Most people who work in our stores are paid by the hour, so every scheduling rule is also a rule about their rent, their studies and their childcare. I would rather agree fewer, steadier hours that people can rely on than keep a reserve of colleagues waiting for a text message. Flexibility should be designed and paid for by the company, not carried by the lowest-paid people in it.
Selected works
Decisions in context.
I
Replacing call-in hours with contracted minimums across 112 stores
In early 2022 about 1,310 of our 3,200 Swedish store colleagues, 41%, were employed on hourly call-in terms.
Store work holds together when the hours people are promised, the colleague beside them at closing and the manager they report to are planned as one decision.
I am chief human resources officer of Bralvinge Hem AB, a family-owned home-goods retailer headquartered in Örebro. We sell kitchenware, home textiles, storage, cleaning products and seasonal goods through 138 stores, 112 in Sweden and 26 in Denmark, supplied from one distribution centre. Revenue in 2025 was SEK 5.9 billion. About 4,200 people work for us, equal to roughly 2,500 full-time posts, because most store colleagues work part-time. I lead 64 HR colleagues and report to the chief executive.
My working life began on the night shift of a food wholesaler's distribution centre, where I was a personnel officer drawing up rotas for people loading lorries at four in the morning. I then ran HR at a garden-centre chain whose workforce more than doubled every spring, and at a coffee-bar chain where the median employee was twenty-two. Each taught me that the rota is where an employer's stated values are tested. A policy can promise fairness; only the schedule shows whether it was delivered.
At Bralvinge I have changed three things that store managers, finance colleagues and our unions each questioned at the time. We replaced most call-in hourly terms with contracted minimum hours. We stopped scheduling anyone under eighteen to close a store. We gave store managers paid shift leaders and smaller regional groups, and closed a head-office team to help pay for it. None of these was free, and the cases on this site record what each cost and who argued against it.
Call-in terms fell from 41% to 14%
Between 2022 and 2024 we moved about 1,300 Swedish store colleagues from text-message call-in terms towards contracts of at least 22 weekly hours. Store turnover fell from 47% to 33%, while payroll rose by 2.6% of the store wage bill.
Nobody under eighteen closes a store
After a robbery at closing time in 2019, we barred under-eighteens from closing and late shifts in every store. Summer places for younger workers fell from 420 to 260 in the first year, before redesigned daytime roles brought them back to 340.
Eight direct reports for a store manager, not twenty-six
Two paid shift leaders in each Swedish store and twelve regional groups instead of nine reduced what each manager carried. Store-manager turnover fell from 24% to 15%, at a net cost of SEK 11 million a year.
Current focus
I am preparing our pay structures for the EU pay transparency directive as it enters Swedish and Danish law, grouping roles across both countries so that store, warehouse and head-office work of equal value can be compared and explained before our job advertisements carry pay ranges.
Conversations I welcome
I am open to a first non-executive appointment with a Nordic consumer, retail or service business, with about twenty days a year available, subject to my chief executive's consent and a review of supplier, landlord and union relationships.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
In the boardroom
Bralvinge Hem A/SExecutive director, wholly owned Danish subsidiary · 2022–present
Formation
Bachelor of science in human resources and working lifeNorrbrinka University College · 1999
Beatrice brought the hours proposal to me with the finance estimate on the first page and her own doubts on the last. She did not ask the board to believe in it, only to measure it, and that is why it survived its first expensive year.
I am open to a first non-executive appointment with a Nordic consumer, retail or service business, with about twenty days a year available, subject to my chief executive's consent and a review of supplier, landlord and union relationships.
