Just Kidding

Jayashree loves to play with her little kid when she gets back home after a tiring day. The smile on little ones face makes her forget all her worries and tensions. She quickly starts to finish all her regular chores for the evening and sits down to feed the baby his dinner. "Tomorrow I must close the financial report of the month and submit the final numbers to the boss. I have to be back home on time to take chhotu for his vaccination as well. Hope the quarterly update meeting gets over on time and am able to send the summary to the headquarters before that", she thinks. Her husband enters and finds her smiling on her own and asks, "hey, who are you smiling at?" She suddenly gets back from her thoughts and says,"just wondering about the regular jobs for tomorrow and also that its feels great to be balancing it all. Its so satisfying. Never thought I would be able to sail through it all after the baby."

Jayashree is our GM compliance working with finance function where the diversity ratio is compratively lower than other functions. I happen to interview her one day for our newsletter and here are the excerpts:
How does it feel to be back after maternity leave?
Jayashree (JS): Feels rather uncomfortable in the beginning, since your thoughts are on the baby – how is he coping, is he comfortable and so on. With time, you learn to switch off home when you are in office and switch off office when you are home.

What was the response of your colleagues & Supervisors when you returned?

JS: Generally everyone was interested in knowing whether it was a boy or a girl, what had we named him, what arrangements I had at home for looking after the baby, how was I coping with work & whether my baby was keeping me awake through the night and so on….

What thoughts come to your mind when you decided to go the family way?
JS : Lots of thoughts crossed my mind – to name just a few:
· the infrastructure that one would need at home to look after the baby – this is vital
· Whether the manager would be willing to allow you to adjust the work timings a bit or allow you to work from home, if this is possible for the role that one has
· How to manage career and home?

What kind of support did you get from PepsiCo during this period?
JS: All infrastructure required to work from home – data card, courier docs to my place, send the rider to pick them up etc.

Do you have any suggestions for PepsiCo to deal better with gender diversity / to make this place more female employee friendly?
JS: It would really really help if we can have a crèche at our office to keep babies upto at least 2 years of age. The cost can be picked up by the employees who use it.

Jayashree's phone rang which she picked up quickly and said,"baby ko kela dena mash kar key, thoda dudh bhi daalna usmein" (give him mashed banana and put some milk as well). She smiled at me and said,"time for lunch for baby and for me too. Catch you later. Bye."

Career opportunities for Women at PepsiCo

Monday Blues

I got up from my bed at 7 am….oh my God! It’s another Monday…In another two hours I have to get ready, search for my shoes, belt, wallet, my Yamaha keys (I call it Tiger) and have to reach office…

…..lying in the bed I could visualize how the office would be on a Monday morning…………the large 10000 sq ft office will be fully packed with professionals acting busy, all 7 conference rooms will be engaged with people pretending to have meetings, some at their workstations some on phone, some will be glaring at their laptop screens, a few would be figuring out the way to come out of their weekend mood and a few chirpy ones would also be gossiping in the corridors… oh My God! It’s another typical Monday where my boss will review me on my projects.

I reached office at 9 am. My boss reached at 9:45 am and as usual I am at her workstation with my D630 laptop (my life) ready for all downloads.

I get a call from Vasudha, R&D Manager…. “What should I do for Southern Challengers” she asks me. In the corridor Nishi Malhotra (the happening EA) from MD’s office checks with me, “Which team do I belong to? Southern Challengers or MT Max?”

In HR Cubicle I could hear Manvi, our OD Manager talking with someone on phone (old American accent) “ Avijit, why don’t you update me on Western Warriors Agenda and Sales Achievement Communication Plan” ??????. She otherwise generally talks about CGM (its PepsiCo’s Career Growth Model)

Muralidharan, the irritating Trade Manager asks me “When will I come to know about my team?” And adds another question rather quickly and aggressively “Where are my cheer leaders”….

Why Vasudha from R&D talked about Southern Challengers, Nishi about MT Max, Manvi about Western Warriors achievements and why the hell Muralidharan is enquiring about Cheer Leaders instead of his trade routes….all these funny questions on a Monday which visually has no connection to their regular job!

After getting puzzled for some time, I suddently realized its all about FPL. What is this FPL????????

FPL has created a revolution in the organization. Currently the talk is on for “Chalo Bazaar Day” and taking entire office to the market. I mean the ones who have the privilege of sitting in this air conditioned office in Gurgaon’s upscale Global Business Park, will now have to go to market and sell the product in this scorching heat along with the frontline sales men. In the next two months of FPL, there are plans of road shows, spot awards, exciting month end meetings, website, trip to Dubai, meeting with Indra Nooyi…etc etc.

Frito Premier League (FPL) is a summer mega sales contest of Frito-Lay between May to July 2008 focusing on sales target achievement and market share. Ok, our name sounds quite familiar with a well known contest recently happened. But what the heck! It has no connection with any one of those. It is our own league. The great Frito Premier League.

This contest has been designed to reward individual performers and team performers covering 100% Sales Team spread across 5 teams South, East, North, West and Modern Trade including our channel partners

This FPL contest is an organization-wide momentum with ExCom taking ownership of each team personally and has more than 6800 awards for our Sales and Support Teams. The teams have been categorized into 5 Sales Regions – South as Southern Challengers, North as North RDX, West as Western Warriors, East as Eastern Tigers and Modern Trade as MT Max. Each of the team is owned by one Ex Com (Executive Committee) member with non-sales office employees playing the role of Cheer Leaders (Support team).

Some exciting titles are :

• Player of the League
• Master Blasters
• League Champs
• Champion of Champions
• Heros of the huddle

Hai na exciting ?? For the next three months, every Monday rather every day, I will see each one of our employees talking about FPL and working hard for their teams to win….Monday never seemed to be so exciting before...

- contributed by Krishna Kumar, Sales HR Manager

Do you Engage Every Day?

Frito-Lay India's HR Program recognized for being top 6 Innovative practices in the industry
It’s not too long ago when we mentioned about our clean sweep at the Employer Branding Awards in January 2008. Our guys just can’t sit without making any stir in the industry. Dev Raj Sharma, our Operations HR head was complaining last time around as we could not showcase our Operations HR innovative practice called ‘Engage Every Day’ at Employer Branding Awards since there wasn’t any specific category for such an initiative.
This time however, he had his way and sent his registration for ‘Innovation in HR’ awards organized by DMA & Erehwon and undoubtedly became the only one among us to have reached the final stage after great amount of grueling and auditing by the Erehwon representative. In fact, this practice has already made its mark on the PI world and has won ‘Talent Sustainability’ Award by Indra Nooyi. To give a brief overview on the practice this is an initiative led by our plant HR teams which connects Frito-Lay India with all its stakeholder on an ongoing basis making it a way of life through a 3 way connect:
· Connecting with employees and their families on a personal level
· Connecting with the community through CSR initiatives & community leaders
· Proactive engagement with bureaucrats on community initiatives /CSR agenda

(photo: L to R Dev Raj Sharma – Vice President Operations HR, Suchitra Rajendra, EVP Staffing and OC, Sudharshan Banerjee, Managing Director India Market Business Advisory Board (Jury member) & Suweshi Sharma Agro HR Manger Frito-Lay India accepting the trophy).

A short AV can be viewed on you tube link -Engage Every Day

Our other two entries on ‘People Certification Process and Employee Communication program were also seen as Best Practices that other organizations can imbibe. To give a snapshot, People Process Certification is a unique self paced online learning tool designed to on-board and build capability on People Processes. It has this very interesting format based on Karate Belt System. Employee Communication initiative is an innovative design to reach out and engage existing employees, potential employees and impact external environment to build the employer brand.

The other two apart from us were – HCL on its program of Employee First – where the HR has many flexible programs of meeting the needs of the employee. And Carborundum Universal Ltd (part of the Murugappan group of South) for its innovative recruitment where workers were hired as supervisors in a new factory which was technology intensive.

DMA Erehwon had received 40 odd entries. Some of the other organizations that have participated are Royal Sundaram Alliance Insurance, Crompton Greaves Limited, NIIT Technologies Ltd, Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL), CavinKare Private Limited, IPCA Laboratories, HCL Technologies Ltd, Zensar Technologies, Indian Hotels Co Ltd, Aviva Life Insurance Company India Ltd., TATA Projects Limited, Coromandal Fertilizers Ltd, GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare Ltd, Satyam Computer Services Ltd, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited, Aricent Technologies (Holdings) Ltd and Wipro Technologies

Through an exhaustive round of debate and dialogue and shortlisting , 21 entries were first chosen of which further 12 entries (4 of which are from PepsiCo – 3 from Snacks and 1 from Beverage) were chosen for the third round which was the in-context audit. From these 6 finalists were given an opportunity to present their practices in front of the Jury and a live audience of about 150 delegates from various organizations across India.

Heartiest congratulations to our Beverage division to have won the 1st runners up trophy for their highly innovative and unique PepsiCo Values roll out initiative. Don’t miss how it was done, call up someone in HR PepsiCo and find out. We have a lot more to tell!