Ambev promotes growth mindset among employees

Supporting a growth mindset
What does transformation look like for a leading beverage business? For Ambev, it means being more agile in the way it explores new opportunities, from new bproduct developments to new marketing concepts. But for that to happen, the business knows it must first transform employee culture. Ambev is a sprawling organization. It operates in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay with its own beer and soft drinks brands. It also bottles water, soft drinks, and energy drinks for some of the world’s biggest brands. The business spans production, sales, marketing, and distribution. Ambev has 42,000 employees in the region.

“We want all employees to have a growth mindset,” says Filipe Campos, Head of Tech People, Ambev. “They should be active listeners, collaborators, and self-learners.”

Cultural change will be necessary if Ambev is to meet some of its ambitious aims. The company has pledged to eliminate its plastic use by 2025, and it quickly pivoted some of its production facilities to help fight COVID-19 – using its polymer stocks to make face shields, and ethanol for hand sanitizer.

Ambev recognizes that its own tools and processes can help inspire this shift. It wants to rethink how employees engage with the business. “If they have more autonomy to self-serve standard tasks then they’ll have more time to focus on adding value to the business,” Filipe explains.

Ambev’s original employee portal, Click, launched in 2014. While enabling a degree of self-service, the portal proved slow to update. Improvements and new services took an age to implement, and service tickets were mounting up. For users, Click proved a less than stellar experience. “The world is moving fast. We recognized that continuous improvement was fundamental,” says Filipe. “Our Click portal must reflect the business: agile, with a growth mindset.”

Simplifying the integration of new services
Ambev knew that the next iteration of Click had to be foundational. If it was to keep employees onboard with the changes, and demonstrate the business was headed in the right, digital direction, Click would need to be relevant, engaging, and simple to use. It would also need to integrate new services and enable Filipe and team to quickly add new features.

Having successfully used ServiceNow for IT and shared services, Ambev naturally turned to the ServiceNow low-code App Engine to build the new Click portal.

“We saw ServiceNow as the best way to connect with different systems across the business,” Filipe explains. “We want Click to sit at the heart of the business, to connect with our SAP, Workday, and time and attendance environments. “Integration has always been the most challenging part of making Click work for users. We knew that ServiceNow could ease that pain.”

The rebuild was designed and implemented alongside Aoop Cloud Solutions, a local ServiceNow partner in digital transformation and enterprise integration. “Aoop was instrumental in challenging us and guiding us through an agile methodology approach to the project,” Filipe says. “This was not only about creating an improved version of Click, but of learning new ways of working. It’s been a great partnership with Aoop.”

Inspiring change with a dynamic portal
The new Click portal relaunched in 2020 in Brazil, Ambev’s main market. Click now works for all 30,000 employees in Brazil, says Filipe: “We have guys in the factory accessing Click via desktop, the tech team accessing via laptops, or sales teams on the road accessing via smartphone. It is easy for any type of user to find what they need.”

Click now presents a unified service to employees. Functionality is consistent, whether it is a HR or IT request. There is a more robust link between user requests and the operational backend. Ambev has clearer visibility of issues and trends, and approvals involve fewer steps and are more traceable.

For Filipe and team, the main advantage is that Click is now far less static. New services or functionality are easier to add. Improvements to the portal are faster to implement. Not only is this far more motivating for Filipe’s team, but it also demonstrates to users that Click is in a state of continuous improvement – the same feeling Ambev wants to create across the business.

This really came in useful with the arrival of COVID-19,” says Filipe. “Suddenly we have teams working remotely, with a great deal of uncertainty, about work, life, and health. We were quickly able to create a section of Click to keep employees up to date with the latest news, Ambev’s plans, and health advice. It would have been impossible to move quickly under the old system.”

The success of Click, Filipe continues, should not be judged on ease of integration or the rate of improvement: “We track NPS, we measure tickets and the levels of engagement on the portal. All metrics are trending positively. User feedback has been excellent. NPS is now 20 points higher than it was on the old Click, and after new modules go live the number of tickets related

Creating an opportunity for social interaction
Click can and must continue to evolve, Filipe says. The immediate plan is to extend. Click into Ambev operations across LATAM, refactoring the portal from Brazilian Portuguese to Spanish. Longer term, the hope is that Click can become the entry point for group-wide collaboration and communication.

“We’re looking at Click as a social platform. We think there is the potential for Click to act as the interaction point between employees. If we can bring teams together, if we can break down geographic or departmental barriers, then we have a better chance of creating real culture change.”

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