My name is Caroline Cater and I’m the VP of People and Culture at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) – the world’s largest independent Coca-Cola bottler.

I’ve worked for three large consumer packaged goods businesses over the last three decades, and nearly half of that time (14 years!) has been with CCEP. CCEP employs over 3,600 people across England, Scotland and Wales.

We make, move and sell the world’s largest soft drinks brands, including Coca-Cola, Fanta and Sprite, which we are very proud of.

For me, a top employer has a clear purpose, but also a set of values that guides decision making. At CCEP, we have four key themes that drives our actions each day.

The first is around keeping our people safe, well and valued. The second is to invest in our people at every level to help them to develop their capabilities and reach their full potential. The third area is about taking onboard and actioning feedback. Whether that’s related to how we build our customer experience, or an internal process, we strive to reduce any potential barriers and always ask our teams to feedback to us on how we are doing.

The final area is about keeping focused on the things that drive positive momentum and drive our employee satisfaction.

We have invested in so many great initiatives in recent years. Our ‘Great People Manager’ programme launched at the end of 2023 and it’s an initiative I’m particularly proud to have been a part of. The goal of the programme is to arm all of our managers with best practices and guidance for creating a great working environment for our employees. We recognise that sometimes, when you’ve built experience in a role, you may forget that the best practice keeps evolving. The programme has seen seven cohorts just this year, meaning we’ve trained circa 200 managers and we plan to repeat this in 2025. It has been recognised in the industry, and we have proudly taken home two awards at the Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards, achieving a Gold Excellence Award for the Best Leadership Development Programme and Best Development Programme for Frontline Leaders. Our employees have also fed back on the positive change its implemented, which reflects its impact.

I’m also proud of a programme called ‘Career Bridge’ which we launched in our field sales team to create a smooth path for every individual to receive coaching, mentoring and extra support to help them prepare for the next step in their career. After great results in the field sales team, we’ve recently launched it for our supply chain too. It’s exciting to expand this initiative in other parts of the business and it’s really important for us to create a path to progression in an open and transparent way.

The programme sits under our Career Hub, which launched last year to further support employees’ career progression. This is an employee-led online platform where our employees can network, explore short term project opportunities, search for new roles and build their own development plan (similar to an internal LinkedIn).

We are proud of employee retention in GB. The average duration of service is sitting at 12 years, which also means our employee turnover is very low, sitting at 8.7%. We also have great internal progression; 57% of the roles we’ve filled in the organisation have been internal appointments. This is testament to all areas of the business prioritising career development and skills training.

The main focus for moving forward in our employee experience is to continue pushing our great work on inclusion and wellbeing forward, making sure each employee feels valued, heard, and inspired to continue learning and developing new skills.

The biggest challenge for CCEP and many other organisations is on moving from a task-based environment to skills-based. We believe a skills-based environment will unlock new ways of working, greater flexibility and the opportunity for an even more diverse, creative and multigenerational workforce.

We have been evolving our approach to recruitment to encourage more people to consider a career in the sector. Rather than focusing on years of experience or qualifications, we focus on attributes like attitude, skills and potential during the recruitment process.

I see the future as one of opportunity, expansion and growth. We know that employees joining the work force today have much greater expectations on us as an employer. Flexibility will remain critical and finding more technological solutions to planning our workloads will also be crucial. We also understand the potential for our turnover rate to increase among younger talent if they don’t find alignment to their values, purpose, flexibility and progression. So, we need to make sure we’re continuously evolving to meet the needs of our employees.

Focusing on our customers, investing in world class tech and processes, empowering our people to do the right things and creating a safe space with trust between managers and colleagues is a great recipe to prepare us for the uncertainty and future we will need to keep pace with.

This interviewee was kindly introduced to us by ‘Top Employers Institute – the global authority on certifying excellence in employee conditions.’ Their organisation is certified as a Top Employer.