As a brand-new Fortune 500 CEO, Zoetis’s Kristin Peck didn’t have all the answers as to how the fast-growing pet health company was going to survive the pandemic. She had only ascended to the corner office in January of 2020: So when COVID started to rev up by March, she was feeling nervous, anxious, and frankly a little overstretched, and figured that the company’s 11,300 workers probably were, too.
So in one of her first COVID-era missives on the company intranet, Peck talked not about typical subjects like earnings or sales projections, but something else entirely: the importance of listening.
The first step “begins with slowing down and spending a lot of time listening to the challenges people are facing personally and professionally,” she wrote. Later, in a LinkedIn post, she shared her own personal story of raising a child with special medical needs, to demonstrate that it was okay for employees to talk about messy realities, and to ask for help if they needed it.
“What the pandemic did was make everybody realize we were all in the same storm, but our boats were quite different,” says Peck. “We had to become very clear about the importance of listening to people, and understanding their needs, and being flexible.”
Practically, that meant shifting to a largely work-from-home model for about 70% of Zoetis’s global workforce. It also meant providing beefed-up benefits like a health care concierge service for caregivers, a student loan repayment program, and improved mental health support services through its employee assistance program.
Peck’s efforts seem to have hit the mark: The company’s employee engagement metrics are “higher than they’ve ever been,” she says, now at 88% and eclipsing pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile hard numbers like the stock price have done very nicely indeed: From March 2020 through Nov. 8 of this year, Zoetis rose almost 38% and is currently bumping all-time highs. “If anyone pretended they had all the answers, no one would have believed it anyways,” she says of this tumultuous period. “Because no one knew what was going to happen next.”
