When Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages President Jean Claude Tissot started planning visits to company distribution centers and other facilities in 2020, employees prepared to roll out the red carpet and impress the boss. But soon after his arrival, it became clear that Tissot wasn’t there to be impressed — he wanted to check on how his teams were faring amid the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and hear their suggestions.
AC-CCSWB is a division of Arca Continental, a multinational beverage and snack giant based in Monterrey, Mexico. In the U.S., CCSWB operates seven plants and 37 facilities that supply Coca-Cola products to 31 million people throughout Texas and parts of Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arkansas.
Visits that started on a small scale quickly developed into a strategy to build transparency, communication and trust throughout the organization and make helpful changes. “We are a people-driven digital bottler,” Tissot is fond of saying. “And you cannot be people-focused if you are not present and not understanding the reality of what is happening with our frontline heroes.”
Dubbed Market Investment Days (MIDs), the program calls for Tissot, the executive team, local leaders and office-based associates from every single department to venture into the field on Wednesdays to talk personally with staff and clients. Dallas-based CCSWB has 8,700 employees, and many of them are dispatched on MIDs weekly or biweekly, including people from human resources, finance, information technology (IT) and communications.
“One of the main questions we ask is, ‘What do you need from us, from the company?’” Tissot explains. “And, ‘What can we do differently as a company?’ We want to talk about the positives but also talk with full transparency about things that are not working well.”
Combined with IT investments, the effort to nurture a positive corporate culture is paying off: Sales have doubled since 2017. In addition, an annual staff survey lofted CCSWB to the top of all Arca Continental companies in terms of employee engagement.
“I’m extremely proud that a lot of our changes and improvements have come from the MIDs,” Tissot says. “We are listening and incorporating feedback from our frontline heroes in all aspects — not just in business but in our culture. We want our employees, customers and communities to feel valued and understood, and MIDs are crucial to that.”
One development, for instance, was the revival of an annual CCSWB “truck rodeo.”
At the Dallas event, associates representing all corporate facilities participate in various competitions, such as driving forklifts through obstacle courses, loading pallets and stocking shelves. Contestants’ family members are invited for the fun and games, and the day wraps with a barbecue feast and awards ceremony. Tissot got the idea from a CCSWB driver who told him how fondly he remembered attending a Coca-Cola truck rodeo as a child with his father, who also drove for the company. “The feedback we’ve received is that this is one of our best events,” Tissot says.
Other suggestions are more practical, such as streamlining a digital application to make it easier to use. And when leadership sees what’s working, those practices are adopted system-wide.
For instance, while visiting one warehouse, Tissot noticed signage promoting items that are part of the Market Street Challenge, a competition among all Coca-Cola bottlers in the U.S. that recognizes executional excellence with the goal of maintaining in-stock positions in its warehouses, trucks and stores. “We replicated that signage everywhere in all our distribution centers,” Tissot says, noting that CCSWB recently earned the prestigious designation of National Champion for that year’s Market Street Challenge.
“Everything they share with us during MIDs is an improvement for our culture, for our business and for our digitalization,” Tissot says. “It’s extremely refreshing, honestly. It’s an opportunity to see what’s happening with all the business strategies, new products, digital strategies, and production, and to do good things. It reinforces our belief that when we focus on culture and engagement, the result is extremely great.” It’s no wonder that Wednesday is his favorite weekday.
Tissot, who is fluent in French, Spanish and English, says he learned the importance of employee relations and building a culture of appreciation while working as pharmaceutical merchandiser and sales rep in Colombia, where he was born and raised.
“I saw how important it was to have good managers,” he says. “That’s why our formula is to build a strong culture, and everything is about our frontline heroes. We encourage our frontline supervisors to make sure that culture is the reality at our distribution facilities, warehouses and everywhere.”