A career written in rotas

The first rota I ever wrote was wrong by one person. In September 1999 I joined Dalvrena Grossist AB, a food wholesaler with a distribution centre outside Västerås, as a personnel officer. I had finished a degree in human resources and working life at Norrbrinka University College three months earlier. The night-shift manager asked me to plan holiday cover across four loading teams, and I put a forklift driver on a week he had already been granted off. He came to the office the next morning, tired rather than angry, and explained that his family had booked the ferry. I learnt that a schedule is read at kitchen tables, not only at the clocking-in screen.

Dalvrena's warehouse ran under a collective agreement with a well-organised union club. My manager insisted that I attend every local negotiation even when I had nothing to say. I watched people who knew each other's arguments thoroughly still having to agree a text by Friday. It left me with lasting respect for shop stewards who read the detail, and a habit of bringing payroll figures to the table rather than summaries of them.

In May 2003 I became HR manager at Rosvalde Plantcenter AB, a garden-centre chain with 21 centres in Sweden and four in Denmark. Its permanent staff of about 380 grew to roughly 940 between March and June. Seasonal hiring there was not a recruitment campaign; it was the business model. I built a register of returning seasonal staff so that people who had worked well one spring were asked back before we advertised. At the Danish centres I learnt a second system at first hand: pay and terms followed a different agreement, and the shop steward expected to be consulted early and in Danish.

Torvika Kaffebarer AB recruited me in September 2008 as its first head of people. The company ran 46 coffee bars in Stockholm, Uppsala and Gothenburg, later 64, and the median age of its baristas was twenty-two. Many were students and many were in their first job. I wrote the company's first rules on younger workers' hours, introduced an induction a seventeen-year-old could follow, and trained shift supervisors to deal with an aggressive customer without leaving a teenager alone at the counter. I saw how quickly a young employee's confidence follows the quality of the person working beside them.

I joined Bralvinge in February 2014 as head of HR for the Swedish stores, then 84 of them. The work was practical: recruitment, sickness absence, local disputes and the support store managers needed when a colleague's performance or health declined. In January 2018 I became HR director for Sweden and head of labour relations for the group, responsible for negotiations with the unions in both countries and for co-determination procedures before major changes. In March 2021 I was appointed chief human resources officer and joined the executive team.

Three decisions from these years are set out in detail on this site. In 2022 about 41% of our Swedish store colleagues worked on hourly call-in terms; we moved most of them to contracted minimum hours and made those hours portable between neighbouring stores. After a seventeen-year-old was left to close a store alone in 2019 and was robbed at the till, we stopped scheduling anyone under eighteen on closing or late shifts anywhere in the chain. And because store managers were directly responsible for as many as 26 people, with regional managers covering up to seventeen stores, we created paid shift leaders and smaller regional groups.

Other work shaped my judgement without becoming a case. Between 2023 and 2025 we installed self-checkout lanes in 58 larger stores, after agreeing with the union that no employment would end because of them; the cashier role became a floor role covering the lanes, returns and replenishment. In 2024 we closed four Danish stores in shopping centres that had lost footfall, and 38 of the 71 people affected moved to other stores or new work within four months. Closure consultation is where an HR leader discovers whether earlier promises were believed.

I lead through the people who run stores. I spend roughly a day a week in them, usually at opening or closing, because that is when scheduling decisions show their consequences. Two union-appointed employee representatives sit on our board, as Swedish law allows, and I have learnt to write papers that they and the family shareholders can test with equal confidence. I work in Swedish and English and negotiate in Danish, and I am more comfortable explaining a cost than defending a slogan.

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Languages / Swedish · English · Danish