamor of noise and confusion as disparate elements struggled to communicate. Ensuring this doesn’t happen requires keeping a finger on the pulse of all the company’s people and acting quickly to head off any potential problems. As part of Coke’s vision for the year 2020, the company is pursuing what Eberly describes as a ‘best place to work’ strategy, building an engaged and happy workforce in its operations all over the globe. “We've been embarking on a journey,” she says. “We measure this through our annual employee insights score, it's a survey we do globally that we basically use that as a temperature gauge to measure the health of the organization.”

So what are Eberly’s key priorities as she moves forward in her new role? “We've put in a number of initiatives, workplace policies around flexibility for women so that we provide flexible benefits for our associates, that we engage our associates in the workplace,” she replies. “We've been enhancing things in the areas of career development, tools and processes.  We've been continuing to focus on training, more learning and those opportunities to continue to accelerate people's growth and learning in the workplace.”

What’s good for Coca-Cola’s global workforce is also good for the company itself. Employees get opportunities to develop their careers and the Coke benefits from more capable and more engaged people. “We're finding that that's probably the best talent retention tool that you can use,” concludes Eberly.

The female of the species

Eberly outlines Coca-Cola’s efforts to advance women throughout the organization.

There's still a lot of work to do, but I'm actually very proud of the work that we have done to advance women in leadership positions.  We do have a priority as a leadership team to recruit, develop and advance women at all levels and across all functions. 

It's very relevant for us and there are a couple of examples of what we've been doing. I just returned from Asia Pacific, where we established a Women's Global Leadership Council in 2007. This is really focused on setting a global strategy with the Chairman of the company around strategies to attract and develop women across all lines of the business, and thinking about what are we doing to attract the talent and what are we doing to continue to accelerate women in leadership positions?  I was recently in Tokyo where this Global Women's Leadership Council met.  In addition to that we did a joint meeting in the Pacific Rim, with all of our countries across Asia Pacific, where they have the next level down of Women's Leadership Council for that geography.

In addition to that we have just initiated the chapter in Japan.  So we had an opportunity to meet with the women locally in Japan who were part of that local chapter.  So we're seeing the effort that we're doing globally just naturally migrate all the way down to the local markets.

We also recently had a global midlevel Women's Leadership Development Forum where 40 women came in from around the world. We do this twice a year, and basically what we did was we brought all these women in from around the world and we had a very targeted development focus session on experiential learning, communication and presentation skills, where they met with senior leaders.

Sheryl Sandberg the COO of Facebook came in and spoke to them. There was a panel discussion with women from a variety of companies.  I was a participant in that.  We talked about stories of leadership and how women have accelerated their careers, how they balance work and family, how they've learned to be mothers or care providers for elderly parents and balanced all of that while still achieving success in the workplace.

If you look at a lot of these examples they speak to our commitment to continue to develop women not just at the high levels but also the pipeline at the midlevel and the lower level so that over the next five to ten years we really do have a steady pipeline of women who are ready and capable to take on those leadership opportunities as the business demands it.

I'm pretty proud of it.  We still have work to do, but I think that our focus and our Chairman's commitment to the advancement of women is unparalleled.