Chief Human Resources Officer / Europe
IngridDuvall
My first personnel office was close enough to the factory entrance that colleagues could stop at the door on their way to a shift.
2,800
Group employees
2025; five European plants
48
People-function team
Five direct reports; October 2026
EUR 9.8m
Function expenditure authority
2026; distinct from total employee costs
I believe
I want a proposal to reach employees while an answer can still change it. Consultation should make the operating choice better informed, and management should be prepared to explain which alternatives it considered, what it accepted and what it could not responsibly promise.
— Ingrid Duvall
The work
A 2022 capacity proposal at Veldrissen Components would have changed the working pattern of 260 employees. The initial model offered the largest increase in output with the smallest addition to permanent staffing. Plant management regarded it as the natural answer to a stronger order book. Employee representatives questioned the effect on predictable time away and the assumptions about how coverage would be maintained. I asked that the alternatives remain open while those questions were examined with the appropriate local advisers. The revised proposal retained a more predictable core working pattern and used an agreed additional coverage arrangement, supported by eighteen new roles. It added EUR 1.4 million to annual employment cost and offered 6% less incremental output than the first option. The operations team had to revisit the customer-capacity plan. I did not present the employment discussion as a way to obtain the same commercial result at no cost. The chief executive asked whether we had conceded too early. I explained which concerns reflected a preference and which exposed a weakness in the original staffing assumptions. Some requests could not be accepted, and management needed to say why. The final choice was made through the company's decision process after the engagement and advice, with the cost and capacity implications recorded together. Implementation still required close attention. Seven individual scheduling questions remained open at the first review and were assigned for follow-up rather than counted as resolved because the group arrangement had been agreed. We monitored the actual coverage and the experience of the employees involved. The proposal did not eliminate overtime or every disruption. The outcome I claim is a better-specified employment arrangement and an executive decision made with its compromises visible. I cannot attribute all later plant performance to that choice. My contribution was to prevent a maximum-output model from becoming an irreversible commitment before the workforce implications had been understood. The process required more time and a less attractive headline capacity number, both of which were real consequences.
During 2023, recruitment offers in several production grades had moved ahead of the usual progression for established employees. Managers were dealing with each vacancy as a local exception. The cumulative effect was pay compression that colleagues could reasonably question. My reward team reviewed role content, relevant experience and the history of offers rather than rely only on grade labels or a single market survey. We identified 168 employees for phased adjustments. At full implementation, the change added EUR 640,000 to annual payroll. Finance asked us to defer the entire exercise until the next broad pay review. Plant managers wanted an immediate correction for everyone who had raised a concern. Neither approach matched the evidence or the available budget. I proposed a two-year sequence, with the most pronounced supported inconsistencies addressed first and a defined route for reviewing disputed cases. The decision required careful explanation. We were not promising identical pay to everyone with the same title, nor claiming that all differences were justified. Some reflected responsibilities or experience that remained relevant; others were the accumulated result of recruitment decisions that had not been reconsidered together. Managers needed to explain the basis without disclosing another employee's personal pay. We prepared them for those conversations and checked where the framework was being understood differently. Twenty-three individual queries required further review during the first phase. Eight led to a correction in the proposed treatment; fifteen were explained without changing the outcome. Those reviews took time and exposed weaknesses in some historic role records. We retained that work in the programme rather than declare every challenge a communication problem. The outcome was a funded, bounded correction with a visible second phase. It did not remove every pay grievance or insulate the company from later recruitment pressure. The lesson was that an external offer is also an internal decision. A business needs to examine the relationships it creates among existing employees before a series of reasonable vacancy exceptions becomes a reward system nobody can explain.
In 2016, several production vacancies remained difficult to fill while applications were being screened through a broad education requirement. Plant managers believed the filter reduced selection effort. The people team questioned whether it was excluding candidates with relevant practical ability for the particular roles. I was group reward and organisation director, and I sponsored a pilot to examine that question with technical colleagues rather than simply remove requirements across the business. We assessed eighty-eight applicants using supervised work samples alongside interviews and the checks necessary for the role. Qualified plant colleagues designed and evaluated the practical tasks. My team reviewed the process for consistency and made sure candidates understood the exercise. Credentials genuinely required for specific work remained necessary. The pilot concerned a defined set of entry roles, not a general assertion that formal education had no value. Thirty-one applicants received offers, twenty-four joined and twenty-one remained after six months. Seven offers were declined, and three starters left during the follow-up period. We examined those categories separately. A larger offer count would have been easy to celebrate, but it would not have explained whether people accepted the employment proposition or how the first months worked for them. The pilot required additional assessor time, costing EUR 74,000 including preparation and administration. Operations wanted the process shortened after the first round. We retained the elements that produced useful evidence and removed an exercise that duplicated another assessment. I accepted that practical selection could be more resource-intensive while asking whether each part earned its place. The result supported extending the approach to comparable vacancies, with continued review. It did not establish that a brief work sample could predict all future performance. The experience changed our discussion from which applicants looked familiar on paper to what evidence the job genuinely required. My role was to make that question possible and the process fair enough to use, while technical judgement remained with the people accountable for the work.
In 2024 an inspection-cell programme affected seventy-eight employees whose existing work included manual checks and handling of production exceptions. The equipment proposal described the intended process change clearly. The employment proposal was less developed: several future roles were grouped under a broad operator title even though their responsibilities differed. I asked operations director Stefan Ornfeld to work with the people team on the actual tasks before we treated a new title as a complete role definition. The resulting plan distinguished routine cell operation, investigation of exceptions and responsibilities that remained with quality specialists. Technical leaders defined the requirements and assessment; my function coordinated role evaluation, employee discussions and the transition arrangements. We budgeted EUR 1.9 million for the people programme, separate from the equipment investment. The capital-project team objected that this work could delay the overall timetable. I argued that an installed cell did not establish that the employment transition was ready. By the end of the programme's first year, fifty-two employees had entered agreed revised roles, twelve had left through individually agreed arrangements and fourteen were still completing development or role-matching work. Those fourteen remained in paid transitional assignments. We did not describe them as redeployed merely because they had attended training. Nor did I claim authority to certify technical readiness for the new work. The trade-off included additional transition cost and a more complicated account of completion. It would have been easier to report one finished project. Instead, equipment acceptance and workforce resolution were tracked separately. Quality leaders also retained independent responsibilities that could not be absorbed into an efficiency calculation without changing the operating model. I learned that the most useful people question may be very concrete: what will this employee be expected to decide on an ordinary shift after the change? If the answer differs between the job description, supervisor and technical owner, the employment work is not finished. A new machine can make that disagreement more urgent, but it cannot resolve it for us.
In 2009 I supported a common shift-start arrangement for two Veldrissen Components plants. I was employee relations manager and believed that the remaining differences could be handled through local administration. The intention was to simplify coordination and create a more consistent working pattern. I had not sufficiently examined the public transport connections and established handover practices on which employees at the second plant relied. During the opening weeks, forty-seven employees needed scheduling exceptions. Supervisors spent time improvising cover, and people received inconsistent answers about which arrangement applied to them. Plant management initially wanted to press ahead until the new routine settled. Employee representatives argued that the problem was in the design. I reviewed the cases and accepted that the central timetable had been made simpler by making the working day more complicated for others. We paused the planned extension for six weeks and changed the start time at one plant by thirty minutes. Temporary transport, administrative corrections and additional coordination cost EUR 95,000. The operations team also had to revise the handover arrangement. I explained my part in approving the original proposal and did not describe the correction as evidence that employees had finally understood the intended change. The revised timetable reduced the need for individual exceptions, although some circumstances still required separate handling. We did not claim that a single time change had improved every aspect of attendance or productivity. The meaningful result was an arrangement that had been tested against the local working day and could be explained consistently by supervisors. That episode changed how I approach standardisation. I still support common processes where they make work clearer. I now ask which practical conditions the proposed standard assumes and whether those conditions exist at each location. A local difference is not automatically an obstacle to efficiency, and a central rule is not automatically fair because it is written once. Sometimes the responsible action is to revise the standard before asking people to adapt again.
Others say
Ingrid brought the lower-output alternative back to the executive discussion with its cost intact. She did not suggest that listening to employees would remove every commercial compromise.
She asked us to identify the work people would actually do after the inspection change. That made the employment discussion more precise without taking technical acceptance away from the plant team.
An invitation
I welcome an industrial people mandate where employee relations is part of making the decision, rather than a communication task after it. I am also interested in a first external board contribution to a manufacturing business with a clear governance framework and time for preparation. Speaking conversations are most useful when they begin with a concrete change that the audience is trying to manage.
office@ingridduvall.example