Joe Fuller: The internet has altered consumer behavior, upending cornerstone businesses like the food and beverage industry. In workforce terms, online shopping and personalized experiences mean companies need advanced digital marketing and data analytics skills to remain competitive. How are leading firms reinventing themselves for these and other market changes, including the emergence of generative AI?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. My guest today is Melissa Werneck, [global] chief people officer at Kraft Heinz. We’ll talk about hiring for the ability to learn new skills and how corporate culture can encourage constructive candor. We’ll also address what it means to cultivate a diverse workforce, reflecting a diverse customer base in a changing legal and political environment. And we’ll talk about the challenges of managing employees in more than 40 countries, representing six generations of workers. Welcome to the podcast, Melissa.

Melissa Werneck: It’s great to be here, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Fuller: Melissa, you started your career as a chemical engineer, and now you find yourself as a chief human resources officer of Kraft Heinz. How did that evolution come about?

Werneck: Joe, it’s a great question. I was lucky enough to meet people who believed in me throughout my career and who offered me experience in different sectors and different functions. I would love to say that HR was a part of my original plan. It was not. I am a chemical engineer who found myself working in the people function and loving it. It was originally a stretch assignment, and along the way, I asked to come back to the function, and here I am.

Fuller: Melissa, one thing we’ve seen in our research here at Harvard is that there is a growing trend for HR functions to be overseen by line managers, technical managers, not people with necessarily a deep background in HR. Whereas historically, the function was largely dominated by people who’d come up, spent their whole careers in the HR function. Are you seeing that trend as well? And what do you think explains it?

Werneck: Look, there’s a lot of quantitative and problem-solving skills that are necessary in modern HR, and business acumen is always helpful. The HR function ended up isolated in its own bubble, and it’s opening up right now to better understand the business and having a bigger seat at the table. Bringing a quantitative analytical and process mindset was exactly the reason that I was first invited to HR, so yes, there is a trend.

Fuller: Another trend that, of course, is affecting everybody in consumer packaged goods is changing consumer behavior—where they get information about products, how influencers are expressing opinions about products and shifting market share around. Younger consumers often try to sample brands that weren’t those that were in their home when they were growing up. How does change like that reflect onto your internal processes and the types of skills you’re looking for at Kraft Heinz?

Werneck: We have undergone a major transformation over the last four years, reengineering the company from the inside out. We have put food and our consumers back at the center of our business, ensuring that our people have the right skills to adapt and innovate to meet the consumers where they are, not only today, but where they will be in the future. Agile at scale has played a central role in this journey. We can be as nimble as a start-up—but at the scale of a company who is present almost in every household. And this includes transforming our marketing and innovation team with a focus on communicating at the speed of culture. This is very important. Also, creating engaging personalized experiences. We’re talking about personalization at scale. A good tangible example is when Heinz joined the Taylor Swift Seemingly Ranch conversation after she attended a Kansas City Chiefs home game in September 2023. It has delivered record-breaking awareness for the brand. As part of this evolution, we also built our global in-house creative agency that is called “The Kitchen.” It enables us to have the skills we need internally to be nimble and faster and more creative.

Fuller: I think, Melissa, a lot of people are familiar with the concept of agility. It’s become a bit of a fad, almost like a cliché. But when you talk about agility at scale, tell me more. What do you mean by that?

Werneck: We mean by spreading the concept of the Agile methodology to the whole organization—not only in the parts that were put in place to work on projects with the Agile methodology. We expanded the training to the whole organization, and we wanted the concepts and the mindset to be spread out in the whole organization in a way that, when someone is approaching an opportunity, they realize what is the best method to apply to solve that opportunity and to address the project that they have in front of them.

Fuller: That sounds like it would require a fair amount of investment and training and culture change. Is that right?

Werneck: Yes, 100 percent.

Fuller: How did you engage in that? Because I’m sure companies listening would be anxious to try to achieve that. But it sounds like an awfully big challenge, particularly in a company that’s got a lot of experienced workers, veteran workers, who’ve been around the brands and distribution for long periods and may not be necessarily as instilled with the concept of agility as younger workers.

Werneck: I’ll go back to the concept of personalization. And for the first time in history, we have six generations in the workforce. This means that learning and development needs to be customized to impact and engage with each generation. There is no longer a time of one-size-fits-all approach. At Kraft Heinz, we have created the personalized opportunities to encourage and support the habits that fuel great leadership for all levels, regardless if they are people managers or not. That’s the way to spread out the concept. And now talking about the Gen Z. Gen Z is the first generation to have had full access to the internet and connected devices since birth. Tapping into this, we offered a training in Excel with a TikToker. And when the team first came to me with this idea of having a TikToker teaching Excel in the company, I need to confess that I was really skeptical. But the response of our Gen Z employees was overwhelmingly positive, and she has been back three more times. And I’m also now recommending MS Excel in TikTok to my sons. I think that is the strategy behind elevating training in the organization and being able to access all generations and meet them where they are.

Fuller: Melissa, we’re talking in early June of 2024, and of course, over the last two years there’s been a titanic development in technology, obviously well beyond Excel or TikTok. We’re talking about generative AI. As you think about generative AI, how do you think about introducing it to Kraft Heinz, bringing those six generations of workers along with its deployment? And how do you ensure that it’s done with security and a focus on things like customer confidentiality?

Werneck: We’re innovating across the company, deploying digital-first solutions in many areas of the business, doing it responsibly, piloting first, and deploying the successful cases. Artificial intelligence is here to stay. There is no going back, and it’ll be another major shift in the way we work, how we work. It has the potential to help us to be more productive, and that’s the angle that we are using in the organization. And it’s a revolution also in HR. The approach that we are using here is to put the oxygen masks on HR first, because then we can help the others. The others there are still skeptical: “Oh, will it affect my job? Will it not affect my job? What will happen?” Applying especially generative AI in HR and learning as we go has been very powerful to the organization.

Fuller: How are you anticipating the growing penetration of generative AI in large companies affecting the skills you’re looking for, how you qualify candidates, where you source candidates? Because historically, many people have been hired on the basis of technical skills or hard skills, but it really seems like generative AI is going to be able to augment people’s capacity to work by doing a lot of those hard skills that historically had been the basis for selecting a candidate that’s applied for the job.

Werneck: Beyond the traditional approach to look at the skills that are necessary for a talent to be able to perform in a job, there is one angle that we have been using that has proven to be a game changer: focusing on learning agility. Because the world is changing, it’s changing fast, so the skill and the ability of learning, unlearning, relearning, it’s even more important than what you know. That’s the approach that we are using here to find people that are more adaptable, flexible, and willing to learn to drive impact for today and for tomorrow, and that are not afraid of the change.

Fuller: Those are personal attributes, Melissa—the ability to learn, curiosity, not getting intimidated by things—that I’m sure lots of employers would really value in hiring someone, but how do you assess that? Historically, things like that have been pretty hard to assess beyond just surmising what people did and learned in previous jobs, and through interviewing. Have you learned any tricks about how you detect whether someone has that package of skills?

Werneck: There are assessments that can be an input for the recruitment process that we use, and I think they give very good insights in the whole process. But also, when we’re talking about learning agility, ability to adapt, when we look back to personal examples and how the employees address situations that were unexpected in their lives, the way that they answer those questions, it’s also a very important input and insight to the whole process of adaptation and flexibility and thinking outside the box and looking at curiosity and looking for solutions that not necessarily are right in front of them.

Fuller: Another major development, of course, since the end of the pandemic has been a broader adoption of hybrid work, remote work, which puts some new pressures on managers and employees to develop new skills and collaboration, collaborating remotely, not relying on management by wandering around. How are you accommodating the move to hybrid? And how are you ensuring that in this new configuration of work you’re getting the levels of collaboration and integration and thinking that are necessary to succeed?

Werneck: I think there is an important element in your question that is company culture. And the company culture is one of the key differentiators for each company. We created a unique culture with ownership at the center that empowers our employees to make the greatest impact where people’s agility and ambitions are encouraged and rewarded. As you said, where we work has forever changed. This also means how we work has forever changed it. We here, we chose an approach to be three days at the office. And in the beginning of the pandemic, we stopped, and we looked at each other, and we discussed it a lot. What is the purpose of the office? The conclusion for us is that the purpose of our offices is collaboration. We want our offices to be viewed as collaboration spaces that can really foster creativity and innovation. With that, we took the call at that time to renovate our offices. A lot of companies, they were reducing real estate, they were downsizing. No, in some places we even increased the real estate because we realized that the setup that we had before didn’t foster collaboration. I’m very happy that we did that, because it has been very helpful in our innovation agenda, creativity, and the way that our employees work together.

Fuller: Melissa, you’ve used the phrase “ownership culture.” How do you define that? And how does it manifest itself in cultural attributes, in things you’re looking for in recruits, in things you’re providing by way of feedback to people when they’re going through a professional development cycle?

Werneck: The way we view ownership mentality is exactly the encouragement of employees making decisions every single day as if the company was their company. You have discussions about the short term, the midterm and the long term. You interact with people building the company of the future and developing people that are in your teams—but not only in your teams, in your peers’ teams, as well. You give an opinion about something that is not part of your area. It’s not that you show up, you do your job, you receive your paycheck, and you see things happening in other areas and you think, “No, it’s not my problem, it’s not my area.” This ownership-centric culture ends up influencing a lot the way we hire people, the profile of the people that we choose, the development tools that we have in place, and also, the way that we set up the incentives and rewards in the company.

Fuller: Melissa, you talked about changing incentives, changing the way people feel about the company. It sounds like that, first of all, requires the company to have a culture of psychological safety where people can ask questions about things that are outside their scope of responsibility or maybe even challenge people’s judgments or ideas, even though they may not be expert. Can you give me a little more detail about how you’ve worked to instill the confidence to behave in that way and how you’ve changed incentives so that people embrace that willingly, not just as a principle that might be mentioned to them but isn’t really driving their behavior?

Werneck: I love that you’re asking the question. And we believe a lot in leading by example. When the employees, they are able to watch conversations among senior leaders in this direction and people not avoiding the positive and healthy conflict and having a debate about what is better for the organization, it permeates the organization. We always encourage everyone to speak up. Because good ideas, they come from everywhere. We are all consumers. We are a consumer goods company, so we are all consumers. Everybody can have an opinion about what we do as a company. There is one point on incentives that is a very tangible: as an example, the way we lead our benefits. We used to have one-size-fits-all healthcare provider. We started to debate, and we said, “Look, that’s not working, because we are over-insuring some people, and we are under-insuring other people. We needed to think about a healthcare provider and a healthcare plan that can provide different choices for people that they will select.” We changed it, and now we have different options. And we tell the employees, “Look, as owners, you will analyze this. It’s your benefit, it’s the benefit of your family, and you’ll make a choice according to what is better for you in the moment of your life.” And we measure it. Our engagement survey has questions related to that to exactly see if we are improving, and we are keeping what is important as a foundation of the company. That affects inclusion, as well. For the first time, we achieved a top-quartile result in inclusion in our last survey, and we are very happy about that, because speaking up, being heard, it’s a very important element of inclusion.

Fuller: It certainly is, and something that many big companies are beginning to wrestle with at this point is the aftermath of the Supreme Court finding about university admissions in the United States that seems to have direct relevance to policies companies have adopted over the last 10, 15, 20 years to enhance their diversity, equity, inclusion, hiring, and advancement programs. Is that something you’re concerned about? And how do you see responding to what seems to be a less friendly, less tolerant legal environment for implementing policies like that?

Werneck: Like any other company, we are navigating cultural and political events. But this hasn’t changed our approach to diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Here at Kraft Heinz, one of our core values is we demand diversity. Being a consumer goods company, we need to be diverse to innovate and transform so we can meet the needs of our employees and our consumers. If our workforce truly represents our consumer base, it’s better for the business. In order to demand diversity—it’s one of our values—we need to create an environment that supports inclusion and belonging, and we continue to do that. We also have a global inclusion council that is a cross-functional group of leaders that are responsible for creating the strategy and also providing governance oversight and reporting on our efforts and initiatives. And also, our inclusion council has board members that are part of it. The inclusion council gives the path and strategy for us to deliver on our objectives.

Fuller: Well, I think a lot of our listeners think of Kraft Heinz as, first and foremost, a U.S.-based company, but you have global operations. And, of course, in your equity structure, your ownership structure, there’s a strong Brazilian multinational presence. How do you extend these programs—whether it’s an ownership culture or working hard to sustain high levels of engagement, inclusion, in the company—to your foreign operations?

Werneck: We have employees in more than 40 countries. Overall, we want to make the company feel smaller. It’s big, it’s spread all over the world, but we want the employees to have this feeling that we are all in one conference room together. One way we are doing this is ensuring that our hybrid and in-person developed programs have representation from not only different functions within a country, but also different geographies. Our business has a mix of developed countries, emerging countries, countries that have had our brands for many, many, many years, more than 100 years, countries that we have just started to operate in. Our employees really can learn from each other. We have seen participants form global connections and bonds that encourage knowledge sharing and problem solving with agility. Previously, they have been isolated within a function or a certain geography around the world. We also encourage people to have assignments in different geographies, beyond only having assignments in different functions. Like what happened in my career, that has been very, very powerful for the organization. And as I mentioned before, our corporate university—that we call “Ownerversity”—is a platform that is another example of how we are personalizing those experiences in order to democratize training and learning and create this bond, this connection among all employees around the world. My goal is for our people not to go to a search engine when they want to learn about something, I want them to go to our platform. I want them to go to our Ownerversity.

Fuller: Well, Melissa, it’s hard to imagine that the domain of HR will face as many challenges and as quick a rate of change as has unfolded in the last five to 10 years. As you think about the future, what are you focused on? What challenges are you anticipating? Are there going to be additional disruptions to the system that you think HR is going to be central at responding to?

Werneck: We talked a little bit about it when we were discussing artificial intelligence and generative AI. That keeps me awake at night. It’s still early days and there are a lot of ethical and regulatory considerations that need to be in place before we see widespread adoption, but we have to crack the code, because it increases productivity, it helps people to spend time on strategic thinking and scenario testing instead of tasks that now the technology can perform. Another element, as I said as well, is the fact that we have the six generations in the workforce, and how you can adapt fast and meet them where they are, instead of implementing one-size-fits-all solutions. Now, we think about standardization, we think about simplification; that is important, but some sort of personalization, it’s important as well.

Fuller: What you just said has a couple of interesting implications. You analogize between customization for customers, individualization. You use the example of the healthcare benefits being too standardized and not reflecting the different stages of life that people are in. Do you see the evolution of your working relationships with employees? Rather than there being kind of the standard, “We have full-time employees, we have part-time employees,” that it’s going to be more graduated, it’s going to have different core characteristics, and there may be 6, 8, 10 different patterns of work within the company to reflect those differences across the six generations and different cultures and the further implementation of technology.

Werneck: We also have now the element of gig workers that are willing to work on projects, but they don’t want to have a full-time job. Yes, the organizations will have to learn how to deal with all of that and how to create incentives, compensation, development, collaboration tools in order to be able to capture all that. It’s an amazing opportunity to be, it’s an amazing moment to be in HR. Those who are in HR nowadays, we are very lucky, because we are seeing the revolution with regenerative AI, we are seeing the evolution on how we work, where we work, how we collaborate. Interesting times.

Fuller: Well, Melissa, I think that is, in fact, undeniable. It’s been a fascinating, interesting, and challenging time for HR executives. Thanks for sharing your experiences at Kraft Heinz with us and the Managing the Future of Work podcast audience.

Werneck: Thanks for having me. It was an amazing conversation. Thank you.

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