Thirty-three years from the cab to the people committee

Mandate

Close a driver shortage that was limiting growth, bring driver and dock policies into one coherent HR function and give a family-controlled board the workforce information it had previously left to operations.

Outcomes

• Rebuilt the driver academy without a repayment clause: 1,380 graduates from 2021 to 2025, with 86% first-year retention for dock-sourced graduates against 54% before.
• Reduced driver vacancies from 6.4% to 2.2% of the fleet and sign-on bonus and recruitment advertising spend by US$8.6m a year.
• Cut the dock recordable injury rate from 8.3 to 4.7 per 100 full-time workers between 2022 and 2025 by phasing in pace standards for new workers.
• Led the response to the company's first organising petition in 2023 and the bargaining of a three-year first contract at Joliet, ratified in October 2024.
• Separated federal driver testing from company policy; dock vacancies fell from 8.8% to 4.0% with post-incident positives unchanged.

Decisions in context

I joined Brennoway when the driver shortage was the company's main constraint on growth and its HR function had been built mostly for payroll and benefits. Operations owned hiring standards, the dock owned its pace rules and safety owned testing, with little connecting them. My first two years went into the academy, which meant persuading finance to give up repayment income and persuading safety that new graduates could run city routes under conditions. From 2022 the work widened to the dock, where tenure-based injury analysis led to the phased pace standards, and to testing policy. In 2023 I led our response to the Joliet petition and then our side of first-contract bargaining. I prepare the compensation and people committee's papers, attend its meetings outside executive sessions and report workforce safety measures to the safety committee. I am not a director.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; completing the automation workforce plan and the 2027 Joliet bargaining.

Mandate

Make the seasonal peak safer and cheaper to staff, reduce permanent associate turnover and prepare the workforce for warehouse automation ahead of the sponsor's planned exit.

Outcomes

• Introduced a slower ramp for seasonal associates in the 2018 peak at about US$2.3m of extra labour; recordable injuries among temporary associates fell by about a third.
• Held the pay of 340 pickers for twelve months when goods-to-person robotics arrived in two buildings; 290 remained a year later.
• Reduced permanent associate turnover from 64% to 52% between 2017 and 2019.
• Converted 1,150 seasonal associates to permanent roles after the 2018 and 2019 peaks.

Decisions in context

As chief people officer I was responsible for a workforce that nearly doubled each autumn. The peak plan had been built by finance and operations around productivity assumptions that nobody in HR had tested, and the injury records showed temporary associates in their first month being hurt at about three times the permanent rate. I took that analysis to the sponsor-appointed board in 2018 and asked it to fund a slower ramp, which it did. The same year we installed goods-to-person robotics in two buildings. I argued for a year of pay protection and a retraining route for the 340 pickers affected rather than immediate reductions, and most of them stayed. I also worked to convert reliable seasonal associates into permanent roles, which reduced the number of new people we had to train each peak. I left when Brennoway approached me about a role closer to the freight I had started in.

Reason for the move

Recruited by Brennoway to lead HR at a carrier with a driver shortage, as Cordavine's sale process was beginning.

Mandate

Bring buildings acquired in three transactions onto common HR policies and payroll, and reduce turnover among associates in their first ninety days.

Outcomes

• Moved 24 buildings from three acquisitions onto one set of site HR policies and one payroll.
• Introduced exit interviews and tenure-based turnover reporting in every building; first-ninety-day turnover fell from 48% to 37%.
• Replaced four staffing agencies with two under common safety-training standards for seasonal associates.

Decisions in context

Cordavine had grown by buying smaller warehouse operators, and each building ran HR its own way: different attendance rules, different pay dates, different approaches to temporary labour. My first task was to make them one employer without erasing practices that worked. I spent much of my first year in the buildings themselves, often on night shifts, and found that the most useful thing I could change was how we measured turnover. Reporting it by tenure showed that most associates who left did so within ninety days, usually after a first week with little training and a full productivity expectation. We introduced a structured first week and better agency standards, and early turnover fell. This was my first role with HR responsibility across a whole operating network rather than a single function, and it prepared me for the chief people officer role that followed.

Reason for the move

Promoted to chief people officer.

Mandate

Keep a fleet that was losing nearly all its drivers each year staffed, and lower the cost of every driver hired.

Outcomes

• Cut annual driver turnover from 92% to 64% by 2014, largely through a published home-time schedule for regional and long-haul drivers.
• Trained about 1,700 drivers through the company school over five years.
• Showed in 2011 that the school's repayment agreement had billed US$2.1m over three years and recovered under a fifth; the amount was cut from US$4,500 to US$2,500, though the clause stayed.
• Reduced recruiting cost per hired driver from about US$5,400 to US$3,600.

Decisions in context

Stonemarch hired me because I knew how drivers think about a job and could run a school. I learned quickly that recruiting could not outrun a turnover rate above 90%. Exit interviews, which I started in my first year, kept naming the same thing: drivers did not know when they would next be home. I worked with the operations team on a published home-time schedule, a promise dispatch had to plan around rather than an exception it granted, and turnover fell steadily. The school was harder. I enforced its repayment agreement for two years before I examined what it actually collected and from whom. I could get the amount reduced but not the clause removed, and that failure is the main reason I left for broader HR work. I completed my master's degree part-time during this role.

Reason for the move

Moved to Cordavine for broader HR leadership after failing to persuade Stonemarch to end its repayment agreement.

Career interval

Three months between Tullwater's closure in December 2008 and joining Stonemarch, spent helping former Dayton colleagues find work with other carriers and looking for my own next role.

Mandate

Run the Dayton service centre, then nine service centres, on time and within budget while volumes and the company's finances weakened.

Outcomes

• Raised the Dayton service centre's on-time delivery from 91% to 96% between 2000 and 2004.
• From 2005 ran nine service centres in Ohio and Indiana with about 1,100 colleagues.
• After the December 2008 shutdown, helped 58 Dayton colleagues into driving or dock work with other carriers by March 2009.

Decisions in context

Running Dayton taught me the operating side of LTL: building the dock plan around linehaul departures, balancing city routes, handling claims and hiring drivers in a tight market. I was an effective operator and an uneven manager of people. I filled seats with drivers other carriers had let go, and I issued warnings to dock workers on pace reports I never examined. Both habits came back to me years later as questions I now ask about other people's decisions. From 2005 I ran nine service centres as the company's position worsened, and I spent more time on cost reductions than on anything else. When the owners closed Tullwater in December 2008, with four days' notice to managers, I spent the following weeks finding work for as many Dayton colleagues as I could. That experience, more than any later training, made me think about employment decisions as things that happen to particular people.

Reason for the move

Tullwater ceased operations in December 2008.

Mandate

Complete the company driving school and run a city route; later train new drivers and supervise the night dock.

Outcomes

• Drove a west Toledo city route for three years without a preventable accident.
• Trained fourteen new drivers as a driver trainer from 1996.
• As night dock supervisor, cut misloaded shipments by about 40% by changing how trailers were assigned to dock doors.

Decisions in context

I came to Tullwater because I needed work after university and the driving school cost nothing up front. I signed its repayment agreement without much thought and learned the job from a trainer who had driven since the 1960s. A city route is demanding in ways that are easy to miss from an office: thirty stops, customers who are not ready, docks that are blocked and a schedule that does not move. As a driver trainer I saw why new drivers left, which was more often schedules and treatment than pay. On the night dock I learned the other half of LTL, where freight from every city route is sorted onto linehaul trailers against fixed departure times. I also wrote my first pace warnings there. This period gave me the vocabulary I still use when I talk to drivers and dock workers, and a lasting interest in the rules that govern their days.

Reason for the move

Asked to run the Dayton service centre.