Episode 107: Coca-Cola's Chief People Officer on HR's Role in Organisational Transformation (Lisa Chang)
On the show today, I am talking to Lisa Chang, Senior Vice President and Chief People Officer at the Coca-Cola Company.
Throughout our conversation Lisa shares her perspective on how HR is evolving as a function, based on her experiences throughout a nearly 30 year career in HR and her current role as a Chief People Officer, for employees across more than 200 countries worldwide.
We also discuss:
The role of the Chief People Officer and the HR function in supporting organisational transformation
The impact of the pandemic on employee experience and wellness and how the Coca-Cola Company has addressed this
The critical areas that HR needs to focus on to be successful in the future
How HR can add business value as we start to transition out of the pandemic
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Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Lisa Chang, Chief People Officer at Coca-Cola, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show Lisa, thanks so much for spending the time with our listeners. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and your current role at Coca-Cola?
Lisa Chang: Absolutely. First of all, thank you, David, for having me on your podcast, I am a follower of your work and excited to be here to share some insights about what we are doing, as well as the evolution of the future of HR. So I am the chief people officer for the Coca-Cola Company and have the pleasure and honour of leading the people function, in over 200 countries around the world where Coca-Cola has a presence. I am just excited to share with you, some of the exciting work that we are doing.
David Green: Well great, thanks for that. Thanks for the kind reference there as well Lisa, it is good to hear that you maybe listen to some of the other podcast episodes as well.
Before we get into the work that you are currently doing at Coca-Cola, it would be really great to hear a little bit about your career history and your journey to chief people officer.
Lisa Chang: Sure. So, my journey to HR was a little bit non-traditional. Although, I think that is probably true of a lot of HR leaders.
I started out really on the path of thinking I was going to medical school and soon realising that you have to be comfortable in hospitals and enjoy being around that type of environment, to which I didn't. So in college, I recognised perhaps the shortcomings of that and I migrated towards a major in communications.
In doing so, I was able to secure an internship with a company at the time called Digital Equipment, which was a technology, computer, IT organisation, back in the day. And I was ceremoniously put into the personnel department and that began my journey of curiosity as well as eagerness to learn more about what this field was. Subsequently that has led to an almost, 30 year career, in the space of HR.
I joined Coca-Cola about three years ago. I had been in and around the Atlanta area, working for companies such as, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, and Equifax, a financial services company. And then, just before joining, I was part of the sports businesses in Atlanta, working for Arthur Blank, the former founder of Home Depot, who is also the owner of the Atlanta Falcons in Atlanta, one of the professional sports teams.
So a varied background, all focused primarily in human resources. I did have one stint when I was at The Weather Channel, which was another company I was at for almost 11 years, I did have one stint outside of HR when I went into product management. We may have a chance to talk about that, but I would consider that to be a pivotal moment in my journey of HR as a business, as opposed to HR as a transaction function.
David Green: Yeah, that leads on nicely to the next question. I was just about to say that HR is increasingly creating products, creating offerings for employees, and actually putting the employee at the centre just as we put our customers at the centre as organisations as well. It will be interesting actually, in the next question I am going to ask Lisa, how that experience in product management fits into that a little bit. Obviously you have been in HR a while. We have both been in HR or around the HR field for quite a long time and obviously there has been quite a lot of change.
Given the change that you have seen during your career in HR, how do you think HR has evolved over that time?
Lisa Chang: Well, I touched on that briefly, but I would say that if I think back to my formidable HR training years in the early nineties, late eighties, we were really as a function, trying to move on that continuum of transaction to strategy. I remember very distinctly all the conversations around, how do you make HR more strategic? How do you get people to think of us as more than payroll and benefits? And at the time it seemed like a place that we would be stuck in for a long time, because we provided necessary functions. But I think what has happened over the last 20 years, is definitely that we have moved on that continuum. We have gotten smarter and better through technology, to allow us to automate a lot of the functions that we used to have to do manually and that has freed up that capacity and mind space to allow us to do things that contribute to the business in a more meaningful way. But it also think that it has allowed us to really focus in on, how do we take care of our people? And nothing has been more important than that over the past few years. And whereas before, taking care of our people meant making sure they got paid and had benefits, has moved completely to the other side of significant caretaking and protecting through the social justice, the pandemic, wars, you name it.
How we take care of people today, in the HR function, is critically important and very strategic compared to where we were 20, some years ago.
David Green: And obviously that has been particularly resonant in the last two years, hasn't it? Actually the CEO or the board have been looking to you no doubt, as chief people officer and HR team at Coca-Cola, to really do that, to put employee wellbeing at the centre of responding to the pandemic.
I would love to hear a little bit about that really, because do we think that this is going to stay? Thinking about the HR field as a whole. And actually, maybe some of the things that have come out of that around, when you look after people properly, treat wellbeing, and you look at all the social injustice that has been raised over the last couple of years, is this a new mission for HR and for organisations?
Lisa Chang: I definitely think that it is here to stay and I think part of that is driven by employee expectations. So we have moved to an environment where employees expect us to stand up for things and to protect them.
If you think about how much misinformation may have been spread during the last few years, while social media is wonderful for democratising voice it also has created a lot of noise where it is oftentimes difficult to determine what is the truth and what is perhaps fabricated or a different perspective and point of view. So employees have come to depend on employers as a source of truth when it came to everything from health and safety, to company positions on different stances, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that again, becomes a really important relationship that we have.
What I see more and more of, not only through our employee surveys but also through outside research, is that employees expect companies to do that and as they are searching for their future employers, they are asking themselves the question, is this a company that takes care of its people? Is this a company that has a conscience? Is this a company that does the right thing when it comes to ESG? Does this company have diversity? So I think it is going to be hard not to let it stick, because that level of accountability from our employees, who we try to attract and retain to do the work, is there. So I think that is an important part of it.
With respect to what has happened during the last few years from a wellbeing and a people perspective, in addition to going through the pandemic and the social justice issues in the marketplace, we also did a major transformation in our company where we re-organised ourselves, went top to bottom, and did a lot of work.
The only way we were able to do that was by sitting back and looking through the lens of the impact it would have on people. And so that really affected the strategy of how we decided to approach the re-organisation.
There are lots of ways that companies can re-organise and especially during a pandemic, where you were hearing about companies closing their doors and employees hearing about it in an email and things like that. So we were very, very conscious that in order to have transformation happen, we were on a transformation journey anyway, but what we decided to do was accelerate that transformation in light of the pandemic because our business models were shifting as well. But we did it through the lens of employees and what we tried to do was be really honest and really transparent about the impact of business, but we also gave people choice. We tried to build a couple of pathways to explain to people what the opportunities for choice would be including, taking a voluntary package, posting for a new job, reconsidering if they want to go back to school and get education.
So we tried again, to take the situation through the lens of the voice of the employee, what would this mean to me? And how might I approach this change as opposed to it happening to me? Can I have a voice in how I might respond to the change?
So I think that is something that is fairly modern for us, where we have been known to have re-organisations and people find out about the re-organisations in a very short order. We talked about our re-organisation for several months before we actually enacted it and that is something that we haven't done in the past, but in doing so we focused in on the change management aspect, which I think was a really important part.
David Green: So more transparency, more inclusivity around that so, as you said, thinking about it from the perspective of the employee or the people in the organisation, rather than how companies traditionally have done transformations, which is there is a big announcement, not a huge amount of communication, sometimes people read about it outside in the newspapers or on social media. What was some of the impacts that you had from that? Obviously you mentioned employee survey, did you test to see how that approach resonated, or not, with employees as well?
Lisa Chang: Yes, we started the process fairly early with the senior most leaders and then we went down the business units. What we tested with people was the fact that change was coming and we had been signalling this change, even pre pandemic. So the transformation journey of our business moving from one product Coca-Cola to a portfolio of beverages, which is the beverages for life strategy that our chairman and CEO, James Quincy has been promoting for several years. We kind of told people, hey, change is coming. We are going to have to transform the way we are organised, transform the way we operate, transform the way we organise the roles and responsibilities, and so it is coming, we were laying that foundational groundwork in early 2019.
So when 2020 came and we decided to go ahead and just continue with the change but actually hit the gas a little bit, we anchored on that. We tried to help people understand that this was not a change that we were doing because of the pandemic, we took it as an opportunity to accelerate because our business model accelerating. We are a heavily food service on premise business, in many parts of the world where we rely on our restaurants and retail chains to sell our products. When the pandemic was around, everything was closed so our products could not reach consumers through normal channels, we had to accelerate our business model to find other ways to get to our consumers, which necessarily means we had to change.
So I think, connecting the two and helping people logically understand, not only the impact of the business but the impact to how we service our customers, was really important because it became much more about the entire company in the ecosystem not again about eliminating roles or taking people out of jobs.
We created equal the number of new jobs and new spaces, and doubled down on things like data and insights, analytics and digital. So we really tried to give people opportunities to re-skill themselves in different ways or in some cases, there were people who were probably ready to get off the train and had just been waiting for the right opportunity and we made that process for them, a little easier to do.
David Green: Yeah, give them that soft landing, I guess, so if they do decide it is time to get off the train, as you put it, that they are put nicely on the platform and can go to the next destination and are supported to do that. And HR’s role in the transformation, you talked about the conscience, is that HR’s main role in the transformation? Obviously you talked about data and surveying as well, how would you articulate that?
Lisa Chang: Yes, I mean, I have a personal passion around that topic, but I think the conscience is really driven by the CEO, the ELT, the board, that is what we stand for and a lot of that is also baked into our history of who we are as a corporate citizen.
And so where I see HR’s role is, the translation of our conscience and our purpose into our people programs. So when we say we want to make a difference, when we say we want to ensure a diverse and inclusive environment, or that we respect diversity, or that we promote accountability, or that we want people to operate in an agile way, that has to be translated into how we operate with our people. Not only through people processes, but how we communicate in the way we lead our culture. I take that responsibility very seriously, to be the steward of making sure that what we have identified as our conscience and our culture, is embedded in everything that we do. I am not a believer that culture and purpose and all of that, is a HR thing because it will never sustain itself if it is not embedded into how we operate in the business strategy. So fortunately with our leadership team and with our CEO and our board, we have maintained the elevation of that as a leadership responsibility not as a HR responsibility.
I play a big role in that, in the functions that I oversee, but we really talk about it at all levels in our organisation and make sure that it is incorporated into not only the work that we do, but the metrics that we have.
David Green: That leads on nicely to the role of the CHRO or the chief people officer, this is a role that has really undergone an elevation in the last couple of years, particularly in terms of visibility to the outside world.
I would love to hear how you have seen that role evolve during your career and particularly during the last two?
Lisa Chang: So definitely what I have seen, this is my third role as a CHRO, what I would say is the responsibilities that we have had, which include being a counsellor and a coach to the leadership team and being focused on talent and leadership and succession, remain, but I think there is an amplified responsibility in the space. It is no longer a, nice to have, or a check the box, or let's make sure we do these things.
When it comes to succession planning, many organisations I have been part of always did succession planning and they were pretty extensive processes with, back in the day, big notebooks and binders and all this. They were plans on paper. But when it came time to execute the succession plan, the books were really not helpful because what you found out is, the plans that you had on paper weren't actually executable, or the talent that was identified for the purposes of satisfying the succession plan were really not feasible successors. So what we have done and what I think has become a really important responsibility of the CHRO over the last several years, is operationalising succession planning to the point that there is an operationally feasible plan, that if something happens and a transition happens, the plan works, right? Not just, here is a list of people that we said could be on the job and then when it comes, oh, we are going to do an outside search.
So I think that is critically important.
What I have found is the board is very focused on ensuring the feasibility of that plan, because the sustainability of leadership and the ability to take the company forward, is heavily reliant on having successors built in. They have been much more vocal about making sure that these plans are not just on paper, but if we were to operationalise it, what could we actually do and by when?
So I see that as being something that I talked a lot to my peers in the marketplace too, I think that is something that we have all been focused on. I think the other thing is similarly, it is nice to talk about DE&I but we have to operationalise it the same way. So the focus on us has been, how do we do that? And how do we operationalise it, not just in HR practices, but across the business?
And because of the focus of investors, shareholders, the board, and ESG, it has become, again, a much more important aspect of our role as HR leaders, is to ensure that our organisations not only have programs but that we are actually executing on it and that the results are there and we can see movement in this space.
We have lots of investors of ours that will ask to get a briefing on our DE&I plans, they want to know that what we are doing and what we are saying, is actually being performed within our company.
We recently announced that we are linking executive compensation to ESG, so those are the types of things that I think you will expect more of in the future and those of us that lead the function are required to really keep that at the top of the leadership agenda.
David Green: And I know you have got a burgeoning people analytics function at Coca-Cola and obviously it is a passion for me, as you know.
What has been the role of data in those two areas around succession planning and around embedding DE&I?
Lisa Chang: I am extremely proud of the work that we are doing. It is a journey. I think what has come, you have probably experienced this, but what has come really to fruition for me is the investments that we need to make, in capturing people analytics. We have all kinds of systems that capture customer data, sales data, financial data, but the people data is you know, oftentimes you scratch your head like why don't we have this data? And it is just the investment.
So we are a little bit behind, as a HR function across industries, on that but I think we are making progress. So a couple of things I would say is that during the re-organisation or the transformation of the company in 2020, people analytics and insights with talent, played a really critical role in our ability to appoint leaders in the company.
So when we restructured and re-organised, we reappointed and/or appointed 200 plus of our senior leaders. We literally went through seat by seat and we said, is this the best person for the role, et cetera. All of those, what we call people selection forums, were informed by data.
So obviously people came with their perceptions of so-and-so is good for this job, and they have done better here, et cetera and that was obviously input as well, but we had tons of data.
We had assessment data, we had employee engagement data, we had performance enablement, which is our performance management, upward feedback data.
We had all of this data with us and we were really kind of testing, does the audio match the visual? If we are seeing something, does the data back it up? If they are really focused on developing people and promoting people, are they doing regular feedback sessions with their talent? Are they giving them what they need? Are their engagement levels high? Do they support their people? Is it matching?
So our ability to have that data has been critical in our ability to appoint leaders into roles.
And while it is not perfect, because we are still refining the way we capture data, overwhelmingly, it has been successful. We have determined that the people we have put in jobs are accelerating to the levels of leadership that we would expect them to accelerate and they are showing the behaviours that we want them to see.
A really interesting insight that we did is, we took the data, so all that data that I mentioned to you, and we took a snapshot of that cohort of leaders in the organisation. We then did the same thing for the senior most people in the company. What we found is the leaders that were next in the pipeline, were actually better equipped to be leaders of the future based on the competencies and the future of our business, than the existing leadership team. They had sort of naturally, a focus on leading through people whereas our people at the senior level were focused on leading the business. And so that was a really telling way for us to say, hey, what got you here, won't get you there and what we need to do is make sure that we are putting leaders in place that can take us to the next level. So that has been really, really helpful on our talent front.
On the DEI front, we are spending quite a bit of time moving beyond representation. So we have had lots of data that tells us what is our cut of data for gender, ethnicity, et cetera and we are now putting it towards trending lines. And it is a three-legged stool, you have got recruitment, retention and growth, so we have to figure out how we are doing in all three.
The data that we are starting to put together now is multidimensional. You can't just only recruit diverse talent and you can't just only promote diverse talent, you have to do all three.
So our data is becoming more robust. We are really starting to try to figure out where do we move the needle. We are starting to see the places where there is a little bit of a ceiling and we are starting to try to figure out, how do we break that down? For example, in some parts of our organisation, tenure is long and so senior roles don't open very frequently. And so you see that we have diverse and/or gender talent in the pipeline, but then they fall off because the seats are not coming open. So then we ask ourselves the question, okay, what do we do? How do we give those people experiences until such time that we could put them in the job? Or, is there another role that we can put them in that grows them equally? So, for all of that I think it is important to have the data and the insights to make those informed decisions. You can do it based on gut, but when you have the data it is far more compelling.
David Green: Yeah, definitely, definitely. We will probably come back to more data injected questions or data driven questions a little bit later. I think we are going to talk about HR skills, so I think it might come up there.
I know as well as being the Chief People Officer, you are also a board advisor. What do you think that boards of companies, as well as CEOs, expect from HR today and how are you making sure that HR delivers what the business needs are at Coca-Cola?
Lisa Chang: Yes, I do have the great fortune of serving on an external board, as well as several nonprofits. I would say on the external board, it is interesting to see what is being asked for when the tables are turned and what I ask for as the board advisor versus the management team, but it is a lot of the same things that we have talked about. It is making sure that we are focused on diverse hiring practices and as they are bringing new talent in, that we are making sure that we have a diverse slate.
It is making sure that there is a purpose, values, and a culture, that is indicative of the business.
The board that I am on, we hired a new CEO. One of the first conversations I had with him as he joined as CEO and from my board seat, was me asking him the question, what is your perspective on culture? How are you planning to drive culture in your organisation? And what does that look like?
We are also focused heavily on making sure that the engagement levels are there.
The biggest challenge that we all have, I know you spent quite a bit of time on this now, is what does this hybrid work world look like and how do we get people operating back in-person, with respect to hybrid? And, how do you keep that level of engagement high, while bringing people together, when 70% of the people are still saying they have no interest in coming back into an office?
So some of the conversations I have had, with the company that I advise is, what is the balance? That company is very different than our company in that they have a lot more feet on the street, they have service advisors and people that have to go into the homes, and there are things in those roles you can't do virtually, so how do we address the needs and concerns that they might have, for the needed flexibility that they want, while meeting the business objectives?
Then I think, to go back to the ESG, we are asking lots of questions about not only diversity, but sustainability and what is the company's plan to ensure that we minimise the footprint through their business.
So, it is a lot of the same topics. Leadership and succession is extremely important and making sure that there is a viable path for the future.
David Green: Well, one could say that being chief people officer is a good grooming for being the CEO actually, we have seen Leena Nair, obviously take the CEO role at Chanel after a very successful stint as cheif people officer at Unilever.
A lot of the topics that are coming up on the boards now, are people topics effectively, it is quite interesting. We talked about the major transformation that Coca-Cola has undergone and how that happened in parallel with the pandemic and the social justice crisis.
I would love to hear what the impact has been on the company culture, again maybe bringing in some of the challenges around hybrid as well. I guess every time there is a transformation, there has to be to some extent, a cultural transformation as well. I would love to hear a little bit more about that.
Lisa Chang: So, as I mentioned, we have been on a journey for the last several years, that our chairman and CEO started when he was president and COO, to move our organisation to what we call, a more networked organisation.
Coca-Cola has been around for 135 years. We have been pretty set in the way that we operate. We go back and forth between centralised, decentralised, centralised, decentralised, but for the most part, there are roles.
We have business units, it is a pretty established hierarchy and way of working and it has worked, right. We have been successful for 135 years.
This transformation that we have been on has really been about breaking down some of the negative aspects of hierarchies and structures, which has been one of creating scalability and joint and shared success.
So what is successful in Europe, might not work in Latin America, might not work in the US, and so we created sort of customised business to address all of those.
But as time has gone on, the world has become a much more shared and collective space and what we have discovered is that having 200 different ways of addressing innovation, marketing, and shared services and it doesn't make a lot of sense 1] financially, because you are just replicating cost structure, but secondly, you are not benefiting from what is the most beneficial aspects of working in a network, which is shared best practices. We are arguably one of the best CPG marketing companies in the world, but yet we have all these different marketing campaigns that are created around the world, when we could really just leverage the power that we have and push it out. So we have taken it away from what was previously called centralised, because that has a negative connotation and we have instead created, the networked way of working, which is we really want everybody to share in the success and what do we bring to the table that allows us to scale things across the world? Same thing as on the people programs, as well as how we are doing marketing as well as how we are doing some of our other functions. But it is really taking that mentality of, corporate tells me what to do, to, what is the best way to do it. Maybe the best way to do it has been created by a business unit somewhere completely different than where I am used to operating, but wow, they figured out a really cool way to interact with consumers that makes a lot of sense for us to do so.
That has been, I think, the most encouraging part of our transformation in our culture, which is getting people away from this mentality of this is my lane and that is your lane, in to what we call “water polo”. We want people to play across, we all have a success, which is to get to the goal, but it is not like you have to stay in your lane, the goal is just to get it to the goal.
And so I think that has been a successful part of our journey and part of what we are trying to do to move the needle along. I think the other part of our culture is one of this leadership transparency and authenticity. So because we are what I would say, a very traditional company by history, there has been a very traditional way of leadership. There are the leaders and the people do what the leaders say, right.
And so we are moving that as well into one of leaders provide the guidance and the direction, but the execution really needs to be owned and held accountable at the business level. So it is not do this because the chairman and CEO said it, but it is like, okay, the chairman and CEO asked an interesting question. What does that look like in our business unit and how might we solve that problem?
That I think, has required us to put in place leaders that can be authentic and transparent and human, right? So it is not this, oh, here comes the leader and everybody stands in line and is on their best behaviour. It is, how can I ask questions that help us raise it to the different level?
What I have seen has been amazing, our CEO and our leadership team have made themselves very accessible through town halls, other Q&A functions, and on market visits and people are opening up to this notion of, our leaders are people too and they have the best interests of our business, so let me ask the question.
What is not happening is, it is the end of your career if you ask a challenging question. Instead, it is kind of like, wow, that is a really good question. We don't know the answer to that, but let us think about how we might solve that question.
David Green: Because of course, it is so important to create that culture of trust and transparency as most of the best questions and best ideas will actually come from employees anyway, who are actually doing the work. It is so important for leaders to hear those questions.
Lisa Chang: Absolutely. I think the pandemic has helped accelerate that as well, because we sort of all went to a level playing field when we got into this Zoom environment. So no longer do you have the big executive office on one floor and everybody else on another. We all have our little box and it is equal sized, we are all working from our homes and so a lot of that helped us accelerate our journey to transparency because we are all working from home as well, the CEO is working from his home, and there are lots of things that help people understand that we have the same challenges and problems that they have. I remember in one particular town hall, somebody asked him a question about his office set up and how was he finding working at home without all the equipment that we have in our fancy offices? And he literally pulled out a box and said, well, this is my standing desk. I take this box and I put it down and then I put my computer on top of it and I can stand up. And so, that created a level of humanness that was like, oh, well, he doesn't have some big telescoping monitor like we all wish we had, he is using a box from home, just like we are.
David Green: Funny enough, my Mac is actually perched on top of a box at the moment, on my desk and my kids have just come home from school so I am actually very nervous that they are going to walk through the door, even though there is a sign on the door saying recording in session.
And what do you think the impact has been on employee wellness and employee experience, given all the recent changes? It certainly sounds like because you have taken that kind of employee centric approach, all the change that has gone on, I presume it has been good and obviously you have been measuring it.
How have you addressed that whole employee experience and wellness thing at Coca-Cola?
Lisa Chang: Yeah, look, I think it is a journey. I think, while we would like to say that we are doing a good job, I think it is still not good enough. Our data is like everyone else's data, people are feeling burned out, too many priorities, too many meetings, it is a cookie cutter of what everyone else is experiencing so despite our best efforts, I think it just is.
There are a couple things that I have been focusing on and just kind of processing in my mind and one is this notion of the separation of work and home. You know, you just said your kids are in the background, we have blurred those lines so much that it is almost hard to physically turn it off because you can just go into your office and send one more email or respond to one more thing. So this natural separation that we used to get when we would get on the train or get in our car to carpool home, is not happening anymore and so I think that is having an impact. It is one of the reasons that we are trying to encourage people, we are not requiring it, but we are encouraging people to start spending some time in the office because that does break up this monotony of sitting in your office at home and then having your kids running around and having no separation. So there is something about that, that I think has been part of the process.
I think the other interesting thing is, I was having a conversation fairly recently with one of our medical providers and they do executive physicals. I was just curious as to what have they seen as a trend for executives in health, over the last couple of years, and what impact has this pandemic had on the health of our executives? She said a couple of interesting things. One, which didn't surprise me, which is they are all losing body mass. No surprises there since we are all sitting in chairs all day long and not moving around, our BMI indexes are very high.
The second one was the one that surprised me, but it makes a ton of sense. Because we are all in this secluded, somewhat isolated environment, although we are on screens all day long, we have no physical interaction with humans, the amount of stress that is being created in our brains is significantly reduced. So the stimulation that you are getting is through video and I am interacting with you on video and for the most part, it is a bit one way, right? I kinda get that, I give it back to you, it is not dynamic, right.
What happens is your brain actually loses the ability to respond to stress in a dynamic active way and so when you get into environments where there is more stress, it is like muscle memory, you lose the ability to handle that stress. I can see this, after a year of working at home and not driving my car, I get in the car for the first time and I get on the highway to drive and I suddenly am like skittish because cars are zipping past me and I am like, where did that come from? Meanwhile, when I would drive in traffic every single day, I have learned to program and process all those external influencers. So I think there is something to that and I think there is something to helping people understand that getting outside of your home, not just for work, but for other things, is good. Bringing people back out of the cave, is good because it teaches your brain to respond to different sensors and different reactions and you can handle stress better. So I think we have just compounded the issue with the pandemic and with us all being inside and working remote.
I am not obviously a medical professional, but it certainly resonated with me and that makes a ton of sense.
So, we are trying to encourage people to come back to the office to get some exposure. We had a big sidewalk sale last week and we had a ton of people show up. Coca-Cola has a great licensing group in retail that we sell a lot of merchandise with Coca-Cola brands all over it and our sidewalk sale is a beloved event that happens once a year, when all the inventory comes out, and employees can buy it for fairly inexpensive rates. So we decided to have a sidewalk sale and a lot of people came back for the sidewalk sale. We have reenacted happy hours, we are trying to, again, get people back to the campus.
One thing that we tried to do, well we tried to do last year, is we had one day, which doesn't sound like a lot, but when you are in 200 countries it is a lot. We had one day that we call, the global pause to refresh, and we closed all the offices for one day when everybody could just be offline for a day.
On top of that, we are encouraging all the different businesses to come up with their own ideas. So some business units have focus Fridays, which are meeting free Fridays. Some have white space Wednesdays, which is just a day for you to think and do work and not be focused on meeting with people.
We also have this new saying that we have been promoting which is JOMO, the joy of missing out. So we are trying to get fewer meetings, it is way okay to opt out of a meeting, if you see there are 67 other attendees, for you to say, you know what, maybe I don't need to be in that meeting.
So we are trying to promote some of these behaviours to get people a little more comfortable with managing their work, life balance.
David Green: Yeah, there have been so many studies and companies like Microsoft, have published about the importance of focus time and I think that has definitely been quite impacted by working like this because the number of Zoom meetings, Teams meetings, have gone up. And I love what you were saying about because we have been cocooned in our homes for the most part of the last two years, well a lot of people have not everyone of course because some people are key workers. I haven't seen any data to back this up yet, but maybe that is impacting people's reticence to go back to the office because they are thinking, I have got all this work to do, how will I do it when I have got a commute to deal with as well? Maybe work will adapt on that as well. It is going to be interesting over the next year, 18 months, as hopefully we do start to return to some office working, how people might change their opinion and actually quite like being in the office and seeing my colleagues face-to-face.
All interesting stuff and everything that you have spoken about today, Lisa, I think is clear that HR is a function that is transforming itself as a function, if we think about it. Of all the things that you have talked about and as a chief people officer, how has it changed what you expect from your HR team? And, what do you think are the critical skills for HR to be successful, maybe even more successful, moving forward?
Lisa Chang: So some of the things are what we talked about in terms of not being focused on delivering transactions and being focused on really partnering with the businesses.
My leadership team, we spent a little bit of time together in January, talking about the future of our function and what was centred on that was the role that we need to play to be ahead of the curve. HR has really always been a real-time or delayed function. Business makes the decisions, they decide what they are going to do and then they get their HR person involved to actually transact it. Right. We have moved it a little bit further up the continuum, so we are more kind of real time now. So it is like, okay, we are making decisions. We are sitting right there. We are kind of deciding, okay, if we do this, what does that impact? So that is good, that is progress. I think we need to move even further to be ahead, where we are actually looking at what is coming and processing the impact that will have on people, culture, and ways of working, so that when the business is dealing with it, we already know this is an issue we are going to have to deal with and how do we handle it. So that is something we have been talking a lot about.
I know that there was a recent article talking about how much more prepared companies were for dealing with the situation in Europe, than we were the pandemic and some of that was just because we have been dealing with crisis for over two years. We kind of knew very quickly the things we had to do, to handle the crises.
So I think our function needs to be ahead of the curve, looking around the bend, staying very close to the thought leaders of, whether it is digital or AI or VR, whatever is coming towards us, what is the impact to our people going to be and how are we going to respond to that in a way that helps move our businesses forward?
So I think that is a big one.
I think coupled with that, is this need to be agile and the need to be really able to move very quickly. HR has not been known to do that, we have lots of processes and things that have tentacles on them. So if we want to change the way we do something, it is a big work stream that takes years to change. We have to get better at pivoting and moving and moving our programs and practices that way.
So we have moved from what we call, policy led to principal led. We can't create a policy for everything at the pace of change, so what we try to do is just create policies that allow us to focus on the guidelines and the guidance of, like during the pandemic, we couldn't create a policy that addressed how we would handle COVID in over 200 countries, it is just impossible, so we said, the most important thing is that we are going to prioritise the health and safety of our people, that is number one. So, whatever you are doing, make sure that it does that.
The second is, we want to make sure people have the tools, the technology, and the resources they need to perform their jobs. That was the second one.
The third one was making sure that we had frequent, transparent, communications and so we put things in place.
Those are the types of things that I think our function needs to move into, instead of the big handbook, on page 267 i.3, you will see our policy on teleworking. It doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't exist anymore.
David Green: You know, back to our conversation about data, as we move from real time to being ahead of the curve and helping our organisations anticipate what is coming, data is so important to that. Both data that we have got within the organisation, but also external data, external to the organisation, which people analytics teams are helping their colleagues and leaders to see around corners, is a phrase I have heard quite a lot.
Lisa Chang: Yeah, absolutely. It is amazing, as I was saying before, because the investment in the people analytics is a little behind, but you could probably go back to humankind from even the caveman, cavewoman days and see that human behaviour is very predictable. And so if we can have the data that tells us how people respond to certain situations, the predictability of that to handle the next situation and/or how we approach things, is there we just have to look at the data. So I think that, that is a really important part of this is like we do with financial data, like we do with whether it is compliance data, sales data, customer data, we have to do the same thing with people analytics and insights, is we know and people are telling us, they are very clear in telling us. They have many more channels today, than they ever had before, to tell us what they think and how they will respond, we just need to pay attention to it.
David Green: And as you said, Coca-Cola is one of the most recognised brands in the world. The marketing in the company is obviously excellent. There is so much the HR team and the people analytics can learn from what Coca-Cola has done, from a marketing perspective, for customers. So, yeah, looking forward to hearing more of that.
Lisa, moving to the last question and this is a question we are asking everyone on this series. It may be that you summarise some of the things that you have already said on this.
What do you believe to be the two to three things that HR will really need to do to add business value as we, hopefully come out of the pandemic, throughout the rest of this year and into the next?
Lisa Chang: I mean, without being repetitive, one pivot that I might say is, not that we don't, but I think we really need to listen. We really need to listen to what the business is saying, to what our employees are saying and test the things that we are doing to make sure that the solutions we are coming up with, meet those needs and requirements. Sometimes we can get a little too focused on delivering on something and we might miss the mark. And so I think listening is one.
I think the other is to prioritise progress over perfection and not be so concerned about rolling out a big initiative or a big support and making it perfect. But instead, like many other businesses do these days, you put out the best solution that you can, based on the best information you have at that moment and you adjust and pivot and evolve as you need to. That is something that is a little more difficult with employees because everybody compares, well, previous policy allowed me to get this and now you are changing that, but I think we have to move that mindset and culture with our people. The other bit I talked about is, we have to move the way people view their relationship with companies as being an evolution, not something that stays in place all the time. So I think those are two things that I would absolutely recommend.
Then I think the third one gets back down to prioritising talent and helping them be their best selves for your company, as well as their future. Because we are no longer in a place, in a space, where employees stay with companies for 25, 30 years. Companies come, employees come and stay with us for a period of time and they have goals and objectives and we of course, want to develop and grow them in our company as much as possible, but I think it behooves all of us, as HR professionals, to develop the best talent anywhere so that everybody can be competitive, which kind of makes the pool of talent globally, more marketable and better skilled.
I think that is something we have all had a very narrow focus on, I am going to develop you for our company and our job, and I think what we have realised now is industries are merging, there is less distinction between a technology company and a CPG company and so developing skills for the marketplace is where HR leaders should be focused.
David Green: Well, that is a perfect way to end our conversation. I have really enjoyed speaking with you Lisa, thank you so much for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast.
How can listeners stay in touch with you, follow you on social media and find out more about your work?
Lisa Chang: Thank you. Well, I am on LinkedIn so you can certainly follow me there. And appreciate the opportunity to be here with you and share a little bit about the thoughts of the evolution of HR and look forward to progressing the function even more in, in the coming future.
David Green: Well, thanks. As I said, thank you very much, Lisa. I am sure our listeners will love listening to the work that you have been leading at Coca-Cola.