OSA Is a Team Sport: How Hershey Keeps Candy On Shelves During Its Super Bowl
The Hershey Company’s cross-functional volunteer program that provides insight into a day in the life of a retail field team has grown to more than 2,000 total participants, helping the CPG not only keep products on shelves during Halloween but also bolster its talent pipeline.
Known as Helping Hands, the program pairs employees from across the company with Hershey retail teams to show what it’s like in the field during its busiest times of year. This exposure to other functions has provided retail team members with access to senior leaders, and it’s resulted in new ideas for products, merchandising, and marketing, according to a company blog post.
Hershey’s territory sales leads are responsible for sharing consumer insights with retailers, as well as optimizing the display campaigns through augmented reality and 3D content with Adobe. More than 550 employees participated in the 2023 program — a record for Helping Hands — pulling in employees from engineering, supply chain, packaging, sales, and marketing.
While the program isn’t limited to Halloween — Hershey employs it for all of its major selling seasons — it may be having an impact: Instacart reported that Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are in the top three most popular candies year after year.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Exposure to various job duties can be an important factor in recruiting and retaining talent today, and many large consumer goods companies are trying to think creatively about how they can engage employees and provide mentorship. Henkel, for example, runs a program known as HCB University that provides interactive and educational product experiences as part of new employee onboarding.
When it comes to nurturing high performers in CPG, providing a variety of connections can simultaneously help employees acquire skills while supporting their colleagues, Charman Hayes, technology EVP for people and capability at Mastercard, recently told CGT.
“High performers often aren’t content with staying in their lane and want new challenges and opportunities to grow.” Hayes noted. “Connecting them with other opportunities within other teams is a great way for them to pick up new skills and network while also helping those teams complete their projects with a valuable resource they don’t usually work with.”
