HR at Coca Cola

Coca-Cola Company has established its name as a beverage retailer, manufacturer and marketer of non-alcoholic beverage concentrates and syrups. Besides its namesake Coca-Cola beverage, Coca-Cola currently offers more than 500 brands in over 200 countries or territories and serves 1.6 billion servings each day.

The company operates a franchised distribution system dating from 1889 where The Coca-Cola Company only produces syrup concentrate which is then sold to various bottlers throughout the world who hold an exclusive territory. The Coca-Cola Company owns its anchor bottler in North America, Coca-Cola Refreshments.

Human Resource Management within Coca Cola
“At coca cola we understand the true importance of human resource management. It is people, not technology who create the company”. The development of this department is the foundation of the company, the mirror that will reflect the company as a whole. As coca cola is a global entity it has no specific policies or procedures rather they have a culture to take into account the differences in cultural, political and social differences.

While interviewing Mr. Ali Cheema we found out that the main concerns of human resource management remains in performance management, compensation, career development and succession planning, job analysis and design of work, recruitment and selection, training and development, performance appraisals, compensation, employee relationships, staff welfare and medical policies. These all practices are conducted by own policies and strategies. The organizing function focuses on division, coordination, and control of tasks and flow of information within the organization.

Organizing Human resources at Coca Cola Company
Management at Coca Cola Company focuses on the acquisition and retention of highly skilled and knowledgeable employees so that it can maintain its top position in the market. It treats these resources as an asset. It provides such conditions of employment and procedures that enables all employees to develop a sense of unity with the enterprise and to carry out their duties in the most willing and effective manner. It also provides for the security of employment to the workers so that they may not be distracted by the uncertainties of their future. These objectives, strategies, policies, and programs are pre-specified by the company, which guides the management and unions in taking decisions. Also they are in accordance with the organization’s mission, objectives, strategies, policies and its and internal external environments.

Job analysis and design
Job analysis consists of the skill set of a job and what are the requirements that would be looked for in a potential candidate. Job analysis largely consists of two products one is job description and second job specification.

Job description: a list of job duties, responsibilities, reporting relationship, working conditions, and supervisory responsibilities- one product of a job. Job specification: a list of a job’s human requirements that is requisites education, skills, personality, and so on-other product of a job analysis The HR department establishes its own job description by getting information about employees work activities, human behavior, performance standard, job context and human requirements and also other information related to this conduct. This information is then used for recruiting and selection process, compensation, performance appraisal and training.

Planning and forecasting
It is the duty of the HR manager to forecast the future needs of the company and fill the positions accordingly. At coca cola the strategic planning can dictate the process of recruitment.

Recruitment process
The recruitment can be categorized into internal or external recruitment. The internal process is fairly easy as performance evaluation of the current employee is measured against the skills and expertise required for the job in question and decisions are made accordingly. The external recruitment process is much more complex. It requires HR department to give ads in different Medias such as newspaper, company website etc. the applicants are then short listed. The selected ones have to pass through proper channel, more commonly known as the selection process. The selection process consists of:

1. Group exercises
2. Presentations
3. Psychometric tests
4. Role plays/Situational Exercises
5. Interview

Training process of employees

Training process is essential part of every employee without training; employee cannot come to know the procedure of work, rules and regulations of firm, sometimes when new technology is introduced it is also responsibility of a firm to train its employees. After recruiting the fresh employee they are trained for three months and also paid a stipend. Training is also provided to existing employees, especially when a new more advanced form of technology has been introduced.

Performance appraisal
Performance appraisal and evaluation is conducted on a yearly basis. Employees are given a set of goals at the start of the year and if they achieve it they are appraised for their performance.

The performance appraisal process contains three steps:

Define the job
Appraise the performance
Provide feedback

Compensation and benefits
The compensation package can be negotiated; HR manager plays a great role in the final approval of the compensation and benefits to be offered by the company. The compensation and benefits package includes the following: Basic salary

Bonus
Medical facility
Pick and drop
Gratuity fund

Work force of Coca Cola Company is in the best practice where there is a great focus on the wellbeing of the employees and their job satisfaction. At work, focus is on the skills and the abilities of the employees without any other focus on the differences which they may have with the others. The human resource practices employ a competitive model where skills and ability is paramount, along with integrity, honesty and hard work.

Employees are the most important assets of every company so it is very important to give them value, time and importance. The satisfaction of the employees makes the company successful, one such company is Coca Cola. It is the job satisfaction which then leads to feeling of ownership, which is paramount for a successful business.

Every company has its own policy towards its employees, regardless the fact it is pro employees or against employees, but the policy does exist. Likewise Coca Cola has got its own policy by which they give importance to their employees. If any employee faces some kind of problem related to his work or any issue that hinders his/her performance at work then he can directly go to the manager and ask for guidance or support. This attribute of Coca Cola should be adopted by every company because this makes the employee satisfied with the company.

We believe that an open door policy is the best policy for employees’ relations because due to this, our employees feel very independent and they know that if they get any problem, they can contact directly to the manager or come to me for any sort of help. Having said that we strongly believe that such policy makes our employees satisfied and it helps generate more work from them – Bushara Jadoon (Human Resource Head at Coca Cola Factory Sihala)

Reference:-

The information mentioned above has been derived via interview session with honorable Human Resource Head at Coca Cola, respected Ms. Bushara Jadoon.

Mr. Ali Cheema, who is Senior Manager at Human Resource Department at Coca Cola.

Some information has been derived via observation at certain departments such as Finance Department and Marketing Department.