China – one of the countries on this blue marble that I’ve wanted to see since I was a kid. As fate would have it, I had the privlidge of exploring Hong Kong and Shanghai for almost a week as I traveled out of the United States to meet with our teams around the world.
My journey this holiday season put me in Hong Kong for 4 days and Shanghai for another 2, which was enough time to recouperate from a time zone change that was more disruptive than I’d anticipated, but not long enough to allow me to feel like I’d seen enough of the country to say I’ve really “seen it.” Of course, I say this after experiencing things like the Tsim Sha Tsui Promenade, Victoria Peak, Wanchai, the Mid-levels Escalator, the Pudong Skyline and countless shops within Shanghai.
In the spirit of experiencing as much of China as possible, I spent considerable time with team members that included operations specialists, recruiters, communication and HR directors, our chief personnel officer and chief finance officers and my ultimate favorites, a room full of interns and new hires. The discussions I had with every single person I met revolved around the business that they perform, the culture they live within, and the various aspects of mobile technology and social media they do, and don’t, use daily.I’m confident that I learned infinitely more from my peers and leaders that have been doing business here anywhere from 1 month to upwards of a half a dozen years than I could have simply sitting in my office in the United States.
One of the things I took away was the lesson that the work we do in this part of the world is more complicated than nearly anywhere else – the number of countries and languages alone create a unique challenge for our team members, not to mention their families. And while PepsiCo has a fair number of expatriates that move our business forward in Asia, they’re not a group we typically hear enough from around the world. After a few conversations with various members of our team, I think we’ll be able to care for this gap and showcase some things that both our local talent and our expats make happen every day.
If my job is talent engagement then it stands to reason it’s inherently about helping to educate people outside of each of our organizations about what we do not just elsewhere in the company, but also elsewhere in the world. With this comes the responsibility to help our employees tell stories about what possibilities they’re experiencing because of the work they’re doing at PepsiCo. Whether it’s something as simple as achieving a work/life balance they wouldn’t have somewhere else or helping to get clean water and nutritional food to villages that wouldn’t otherwise have any – these are some of the things I think are amazing and deserve more focus.
An additional nugget I walked away with in China included the adoption of social media and mobile technology by local talent. The students certainly thought it was funny as I shared how difficult it was for me to be without Twitter and Facebook for multiple days at a time. After all, in most cases their country has been blocking social channels like this for almost a year. So when we began to talk about social media and networks where they could connect with each other online, they were both excited and engaged in the conversation even though their options were much more limited than students elsewhere in the world.
Interesting enough was the understanding that while the group I spoke with had social sites like Sina.com.cn that remain accessible (at the time of writing this, at least!) they communicate and receive news that’s important to them primarily through email and SMS messages. Suprisingly, smartphones were not a dominant tool with even some of the more wealthy families due to cost and in some cases, interest. Of course that’s not to say that I didn’t have a tough time prying my iPad from the hands of one or two students at the end of the day!
My biggest take-a-way from China is that we at PepsiCo have many more stories to share and just like anywhere else that I’ve visited or engaged, there are people that are eagerly looking to connect with recruiters and managers to both hear, and be part of, those stories.
