Arca Continental Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Lifts Its Leadership Index from 65% to 89.3% Over Five Years Using Activate Nudges
- 65% → 89.3% Leadership Index favorability over five years (2020–2025), with a 1-point gain in the most recent year driven by Activate nudges, 1:1 coaching, and leadership focused development
- 93% of leaders created action plans (1,191 plans with 1,871 activities), directly informed by engagement survey feedback
- 40-point average Leadership Index increase among leaders who scored below 60% favorability, after receiving personalized coaching, individual development plan and one on one support from HR
When CEOs talk about cultural compatibility during mergers, it can often be overstated. There are invariably going to be differences in cultures, regardless of similarity.
What Was the Opportunity?
AC-CCSWB’s annual engagement survey identified three interconnected drivers that employees said needed strengthening: regular feedback, clear communication, and career growth all under the umbrella of our With Respect We All Win culture. Employees were asking for more consistent feedback from their direct managers, greater transparency in how strategy connected to their daily work, and stronger support for career development.
These themes were particularly pronounced among frontline teams, where the gap between what employees wanted from leaders and what they were experiencing was most visible. For an organization where the majority of the 9,000-person workforce operates in production plants, warehouses, and distribution routes, strengthening leader behaviors at the front line was both the hardest and highest-impact lever available.
What Was the Solution?
AC-CCSWB built a multi-tiered approach that combined enterprise-wide culture training, targeted leadership development, and Perceptyx Activate nudges to create a continuous loop between survey data and leader behavior.
Foundational Culture Training
The organization rolled out “With Respect We All Win” training across every role, including new hires, to establish shared behavioral expectations around communication, feedback, and respect.
Targeted Leadership Development
At the leadership level, AC-CCSWB launched several initiatives directly tied to the survey findings. These included a refreshed New Leader Onboarding program, Fierce Conversations workshops to build feedback skills, a One-on-One Conversation Guidebook deployed to all salaried leaders, and GROW (Growing Within the Company), a structured career development program that addressed employee feedback about advancement and goal-setting. An ad hoc Leadership Workshop Menu centered on Connections, Collaboration, and Growth gave leaders flexible, on-demand learning tied to the behaviors most critical for improving engagement.
Activate Nudges Personalized to Each Leader
Leaders were enabled through Perceptyx Activate, which provided Intelligent Nudges. Nudges were delivered based on AC-CCSWB’s Culture Principles, Leadership Code, and each leader’s individual engagement results. Critically, leaders could also personalize their focus areas, selecting the nudge topics most relevant to their team’s feedback. This created a continuous feedback loop in which leaders received timely prompts and coaching linked directly to the survey items where their teams expressed the greatest need. Among leaders who personalized their nudges, 14% selected feedback-focused actions, 11.7% selected career growth, and 2.3% selected openness.
Action Planning at Scale
In 2025, 93% of leaders created their own action plans, totaling 1,191 plans with 1,871 activities based on engagement survey feedback. Plans were a mix of individual team, department, facility, cross-functional, and enterprise-wide. AC-CCSWB shared action plan best practices across functions and facilities, reinforcing what high-performing teams were doing well. HR Team provided on-demand coaching to leaders with personalized guidance to help them interpret their team’s feedback and take targeted action. AC-CCSWB also created a cadence where frontline leaders presented their action plans to Executive Leadership Team providing them the opportunity for exposure with ELT, take accountability about their plans and also to replicate best practices across the organization.
Targeted Intervention for Lowest-Scoring Leaders
Leaders who received below 60% Leadership Index favourability in their 2024 results were provided personalized support including individual development plan, training, and one-on-one coaching. This was a deliberate investment in the leaders who had the most room to grow and whose teams were most at risk.
What Was the Impact?
Leadership Index climbed from 65% to 89.3% over five years. In 2020, the Leadership Index sat at 65% favourable. By 2025, it reached 89.3%, a gain of more than 24 points. The most recent year-over-year improvement (88.3% to 89.3%) was driven by Activate nudges, targeted action plans, one-on-one coaching, and formal leadership training.
Lowest-scoring leaders improved an average of 40 points. All but one leader who scored below 60% Leadership Index favourability in 2024 significantly increased their score in 2025, with an average improvement of approximately 40 percentage points. One leader moved from 38.6% to 100% favourable.
Feedback scores improved after leaders personalized their nudges. “My direct manager provides me with clear and regular feedback” rose from 88.9% to 89.7% overall, including an increase among salaried employees from 92.8% to 93.1%. Feedback had been identified as one of the top opportunities in the 2024 survey, and 14% of leaders chose to personalize their nudges around it.
Career development and prioritization both improved. Employee confidence in career opportunities at AC increased from 81.7% to 83.0%. Manager support for prioritizing important goals rose from 88.5% to 89.4%. The prioritization item had been one of the top five declines in 2024, making the 2025 reversal a direct indicator that leader actions had an effect.
Transparent communication ticked up. “There is clear and transparent communication between me and my direct manager” increased from 89.5% to 89.9%.
For a 9,000-person, frontline-heavy bottling and distribution operation that won the global Coca-Cola Candler Cup in 2025 for executional excellence, this combination of long-term Leadership Index growth, personalized nudge adoption, and large-scale action planning demonstrates how Activate can drive sustained, measurable improvement in leader effectiveness when paired with structured development and accountability.
By employing a listening strategy and leveraging a platform that gives you objective data, it’s invaluable to informing your people strategy,” says Miller.
The Impact
Improvements in employee engagement, retention, and leadership support
The employee listening strategy delivered significant benefits:
Discovery of Engagement Hotspots: The data revealed previously unanticipated issues across different business units that leadership had assumed would be more insulated from M&A activity. “We thought our people challenges, such as retention, were only in our wholesale banks, but the reality is they were in our frontline and branches as well,” notes Miller. This insight allowed for more targeted action planning and interventions.
Identification of Cultural Misalignments: The surveys exposed important differences in how each organization interpreted the bank’s core values. While both banks considered themselves people-centric, their practical approaches differed significantly. “[Some of the people from American National Bank] perceived us to be more process-oriented... they really didn’t understand why we had all these ‘hoops’ to jump through,” explains Miller. “They saw that as an example of, ‘Hey, we can be flexible and nimble when we need to service a customer.’ But for us, it was like, ‘Wow, that’s a really risky proposition.’ We leveraged the data and insights to then go and have conversations with those leaders and action plan around it.” Subsequent surveying showed that this “values gap” had indeed narrowed.
Acceleration of Technology Investments: Insights from the survey revealed significant technology gaps that negatively impacted productivity and employee experience. For example, American National Bank, the acquired institution, had implemented innovative tools like DocuSign to streamline loan administration. However, these capabilities were lost during the transition to Atlantic Union Bank, creating frustration among employees. “For your job to be easy, and then to come to Atlantic Union Bank and have the thing that makes it easy go away... that degrades the experience all the more,” explains Miller. This degradation in the employee experience also risked reduced productivity and retention.
Recognizing this as an acute pain point, Atlantic Union Bank acted swiftly. They worked cross-functionally with their technology and operations teams to reprioritize the DocuSign project within their existing roadmap. This decision was driven by the understanding that reinstating such tools was essential for retaining talent and improving engagement. The initiative had a meaningful impact on teammate work experience, engagement, and retention. “The most powerful thing we heard is, ‘You listened. You leveraged this information and did something with it. That reaffirmed the commitment to the combined organization and retention in the long term,’” says Miller.
Expansion of Leadership Visibility: Listening data showed that new markets without an existing Atlantic Union leadership presence struggled more during the transition. “It felt like the blind were leading the blind,” says Miller. This led to a strategic change in their integration approach, ensuring the physical presence and accessibility of legacy leadership in new markets.
Lessons for the Future
Improvements in employee engagement, retention, and leadership support
The insights gained have now become part of Atlantic Union Bank’s M&A playbook, directly informing their approach to future growth. “The lessons learned from our listening strategy have literally been written into our playbook for future state M&A,” Miller explains.
The impact extends beyond immediate integration concerns. The data now informs executive goal-setting and accountability measures as well, with leaders being evaluated on their contribution to successful integration outcomes. “Senior and executive leadership has a responsibility to support the success of the integration,” says Miller. “Thanks to Perceptyx’s platform, we can measure engagement, where we see hotspots, where we’re seeing risk to retention, and where we’re seeing far-reaching positive impacts.”
Senior and executive leadership has a responsibility to support the success of the integration,” says Miller. “Thanks to Perceptyx’s platform, we can measure engagement, where we see hotspots, where we’re seeing risk to retention, and where we’re seeing far-reaching positive impacts.
Looking ahead, Atlantic Union Bank continues to refine its employee listening strategy, particularly as it manages the challenges of back-to-back acquisitions. “Merger fatigue is real,” acknowledges Miller. “We have to prioritize our investment in time to ensure that we are not losing momentum around teammate engagement and actioning on the insights we had, amid a lot of different distractions. In the instance of back-to-back mergers, we have to be mindful of the future integration but also continue attending to the teammates who have joined in the not-so-distant past.”
Objective data has been instrumental in helping the company interpret feedback and insights, explains Miller: “It is imperative to run pulse surveys during a merger and respond to that data before going into the next merger.” This approach provides valuable lessons learned as they prepare for their next acquisition. Another focus area for Atlantic Union Bank moving forward is leveraging features that support action planning: “[Perceptyx has] made [action planning] so easy, it’s so seamless.”