The question a claims handler's journey left me

In June 1999 I sat at the back of a works-council meeting in a Strasbourg insurance office while my firm's client announced the closure of its claims centre. The legal procedure was correct. The documents had been delivered on time, an expert had been appointed and the consultation calendar had been respected. What nobody in the room could answer was where a claims handler with two children and no car was expected to work the following spring. The council secretary asked twice. I have built much of my working life around being able to answer that kind of question before the meeting starts.

I studied labour and social-security law at the Institut Corvaleine de droit social and joined Cabinet Delvoisin Conseil Social, a small employment-law practice in Strasbourg, in September 1996. For six years I drafted consultation documents, prepared negotiation briefs and advised mid-sized employers on reorganisation procedures. The work made me precise about process. It also showed me that an employer can follow every step correctly and still lose the trust of the people it most needs to keep.

In 2002 I moved to Morvalten Fund Services in Luxembourg, a fund administrator whose staff commuted from France, Belgium and Germany. I joined as an employee-relations adviser and from 2005 led human resources for its operations division of about 540 people. The staff delegation met in French and German, operating procedures were written in English, and corridor conversation happened in Luxembourgish. I came to regard language as a working condition. A procedure that a team cannot read in the language it thinks in will be followed approximately, and a disciplinary letter in someone's second language is a poor instrument for being understood.

Banque Ardevrange recruited me in September 2008 as head of employee relations and pay, in the month the financial crisis reached its sharpest point. The bank, like the rest of its national network, faced years of pressure on margins. I negotiated with four representative unions, prepared the annual pay negotiation and worked with the works council, which later became the CSE when French law merged the separate employee bodies. As the EU pay rules for banks strengthened in the early 2010s, I helped write our first policy for identifying staff whose work could materially affect the bank's risk profile.

As deputy HR director from September 2013, I added training and job architecture to that work. The certification that French regulators require of certain investment advisers, and the competence requirements for staff selling credit and insurance, turned our training records into regulatory evidence. I moved them out of a spreadsheet and into a register that the compliance function could test.

I became chief human resources officer in January 2019. Two years later the board approved a network plan that closed 27 branches. I argued for a thirty-month programme rather than the fifteen months our finance director proposed, and I lost some arguments as well: the unions wanted nine rural branches protected, and we kept only four open by appointment. Since then we have rebuilt our job architecture for the EU pay-transparency directive and applied malus for the first time, to two managers whose desk sold unit-linked contracts to cross-border customers without an adequate explanation in their language.

I lead through the managers who carry decisions to their teams. Before a consultation opens, I ask each regional manager to tell me which three people in their area will find the change hardest, and why. That list has altered more of our plans than any spreadsheet. With the board, I present to the remuneration and nomination committees as an executive; I am not a director of the bank. Since 2022 I have also served, unpaid, on the board of the Association Trévalmont pour l'alternance, which places apprentices with small employers around Thionville.

Colleagues would probably describe me as patient in negotiation and impatient with vague papers. I would rather present a committee with a smaller change described person by person than a larger one whose human consequences are left to an implementation phase. I am also aware of what my route leaves out. I have never run a branch or managed a lending book, and I rely on colleagues who have whenever a people decision touches credit quality or customer outcomes.

The questions I want to work on next are the ones a board finds hardest to see from its papers: whether pay rules produce the conduct they were written for, whether a reorganisation has been consulted on in substance, and whether automation is changing jobs faster than people are being prepared for them.

Open to Board appointments

Languages / French · German · English · Luxembourgish (conversational)