Coca-Cola Europacific partners experience of digital transformation in Australia

Anna Tregurtha, Coca-Cola Europacific partners (CCEP) experience manager in Australia, tells a story of when she worked in Europe. She spoke about visiting one of CCEP’s supply sites in Barcelona when the business was in the throes of setting up a new digital process to create ease of use and standardisation around recruitment. Anna toured different sites with the operations teams, talking to local leaders about the plans and getting them on board.

“We met the site director, and I explained the online recruitment process. He stopped me and said: ‘You fill out the form, I am going to do it my way.’ He ran down the corridor and told the HR person sitting three doors down: “I need, 10 operators and 10 technicians”. He came back, and it was done. It was a big eye-opener.”

It's an illustration of the complexities involved when rolling out new digital solutions to an organisation where things have been done a certain way for a long time, and where regional differences and local market practices have been adopted in procedures and processes.

The fact that the change management team were out there talking to employees worked in their favour, Tregurtha a says. “We weren’t being told ‘no’; it became a discussion about how we can work together, and how we can support each other.”

The lesson for anyone in HR, she says, is that it’s important to be close to your employees and your leaders. “You can’t sit in the office. You need to get out there and understand the roles in the organisation, understand what people do. In Australia, 82% of our CCEP population are on the frontline - which are largely sales and supply chain roles.  What we must do on a day-to-day basis is design systems and processes for each role, and not come at this with a cookie cutter approach sitting in an office.”

Around two years ago, the team in Australia began work on HR personas to analyse their working population and bring those personas to life. “It meant that when the HR team went into meetings around change management and digital technology, we made sure that we were designing with all our personas in mind and not just for one or two.

One of the biggest elements when considering digital investment is how to get buy-in from stakeholders. Tregurtha says that involving people from the beginning is key.

“I ran a feedback session recently with managers whom we’ve been consulting with for a year about the digital changes we are bringing in. It helps enormously when we are building our training and How To guides to ensure we engage stakeholders at every stage and that we have taken in as much feedback as possible. You really need to understand what’s working well and where the friction points are,” Tregurtha says.

The modifications that arise from these feedback sessions might seem small. Things such as: Where would you go if you need to update your bank details? Or where do you click to get an overview of your team? Watching employees navigate the system, helped Tregurtha and the team to improve CCEP’s digital offering.

“You are speaking their language, not the system language and building in their experiences for the best possible outcome.”

The big goal this year for CCEP is to open a digital HR self-service tool for everybody in the business. Employees will be able to find and access the information they need when it’s convenient to them on the device of their choice.

“For example, take a salesperson who is out on the road. They might only have 10 minutes between clients, and they have a policy question they need a quick answer to; they can log on to our platform via their mobile and get the information they need. If they can’t find the answer, then there’s a ticket or an online form they can submit with a guarantee that someone will get back to them within 48 hours,” Tregurtha says.

But how does that self-service model work in ensuring each employee’s wellbeing and mental health is cared for? Are digital platforms enough?

“The safety of our people is our highest priority, both in terms of mental and physical health. We have dedicated wellbeing teams based at different CCEP sites across Australia and the world.”

In person teams are supported by systems programs geared to provide information on what an employee can do if they need support, such as how can they get in contact; and how they can escalate as part of their EAP offering.

“Someone might not need to talk to a person, they may just want to go and look at certain information. We make sure that is available to anyone at any time when they need it,” Tregurtha says.

Getting that customisation right in HR technology rollouts and prioritising what is needed helps to bring people in and gain their trust, Tregurtha says.

“Once people start to see the tools and the opportunities the technology offers, they get excited by the possibilities. It’s great when you see that start to happen.”