Following each complaint back to the commitment behind it

The first roster I wrote decided whether a cargo handler at Changi went home at eleven at night or at three in the morning. I joined Serapine Cargo Terminals in July 1996, two months after completing a sociology degree at Ellowmere University. As an HR officer I prepared shift patterns, processed leave and sat in on grievance meetings. I did not decide how many handlers a freighter needed. I could see, though, that a roster built around the flight schedule could leave the same people on the hot apron for the worst hours of the day, week after week, without any manager having chosen that result.

That observation still shapes how I think about people decisions in transport. Most of them are made indirectly. A timetable, a service window or a rate card fixes somebody's working day long before HR is consulted. I learnt to follow a complaint back to the commitment that produced it and to describe that commitment to the managers who had made it, rather than quietly adjusting the roster at the end of the chain.

In July 2001 I moved to Johor Bahru to join Kenarith Coachlines, a cross-border express coach operator, as HR manager. Our drivers were mostly Malaysian union members, and two depots of mechanics kept an ageing fleet on the road. I negotiated two collective agreements and discovered how much a depot depends on a handful of experienced technicians. When two senior mechanics left for a dealership in 2003, roadside breakdowns rose within a month. During those years I also completed a part-time master's degree in human resource management, crossing the Causeway for evening classes.

Haluvere Logistics recruited me in July 2006 to lead HR for its contract warehouses in the Klang Valley. Most warehouse operatives came from Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar, were supplied through agencies and lived in hostels. My early work was basic: establishing who actually employed each person, where they slept, how they were paid and who held their documents. We moved workers onto direct employment, paid wages into bank accounts instead of cash envelopes and inspected the hostels ourselves. In 2011 I became head of HR for Malaysia and Singapore, responsible for 2,600 people and for the labour terms written into customer tenders.

I came home to Singapore in April 2016 to join Merbavane Express as vice-president of people operations. The company was growing on e-commerce volumes and had begun allocating deliveries to contracted motorcycle riders through its own app. That model offered flexibility to riders and to us, but it raised questions nobody had asked the people function: who carried the injury risk, how a rider's pay was calculated and what happened when an account was suspended. I built our first rider-relations team and a written appeal route for suspensions.

I was appointed chief human resources officer in April 2021. I lead payroll, employee relations, recruitment, rider relations, learning and the workshop academy, and I present to the board's remuneration committee. Workplace safety reports to our chief operating officer; the two of us review every serious incident together. I hold no seat on our own board.

The decisions I describe on this site carried costs I do not try to hide. Funding platform protections directly cost more than routing riders through agencies. Taking express windows out of the afternoon lost revenue from an important customer. Capping overtime at Shah Alam reduced the earnings of workers who had asked for the hours. Each time, colleagues I respect disagreed, and in one case the people affected disagreed too. A CHRO earns a hearing, in my experience, by setting those objections out fairly rather than claiming that every people decision also improves the margin.

I lead by asking managers to walk me through a working day before they approve a change to it. The habit began on the terminal apron and has served me in coach depots, warehouses and parcel hubs. It has limits. I am not an engineer, a safety specialist or an employment lawyer, and I depend on colleagues and advisers in those disciplines. My contribution is to make the human consequences of a commercial choice visible while that choice can still be altered.

I now want to bring that discipline to a board as a non-executive director. I have presented to a board committee for five years but have never held a directorship. I expect to spend my first period learning how directors oversee pay, safety and workforce risk in a business they do not run, and how to ask a useful question without supplying the answer I would give as an executive.

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