How PepsiCo's 180-Day Safety Reset Connected Executive Decisions to Field Verification

The difficult question in a large safety transformation is not whether leaders can announce a 180-day plan. It is whether the plan changes what supervisors verify, what managers decide, and what workers experience during the next shift.

PepsiCo South America Foods provides a documented case. During a 180-day plan, the accident ratio fell 50% in six months across a regional operation that included 7 countries, 30 factories, and 168 distribution centers. The useful lesson is not that a number can be copied. The lesson is that executive attention must travel through an operating system that can be checked at the point of work.

Initial scenario: scale made inconsistency expensive

A regional network with 7 countries, 30 factories, and 168 distribution centers does not have one safety culture in the practical sense. It has multiple local operating conditions, leadership habits, production pressures, and interpretations of what deserves escalation. A policy can be identical in every location while the control experience differs by shift.

That difference is where many transformation plans weaken. A director reviews a dashboard, a site manager confirms that actions are open, and a supervisor receives another message about expectations. Each step looks reasonable, yet the chain can end without a verified change in the task. HSE leadership guidance emphasizes the need for management involvement that reaches the workplace, which is why a review rhythm must include evidence from the field.

The case therefore starts with a management problem rather than a training problem. A 180-day reset has to reduce the distance between what the regional leader asks for and what the frontline leader can demonstrate.

That operating rhythm also gives leaders a way to distinguish a local exception from a repeated design weakness. One unusual finding may need a supervisor response, while the same finding in 2 sites can justify a regional engineering or procurement decision. The reset earns credibility when those patterns change what senior leaders fund and what site leaders verify next.

The decision: make the operating rhythm visible

The central decision in a reset of this kind is to treat safety as a recurring management process with a visible owner, a defined review cadence, and a field test for every material commitment. This is consistent with the logic of ISO 45001's management-system requirements, which connect leadership, planning, performance evaluation, and improvement.

Andreza Araujo's experience across 25+ years of multinational EHS leadership supports this shift in emphasis. She has worked across consumer goods, supply chain, mining, agriculture, construction, and industrial operations, where the same written standard can produce different results because local decisions determine whether the control survives pressure.

The decision is not to create more reporting. It is to define what evidence earns executive confidence. For a critical control, that evidence may include a current risk assessment, a competent person assigned to the task, a verification completed during real work, and a corrective decision that is closed rather than merely recorded.

Execution: translate priorities into field tests

A 180-day cycle becomes practical when it is divided into short evidence loops. The first loop identifies the exposures that deserve leadership attention. The second assigns decision rights and removes ambiguity about who can stop, redesign, resource, or accept a deviation. The third tests whether the control is present during the work that creates the exposure.

This sequence also protects the plan from a common trap. Leaders often count meetings, observations, and completed training because those activities are easy to report. The more demanding question is whether a field test changed a decision. If a supervisor finds that a barrier is unavailable, the record should show who authorized the correction, when the work resumed, and how the same weakness will be prevented at the next location.

In *Make The Difference: Be a Leader in Health & Safety*, Andreza Araujo presents safety leadership as an operational responsibility rather than a communication style. The PepsiCo case makes that distinction concrete. A leader does not create control by repeating the expectation. The leader creates control by ensuring that the expectation has an owner, a resource, a verification point, and a consequence when the condition is not acceptable.

For a multi-site program, the operating loop can be reviewed weekly at site level and monthly at regional level. A weekly review asks what changed in the work. A monthly review asks which recurring condition requires a design, budget, staffing, or governance decision. The two cadences serve different purposes, and combining them usually hides the decision that only the senior level can make.

Measured result: 50% was the outcome, not the method

The documented result was a 50% reduction in accident ratio in six months. That number is significant because it gives the transformation a measurable outcome, while the 180-day period gives leaders a defined time horizon. It still cannot tell us which individual intervention produced the change, and it should not be presented as a universal forecast.

The responsible interpretation is narrower. A regional safety reset can produce a material result when leaders align the scope, decision rhythm, and field evidence instead of treating safety as a campaign that sits beside production. The metric becomes more useful when it is read with at least 4 supporting questions: which exposures changed, which controls were verified, which decisions removed recurring obstacles, and which sites required local adaptation.

ILO guidance describes occupational safety and health as a fundamental principle and right at work, which strengthens the case for treating leadership decisions as a duty with operational consequences rather than as optional culture language. The result at PepsiCo belongs to a real business setting, yet its value for other organizations lies in the management questions it creates.

What the case teaches leaders outside PepsiCo

The first lesson is that scale requires decision architecture. When responsibility is distributed across 7 countries and hundreds of operating locations, a regional promise without local decision rights becomes a slogan. Leaders need a clear boundary between what the center sets, what the site adapts, and what the supervisor verifies during the shift.

The second lesson is that field evidence must be connected to resources. A verification that repeatedly finds the same condition is not a worker-performance issue when the barrier requires engineering, maintenance, procurement, or scheduling. James Reason's work on latent failures remains useful here because the visible event may be local while the conditions that allowed it to persist were created earlier in the organization.

The third lesson is that measurement needs a time sequence. A six-month outcome should be accompanied by evidence from 30-day intervals, because leaders otherwise learn about the result after the opportunity to correct the operating model has passed. This is where a leading-indicator review can help, provided the indicators lead to decisions rather than dashboard theater.

The fourth lesson is that culture becomes credible when people see what happens after they raise a concern. A safety-culture review of operating rituals can expose whether the organization is rewarding visible activity or strengthening control. The distinction matters because a full calendar does not prove that the work became safer.

How to apply the reset in your operation

A smaller operation does not need PepsiCo's footprint to use the same logic. Start with 3 to 5 high-consequence exposures and write down the decision that must change for each one. Define the evidence that will be accepted, identify the person who can remove the obstacle, and set a review date within 30 days.

At the next review, compare the stated condition with what workers and supervisors can demonstrate during real work. If the evidence is weak, do not solve the problem by asking for another presentation. Change the control, the resource, the supervision, or the decision boundary. The difference between accountability and blame becomes practical when leaders ask who had authority to change the condition and whether that authority was usable.

Andreza Araujo has supported more than 250 cultural-transformation projects and worked in more than 30 countries. That breadth does not turn the PepsiCo result into a template. It reinforces a more disciplined conclusion, which is that safety improvement depends on the quality of decisions that reach the field and the evidence that comes back from it.

A 180-day plan should therefore end with a changed management system, not a closing presentation. If the same exposures still require the same explanations after day 180, the organization completed a program but did not complete the transformation. Safety is about coming home, and leaders make that promise credible when they turn attention into verified control.

For leaders who want to diagnose the gap between declared culture and operated culture, Andreza Araujo's work on safety-culture transformation offers a useful next reading path.