Sum Of Us Is Not All of Us

Last evening we had a great party to celebrate the slew of awards that the FritoLay HR team won at the Asia Pacific HRM Congress. So we had to get our new Managing Director, Gautham Mukkavilli to foot the bill for a Rock 'n Roll party. Gautham has taken over as the head honcho of FritoLay India from the 1st of January 2008. He is a 16 year old PepsiCo veteran who was part of the early team that launched Pepsi in India in 1991. So like all good PepsiCo employees he enjoys our "work hard party hard" culture. Gautham loves to play the flute and guitar and promised us a performance soon. Watch this space for more.

The venue was this cute little place in Gurgaon (I think the place is called JMD Plaza) where the HR team from the FritoLay office had one helluva rocking time. The place plays classic rock and they play it loud and that forces everyone to scream out their conversations.

The high energy HR team had many others from the office joining in to burn the dance floor. Suchitra won the award for finally armtwisting our CFO, Kimsuka Narsimhan to do her first ever dance performance. Thus proving that she can handle all kinds of numbers (that was a bad pun, but y'know the worse the pun, the harder they are to resist).

On the dance floor was Deepika Warrier our Marketing Veep who was in the news recently for signing on Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the star cricketer as our brand ambassador.

We missed having the HR folks in our plants at Channo, Pune and Kolkata at the party. Also missed were the Sales HR folks in the various offices across India ... but here are the rest of us.

Sitting (L to R): Bhavna, Mridula, Umang, Krishna, Mohit and Sekhar

Standing (L to R): Madhu, Romika, Suweshi, Dev, Manvi, Abhijit, Suchitra and Charu

Frito Buzz - True Stories from Life @ Frito-Lay India

This is a quick little Promo of our in-house AV Newsletter Frito Buzz. Our highly inquisitive and info hungry employees would like to be continuously informed of what's happening in and around the organization and they refuse to accept the conventional ways of communication. That’s when we thought of creating our own production house called – ‘HR Entertainment Limited – a product of Employee Communication’ and created this interesting format. Manvi Sarkar, our HR Manager and Amitabh Pandy, our VP Consumer Insights are the anchors of the movie (imagine after we gave him this break, he got a job offer in UK and is now an international star!) and the rest of the characters are as real as it can get including our CEO and the highly enthusiastic women force in our Kolkata Plant. We first released this promo and then the movie was shown to all our employees across the country by creating the ambience and feel of a actual movie show (worx n'all!) . It turned out to be a huge hit :) We had fun making it and employees had fun watching it indeed. Remember, if you are thinking of joining Frito-Lay, do brush your acting skills…who knows you might be our next Frito Buzz star anchor!

Vaisay bhi..Yeh toh sirf Trailor hai...picture abhi baki hai mere dost!!

COMING SOON...FRITO BUZZ 'four'

FritoLay Wins Employer of Choice - Thirst RU

That's not a typo. We did get the "Thirst" R.U. Award But let me talk about our Employer of Choice award in a moment. First things first.

We had already won three awards at the Asia Pacific HRM Congress held in New Delhi a fortnight back. But then this was the national round. So it was a different game. We all keep joking with each other about how inherently competitive a FritoLay employee is. Basically we like to win. Hey I am different. For me winning is not the only thing - it is EVERYTHING!! When we decided to go across to Mumbai (we were apprehensive. Would we win or wouldn't we. It is a tough thing to go to an awards ceremony and then return empty handed. That just sucks.

Well we did win awards. Allow us to preen and strut for a brief minute. The first one was the Global HR Excellence Award that recognizes FritoLay for being an Organization With Innovative HR Practices.

In addition we won all three categories of the Employer Branding Awards for 2007-08 at the national level. These were for FritoLay Division being recognized has having the Best HR Strategy in line with Business, Innovation in Recruitment and the fiercely competitive category of Excellence in Training

We won the 3rd Runners Up award for being Employer Brand of the Year 2007-08 the national round of Asia Pac HRM Congress which celebrated 16 years of the awards. Mahindra and Mahindra got the award for being the Employer of Choice. Congrats M&M. This was no mean feat with "2600 entries, out of which 50 companies reached the finals." According to Suchitra FritoLay is "THIRST Runners Up". I agree. Until we win the first spot, we will remain "thirsty for more"!

Here is a closeup view of the awards. And the awardees (from L to R): Madhu Rajesh, Abhijit Bhaduri, Suchitra Rajendra and Sanjeev Dixit.

Sidelight: Both Suchitra ("Suchi" to friends) and fellow blogger Madhu are diehard fans of Shah Rukh Khan. Since the venue of the competition was bang next to the superstar's house and it just happened to be Valentine's Day - yes the competition was on 14th February 2008, Madhu and Suchitra decided to camp outside the Bollywood actor's house (called Mannat - means a vow made to a deity) in Bandra. They clicked this photo of Pepsi's brand ambassador Shah Rukh's mansion (Mannat is marked with the arrow - and that's a road sign. Not what you thought). Both of them swear that if you look hard enough you will see Shah Rukh Khan standing in the Balcony. Leave your comment behind to let me know if you spotted SRK.

FritoLay Wins 3 Awards at Asia Pacific HRM

Just so you know it first from us. Last evening our HR Team went to attend the awards function for the Regional round of the Asia Pacific HRM Congress in New Delhi. The entire HR team had turned up hoping that we would win at least one of the three categories we were competing for. And then the first one happened...

"The award for innovation in Recruitment goes to FritoLay India...". The rest of the announcement was drown by the loud applause. It was great to see how our Employee Referral Program aptly called "Bring a Friend to Work" (there is a neat video on this site). It was recognition for the great done by Suchitra and her staffing team with some superb work done by Umang and the Sales HR Team with Mohit, Avijit, Dhruv and the inimitable Krishna doing some stellar work in making sure the Referral program of Frito becomes a national benchmark.

The second one was the category that saw steep competition from all the companies - Training. But our innovations in linking training to business strategy helped us win ahead of others who were competing on number of training days and all that. That's Suchitra and her Org Capability team at it. The work they have done in building the talent pipeline at Frito is truly outstanding. We always thought so and now everyone thinks so too!

But the biggest recognition came to FritoLay India came for having the "Best HR Strategy in Line with Business". This award had 600 entries and despite that we were recognized for "setting a standard for the rest of the industry". The entire HR team was delirious and was busy hugging and congratulating each other. A million sms messages were sent to friends, colleagues and well-wishers all over. And the responses kept pouring in and are still coming in.

So where are the pictures? Errrr... well.... we did not take the camera along. As one of them explained, "It would have been worse if we had brought a camera and not won any awards." But we will get some from the organizers and share them with you.

See you in Mumbai when we compete for more on Valentines Day!