From a wholesaler's night shift to group HR

Mandate

Build a workforce model that store colleagues can plan their lives around, at a cost the family owners can see and accept.

Outcomes

• Reduced call-in employment in Swedish stores from 41% to 14% between 2022 and 2024
• Cut store managers' direct reports from as many as 26 to about eight through paid shift leaders
• Agreed self-checkout role changes in 58 stores with no dismissals attributable to the lanes
• Placed 38 of 71 colleagues affected by four Danish store closures in other work within four months

Decisions in context

This appointment moved me from running labour relations to answering for the whole workforce model before a board. I report to Gustaf Lindvreten, our chief executive, and present people matters to directors who include family shareholders, an independent chair and two employee representatives appointed by the unions. That mix is a useful discipline: a paper on scheduling must make sense to a shareholder reading the cost and to a shop-floor colleague reading the consequences. My largest decisions have concerned contracted hours, store leadership and the self-checkout programme, each negotiated with unions in Sweden and, where relevant, Denmark. I also lead our preparation for pay transparency. Since 2022 I have sat on the board of our Danish subsidiary as an executive director, which has given me a director's formal duties but not the independence of a non-executive seat.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; I intend to keep it and would add a first non-executive role only with my chief executive's consent.

Mandate

Lead negotiations and co-determination procedures in both countries and make HR support for Swedish stores consistent.

Outcomes

• Built under-eighteen shift rules into the scheduling system after the 2019 Karlstad robbery
• Concluded co-determination negotiations on a new warehouse management system without a formal dispute
• Reduced Swedish store sickness absence from 6.9% to 5.8% through earlier occupational-health contact

Decisions in context

Labour relations became my central responsibility here, alongside HR support for every Swedish store. I led the employer side in local negotiations for the Swedish stores and the warehouse, and prepared the group's position for Danish agreement rounds with support from our employers' organisation. The Karlstad incident happened in my second summer in the role. It changed how I think about rules that depend on memory: a store manager on a busy Sunday should not have to recall the regulations for minors at the moment a colleague falls ill. We moved those rules into the scheduling system. The pandemic period then tested whether our consultation habits held when decisions had to be taken within days. Shopping-centre stores lost footfall while online picking grew, and we moved 120 colleagues temporarily into order picking under agreed terms rather than cutting their hours.

Reason for the move

The board chose me to succeed the group HR director on her retirement in early 2021.

Mandate

Give store managers dependable support with recruitment, absence and performance while the chain expanded.

Outcomes

• Supported 17 Swedish store openings, including recruitment of about 450 colleagues
• Introduced a returning seasonal-worker register in every Swedish store
• Cut the average time to fill a store-manager vacancy from fourteen weeks to nine

Decisions in context

I joined a chain that was opening stores faster than its HR practice was maturing. Store managers handled recruitment, absence and difficult conversations largely alone, and each region had developed its own habits. My fourteen HR partners each covered a group of stores, and I asked them to spend at least two days a week on site rather than answering questions by email. We standardised recruitment for new stores, so an opening team of thirty could be selected and trained in six weeks. I brought the returning-worker register I had first built in garden centres and adapted it for the Christmas and summer peaks. The period also taught me how much a store manager's span mattered: the managers we lost were rarely failing commercially, but were exhausted by carrying every personnel matter themselves, often after closing time.

Reason for the move

Promoted to lead Swedish HR and group labour relations.

Mandate

Create the company's first HR function and make employment practice consistent across a fast-growing chain with a very young workforce.

Outcomes

• Wrote the company's first rules on younger workers' hours and lone working
• Reduced first-year barista turnover from 78% to 55%
• Trained 110 shift supervisors to manage conflict without leaving a junior colleague alone

Decisions in context

Torvika was my first experience of building an HR function from nothing. The founders had grown the business on energy and personal loyalty, and employment practice differed between almost every coffee bar. Half the workforce was under twenty-five, and many were in their first job. I started with the questions that carried risk: who could open alone, who could close, how late a sixteen-year-old could work, and what a supervisor should do when a customer became aggressive. We wrote those rules down, trained supervisors to apply them and checked rotas monthly. Turnover remained high by any standard, but first-year leavers fell sharply once new baristas spent their first shifts beside a trained supervisor. The arrival of a private-equity investor in 2011 added monthly people reporting, which taught me to present workforce data to owners who were not retailers.

Reason for the move

Joined Bralvinge for a larger store network and a role leading towards labour relations.

Mandate

Make seasonal hiring repeatable and reduce the cost of training a new spring workforce every year.

Outcomes

• Built a returning-season register; returners rose to 52% of spring staff by 2008
• Aligned induction across the Swedish and Danish centres
• Halved the number of seasonal colleagues starting work before their contracts were signed

Decisions in context

Rosvalde's year was decided in fourteen weeks. Between March and June the workforce more than doubled, and a poor start to recruitment meant plants dying on benches and queues at the tills. When I arrived, each centre manager hired independently, often from scratch. I introduced a register of people who had worked well the previous spring, asked managers to rate returners honestly at the end of each season, and contacted them in January before any advertising. By 2008 returners made up over half the spring workforce. I also met the Danish system for the first time. The four Danish centres followed a different collective agreement, and their shop steward expected to see proposals early and in Danish. Learning to negotiate in that language began here, under the patient correction of colleagues who wanted to be understood correctly.

Reason for the move

Moved to lead HR in a year-round business with a much younger workforce.

Mandate

Administer recruitment, holidays and shift rotas, and prepare information for local negotiations.

Outcomes

• Moved holiday planning for four loading teams from paper lists to a shared register
• Prepared the figures for three local negotiations on shift supplements
• Reduced summer night-shift overtime by 18% through earlier planning of holiday cover

Decisions in context

My first employer taught me the mechanics of shift work. The distribution centre loaded lorries through the night for grocers and restaurants across central Sweden, and every absence moved work onto someone else's shoulders. I administered recruitment, holidays and rotas for the warehouse teams and supported the personnel manager in local negotiations with the union club. The forklift driver whose holiday I scheduled wrongly became, in a way, my first teacher: after that I checked every rota against approved leave and asked team leaders to confirm it before publication. Preparing figures for negotiations showed me that shop stewards trusted numbers they could trace to the payroll, and distrusted anything that looked assembled for an argument. I left after nearly four years to take responsibility for a small HR function of my own, in a business whose workforce changed with the seasons.

Reason for the move

Left for an HR manager role with seasonal and cross-border responsibility.