AS THE COMPANY MARKS THE ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF ITS EMPLOYEE RECOGNITION TOOL, COLLEAGUES HAVE SHARED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF MESSAGES OF RECOGNITION.

Sending a note of gratitude. Posting a message of celebration. Sharing an outstanding achievement. One simple tool that enables these and other meaningful moments of recognition is making an impact at PepsiCo.

Launched last August, the company’s Smiles platform offers the company’s more than 290,000 employees an easy-to-use digital tool to celebrate each other every day. And employees have responded — sending over 800,000 messages of recognition in its first year. (That’s upwards of 2,000 Smiles a day.) “Thank you for all your hard work — your store looked outstanding on Friday!” says one. “Awesome job getting our Q3 training done fast and efficiently!” notes another.

“We created Smiles to offer employees an intuitive and seamless experience for recognizing each other,” says Ronald Schellekens, PepsiCo EVP and Chief Human Resources Officer. "Now our people can easily celebrate success in meaningful ways, no matter where they work across the globe."

 

Now our people can easily celebrate success in meaningful ways, no matter where they work across the globe.

Designed like a social feed, Smiles offers full- and part-time associates a platform to acknowledge their peers who stand out for demonstrating the company’s culture and values, known as The PepsiCo Way behaviors. They can also nominate someone for one of the annual Chairman’s Awards, which PepsiCo Chairman and CEO Ramon Laguarta presents to associates for outstanding achievements. There are opportunities to send messages to celebrate service milestones and life events such as a new baby, a new house or a birthday, and special community events like holidays or other important observances. Employees can log on anytime to post a Smile through their desktop or mobile device, then view real-time posts for their team and beyond.

Smiles is one example of how PepsiCo is digitalizing the associate experience by evolving how people engage online, as they look for convenient and intuitive tools at work and beyond. In the past, teams had no centralized way to celebrate each other for demonstrating The PepsiCo Way behaviors — the streamlined platform helps unite PepsiCo employees who often collaborate across countries. Smiles also offers yet another way to showcase the principles that make PepsiCo culture unique.

“Having this very mobile, very accessible experience reimagines the way we can recognize our colleagues,” Schellekens says. “The overwhelming response has proven that our employees are doing great work every day and this is an amazing digital platform to highlight the talent, enthusiasm and expertise inherent in all our teams.”