Attracting, developing and retaining the best talent is our single most important challenge. That is why we put tremendous energy into listening to and acting on the views of our employees. We know that employee engagement has a direct link to our business performance. More engaged employees have better safety records, higher performance, and less absenteeism.

We measure employee engagement through our confidential Global People Survey, conducted annually by Towers Perrin Survey Research (ISR). We are confident in the accuracy of our People Survey in part because it is completely confidential. We are careful to ensure that all of our people can be comfortable and open with their responses. This helps us to create a company where passionate brand champions can achieve extraordinary results.

In 2011, our engagement score remained among the high performing companies category at 85%, and we are proud that we have a very high participation rate among our employees.

We attribute the sustained high score to the momentum of "Our Brew", the cultural guidepost that defines who we are and how we'll work toward success. It is distributed to every employee, and like any good map, we refer back to it regularly to ensure we are all aligned with the company's mission and vision.

Also in 2011, we asked employees a number of ethical, social, and environmental questions. The index of these questions was identified as one of the top 3 drivers of employee engagement.

• 90% believed that the company was responsible in the community
• 89% believed that the company was environmentally responsible

Though we are among the high-performing companies as rated by our engagement percentage, we still have work to do to fully engage our employees. For example, the engagement scores were higher for our salaried as compared to hourly employees, so we are developing action plans to address this. We also will focus on increasing our commitment to leadership development, overall employee education and better communication to all employees.

As a company we are challenged to get more women and ethnic diversity into our senior management group and have launched The Violet Initiative to begin to address this critical need. We will provide progress reports in the coming year.