Learning and Development

Learning and development

WE ARE A “UNIVERSITY OF BUSINESS” – WE INVEST IN BUILDING THE BEST TEAMS IN THE INDUSTRY.

Our people work in a fast-paced, challenging environment that has multiple opportunities for growth. We support our people to do their best work while building a unique and exciting career journey with us. We encourage our people to take charge of their own career paths, offering personalised programmes that every employee can access. Our leaders are our coaches supporting employee on their career journey.

The best people have a choice – we want to be their first.

We offer an environment in which employees feel fully understood, valued and motivated to realize their full potential with us. We nurture our talents. We give opportunities to people across all functions and levels, as well as different geographies, backgrounds and education. We are willing to take a risk on the people we believe in, even if they don’t have the perfect experience. We have faith in what every person can be.


Above all, we place the highest value in nurturing our people, creating a wide range of opportunities for them to develop, be curious and learn, reaching their full potential. For us, people always come first.

Zoran Bogdanovic, Coca-Cola HBC CEO

 

Apart from various learnings on the job such as a digital and personal learning cloud which enables employees to learn what they like and when they like, we offer award-winning accelerated development programs. 

International Leadership Trainee Program is dedicated for early talents, ready to develop an international commercial experience. Trainees get hands-on experience in the market from the very beginning, from understanding our Field Sales to learning how to create partnership with our customers. They also get the chance to discover our local operations, during international rotations and, in order to develop their strategic views, they are invited to join x-country projects.

After successful completion of the program, trainees are on the path to becoming a successful commercial leaders, with operational and strategic expertise. 

Learn more about the programme

Our Fast Forward Program is a talent development acceleration program aimed at building bench strength for our key positions. FFWD program, which covers selected successors in the company, accelerates the time that talents take to reach the next level of leadership by developing the right mindset, relevant network and critical experiences for that next level. It engages and retains talents by providing them with clear career opportunities within the company and ensures a smooth transition to a more senior role. This experiential acceleration program takes a blended learning approach, combining exposure to critical business experiences, collaborative learning with international peers, mentoring and coaching, and formal training opportunities. In 2020 our Fast Forward programs have been recognized with the 2019/2020 Talent Development Excellence Award by the Association for Talent Development (ATD). In 2022, 250 employees were enrolled from different levels (from non-managers to mid-level leaders), into 1 of the 3 available levels of the program, which run for 12-14 months. The program has a strong track record of accelerating development of our talents towards senior leadership roles.  For 2022, 56% of our participants from all three programs got promoted within 12 months after program completion. Find additional information on business benefits of this program here

Find more information by reading the Fast Forward Program Overview

Leadership Development Pathway is our flagship leadership development program that covers all leaders across the organization. It aims at enabling our line managers to become high performing people leaders. Leadership development pathway aims to accelerate the skills of people leaders to: (1) develop teams to drive results through agile and customer-centric ways of working; (2) manage and continuously raise the performance of the team as a whole - promoting collaboration and performing as one; (3) act as a talent development champion; (4) empower team members to deliver work autonomously; and (5) inspire and drive engagement within teams. The program drives a number of key business benefits to deliver short- and long-term value for the organization. Benefits include: (1) a better employee experience for the majority of our people, as Leadership Development Pathway covers leaders who manage 98% of all employees; (2) higher retention rate of leaders, as the company's investment in their personal and career development is seen as a differentiating factor in their employee experience; (3) improved business performance and efficiency through acceleration of team leaders' skills in role and subsequently their team’s performance; (4) improved succession bench strength and reduced external cost of hiring, as skilled people leaders accelerate the development and promotion-readiness of their teams; and (5) increased team engagement, which in turn leads to higher retention and productivity.

In 2022, 790 out of 999 eligible employees completed the Leadership Development Pathway, with the remainder due to complete the program in 2023. 95% of managers of Leadership Development Pathway participants stated that those participants had improved performance following participation in the program and 97% stated it was a worthwhile investment in the career development. Retention rate of Leadership Development Pathway participants is 5, 9% points higher than for the comparable employee group while employees who have completed Leadership Development Pathway are 2% points more likely than comparable leaders to receive a 90%-100% score in our Upward Feedback survey. Finally, 92% of managers of Leadership Development Pathway rated knowledge/skills learned in Leadership Development Pathway as critical to being an exceptional performer in role while 100% of the strategic business projects prepared and presented will be partially or fully implemented.

Download The Leadership Development Pathway

We asked global Fast Forward programme participants to share their experiences of the programme and what it offered them. We’re thrilled by their enthusiastic responses and to hear how it offers them professional and personal self-confidence, valuable new knowledge, and the great lesson that all challenges can be overcome! Meet some of our passionate participants:

1,303

people in talent acceleration programs in last 3 years

86%

of our leaders are internally appointed

Performance for Growth

Exceptional performance is the key enabler of our Growth Story 2025. We need to be agile to the bone and customer centric in hearts and minds. We want our leaders to focus on performance when it happens and spend less time managing it. Our employees to be empowered to drive their own development. It is not another project or system upgrade, it is a mindset and behavior transformation for the organization.

Our Performance Appraisal approach is aimed at accelerating individual growth and driving business impact. We call it Performance for Growth (P4G). Our approach is designed to empower our employees to drive their own development, and allow our leaders to focus on real time performance and agree on priorities during quarterly check-ins.

P4G includes agile goal setting, frequent check ins, and feedback loops.  Agile goal setting is at the heart of our performance management system. We set regular, measurable goals that are ruthlessly prioritized and reviewed frequently, enabling our employees to stay on track and make progress towards our company’s strategic directions and their own development plans.

We encourage on-going dialogue between leaders and employees, making it easier for leaders to provide feedback and support when needed. It also enables a better understanding of each employee’s professional development needs and what motivates them, leading to higher engagement and motivation. Monthly check-ins are informal, forward-looking coaching conversations between employee and manager, giving regular opportunities to course-correct and get the support needed. Quarterly check-ins are more formal documented conversations to discuss achievements, course correct and agree on prioritized goals that drive impact for the next quarter.

To ensure all of our employees are getting the most out of the performance management process, we instilled a broad range of feedback loops. This includes peer-to-peer feedback, upward feedback, project and Agile teams’ feedback as well as feedback from our customers. Our feedback loops are designed to enable informal on the spot feedback as well as to request more structured feedback based on our values and leadership behaviors. It’s 24/7 available as a mobile application.

Team-based performance management enables our DTPS teams to work in an Agile way. The approach is structured around Program Increments cycles (PI) that consist of 6 Sprints (2 weeks each). Self-Managing and Self Organizing Agile Teams are getting together with business representatives and Vendors to co-plan, prioritize the deliverables and agree on the work to be done during the period. The frequency of monitoring performance is done as per Sprint (every 2 weeks), per month, and finally accumulating the results as per PI (period of 3 months) and includes different levels (epics, features, user stories per team). At the end of each PI, the teams perform retrospectives (after action reviews). The outcome of the team performance metrics is shown in the employee self-performance review, along with any individual specific contributions to assess the Quarterly Performance.

At Coca-Cola Hellenic, we believe that by taking the time to understand each employee’s needs and providing ongoing feedback, we can ensure our employees are reaching their full potential and drive growth. 

 

Learning from each other is key for us. In Summer 2020 we introduced the platform Opportunity Marketplace to encourage and support collaboration across borders and departments. Employees from all our operations are active on the platform and post projects or offer their expertise and skills. Opportunity Marketplace helps them to get the resources they need, to extend their networks, to gain visibility or to boost their skills. It´s a place for curious minds, who are eager to learn from each other.

And so is our Women´s Network and also our Mentoring Program offers colleagues support with their development as well as our internal coaches who help our employees reflect on their aspirations and how to achieve what they aspire.

Gender equality is a global issue and an essential element to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. The idea of the women´s network is to our female colleagues connect, share, learn, empower and inspire each other.  They join the network voluntarily to achieve their potential and realize personal and professional ambitions. Get to know some of our outstanding female colleagues! 

Mentoring is a supporting development activity. It´s a mutual learning partnership in which mentor and mentee assist each other with personal and career development through sharing expertise and knowledge. It is a helpful relationship based upon mutual trust and respect. Its objectives are to support onboarding of newly hired employees to accelerate them to full performance, as well as transition of managers along the leadership pipeline, and support talent to turn. We pride ourselves of the fact that our in-house mentoring programme has been given the seal of approval by Gartner CEB, who have turned it into a best practice case study for the industry.

Coaching helps accelerate your success. It concentrates on where you are today and helps you unlock the potential to do more. Coaching addresses a person's mindset and seeks to remove blockers to performance.

Internal coaching gives a coachee the unique blend of a coach who has Coca-Cola Hellenic expertise and great coaching skills. It is a trust-based partnership between an internal coach who will guide the coachee through a learning process to encourage personal discovery & goal achievement. The aim of Internal Coaching is to unlock your potential and help you become more successful.

And while we encourage our employees to drive their careers, it needs supportive  managers to do so. This is why we have asked them too.  Meet some of our leaders and learn how they support their team´s professional development and what they hope to gain from supporting them. 

 

As a global company, we shift our thinking in response to change. But with 36,000 employees across 29 markets, that's not always easy. In this article for @HRTechOutlook magazine our Chief People and Culture Officer, Sanda Parezanovic, talks about some of the lessons we have learned, unlearned and relearned over the years, helping us drive high engagement and, with that, growing together with our customers. 


HR_Sanda_Accelerating Digital to Enhance Learning

"People appreciate meaningful work - being involved, not just informed, and having the power to make their own decisions.” 

Sanda Parezanovic Chief People & Culture Officer

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