Key takeaways

  • Mondelez Argentina established a cross-functional Top Employers Institute Squad, comprising senior HR specialists across the organisation to translate their Survey results into action.
  • This led to the creation of a quadrant-based prioritisation framework, allowing them to assess and evaluate current and future HR practices.

The challenge

Mondelez Argentina pursued Top Employers Certification as a means of external validation and internal discipline using the process to benchmark its people strategy and strengthen decision-making at leadership level.

Following its first Top Employers Certification year, Mondelez Argentina faced a familiar leadership challenge: how to convert its strong results into focused, prioritised and sustainable action.

While overall performance was high, three strategic tensions required resolution:

  • Prioritisation under constraint: Not all improvement opportunities were viable within existing budget, capacity and organisational focus.
  • Signal versus noise: High scores risked diluting attention away from specific practices that required targeted intervention.
  • Execution beyond HR: Several initiatives required future alignment with legal, medical, and business stakeholders, underscoring the need for sequencing and governance

The organisation was clear that the Certification programme needed to function as more than an annual validation and actively inform strategy.

Tomás Gomez Álzaga

People Senior Director,
Southern Cone | Mondelez Argentina

We believe the Certification process with Top Employers Institute is a great opportunity to continue on the path of evolution and continuous improvement, always placing people at the centre of our practices, policies, and procedures. With this approach, we ensure the consolidation of our People strategies, which allow us to continue building a winning culture, to attract and develop the best talent in the industry, to execute with excellence, and to drive business growth toward our vision for the future.”

The approach

Establishing structured ownership through the Top Employers Institute Squad

Mondelez Argentina established a cross-functional Top Employers Institute Squad comprising senior HR specialists from talent acquisition, talent management, rewards, benefits, people experience, and HR business partnering.

The squad operated with a clear mandate to:

  • Prepare and quality-assure audit evidence across domains.
  • Assign subject-matter ownership for certification inputs.
  • Create shared accountability through weekly progress reviews.

This operating model ensured consistency, reduced execution risk and reinforced HR’s role as a coordinated strategic function rather than a collection of silos.

Implementation – translating data into decisions with a prioritisation framework

Certification results confirmed strong overall performance, with a score of 95.7%, outperforming the food and beverage benchmark by 11 points.

Instead of focusing on topline results, the team undertook a detailed diagnostic review by domain. To support decision-making, a prioritisation framework based on four quadrants was developed, assessing each unmet or partially met practice against two criteria:

  1. Market relevance – the extent to which the practice is adopted across peer organisations.
  2. Implementation complexity – effort, cost and organisational readiness

This enabled leadership to clearly distinguish between:

  • High-impact, low-complexity actions suitable for near-term execution.
  • Strategic initiatives requiring longer-term planning or investment.
  • Items to consciously defer, preserving focus and capacity.

Importantly, upcoming HR Best Practices Survey questions for
the 2026 certification cycle were embedded into the framework,
allowing the organisation to plan proactively rather than
reactively.

Enabling disciplined execution

The framework was operationalised through clear ownership and
governance:

  • Each initiative was assigned to a responsible HR owner.
  • Status was tracked using a colour-coded system that distinguished active, exploratory, corrective, and deferred actions.
  • Regular reviews ensured momentum without over-committing resources.

This approach ensured decisive progress while maintaining alignment and discipline.

Impact and benefits

  • Improved strategic focus:
    The prioritisation framework enabled the HR leadership team to concentrate effort on initiatives with the strongest return on investment.
  • High organisational alignment:
    Despite a period of elevated workload, teams demonstrated strong engagement and ownership, reinforcing confidence in HR’s strategic direction.

Although this practice began with the HR team in Argentina, it was then shared within HR teams across Latin America, who adopted a similar methodology. Mondelez International is now working on a regional track to share results within LA and join forces on various initiatives.