The factory entrance taught me to begin with the actual question.

My first personnel office was close enough to the factory entrance that colleagues could stop at the door on their way to a shift. In July 1993 I joined Ornfeld Motion after completing employment studies at the fictional Talvenne Institute. I was twenty-three and had a careful understanding of forms, dates and the importance of keeping records straight. The employees who came to the office were usually concerned with something more immediate: a pay query, a timetable change or a supervisor's explanation that did not match their own understanding.

I learned to avoid answering the question I wished someone had asked. A colleague disputing an allowance did not necessarily need a recital of the policy. She might need us to establish which assignment she had actually worked and why the record differed. My early contribution was to gather those facts and get the right person to resolve the issue. I had no authority to redesign pay or direct production. Working within that limit taught me the value of a reliable handover and the damage caused when an employee had to repeat the same account to several people.

In July 1998 I became a plant personnel adviser. I supervised four administrators and worked with managers on recruitment, absence processes and changes in working arrangements. The role required more judgement than the title suggested. A manager could arrive with a practical problem and a proposed solution that transferred the difficulty to another group of employees. I began asking what alternatives had been considered and who would experience the consequences. That habit did not make every conversation comfortable, but it made the advice more useful.

I moved to Veldrissen Components in January 2006 as employee relations manager. The company was family controlled and expanding beyond its original Belgian operations. The owners valued continuity, while plant leaders wanted more common processes. I understood both aims. I also saw that standardisation could become a way to stop discussing differences that were inconvenient but real. My work involved making those differences explicit, obtaining appropriate local advice and helping management engage with employee representatives before a proposal was treated as settled.

In 2009 I supported a common shift-start arrangement for two plants. I thought the remaining local issues were administrative. They were not. Public transport connections and established handover arrangements made the same start time work differently at the two locations. Forty-seven employees needed individual scheduling exceptions, and the first weeks created avoidable confusion. We paused the extension, moved one start time by thirty minutes and spent EUR 95,000 on temporary arrangements and corrections. I had accepted a central simplification before understanding the working day it would produce.

That experience stayed with me when I became group reward and organisation director in July 2012. The role combined pay design, job evaluation and the way responsibilities were described across plants. I led twenty-two colleagues and learned to distinguish a common framework from identical treatment. A role could carry a similar title in two locations while involving different equipment, supervision or decision authority. I wanted comparisons to be based on the work rather than on the neatness of a spreadsheet.

The 2016 hiring pilot was a related lesson. We examined whether an education filter was excluding applicants who could demonstrate relevant ability. Eighty-eight candidates completed supervised work samples alongside the necessary checks. The exercise did not abolish genuine qualification requirements, and it did not prove that every rejected applicant would have succeeded. It gave us better evidence for a defined set of production roles. Twenty-four people joined after thirty-one offers, and twenty-one remained six months later. We reviewed the departures as well as the successful starts.

I became CHRO in January 2020, reporting to Marta Veldrissen. The group now has five plants across Belgium, France and Poland, with 2,800 employees recorded in 2025. My forty-eight-person function works through five direct reports, and my delegated expenditure for 2026 is EUR 9.8 million. I advise on the employment consequences of operating decisions and present remuneration matters to the board committee as an executive. I have no director appointment and do not present that exposure as equivalent to one.

The work I find most consequential concerns decisions whose costs are easy to separate on paper but difficult to separate in life. A recruitment offer affects the colleague already doing the job. A machine investment changes who is expected to exercise judgement. A shift proposal changes family routines and the capacity available to customers. My role is to bring those connections into the decision early enough to matter. I do not expect consensus on every outcome. I do expect management to be clear about what remains open, to hear a reasoned challenge and to give an account of the choice it eventually makes.