The pay-query form was my first view of the operating decision.

The first operational disputes I understood were written on pay-query forms. I joined the fictional Ordelune Freight in June 1990, after completing a business-administration degree at Merovelle College the previous year. As a payroll analyst, I checked variable inputs from depots and helped reconcile differences between the central record and what an employee believed had happened. I had no authority over a route or a shift. I could see, however, that an apparently small discrepancy could reveal a much larger uncertainty about who had agreed to what.

Some queries were straightforward mistakes. Others concerned a working arrangement that had changed without a clear record reaching payroll. The employee, supervisor and central team could each be acting on a different account of the same week. I learned to reconstruct the decision before trying to explain the amount. That did not make the payroll role more senior than it was. It made the work more useful, because a repeated correction would continue until the source of the disagreement was understood.

In January 1997 I moved into depot personnel management. The role brought me closer to drivers, warehouse colleagues and the supervisors trying to meet the daily service plan. I began to understand why a change that looked manageable from the planning office could be difficult for the person receiving it. It might affect transport home, care arrangements or the expectation of a particular payment. Listening to those consequences did not remove the operating requirement. It gave management a more complete account of the decision it was asking someone to accept.

I joined Valserenne Logistics in September 2004 as director of labour planning for its French operations. The business wanted a clearer connection between depot demand, employment arrangements and the cost presented in commercial proposals. I worked with operations and finance rather than treating labour planning as a headcount exercise. We needed to know which requirements could be met through existing arrangements, which needed additional cover and which depended on assumptions nobody had yet tested with the people responsible for delivery.

The 2010 pay-record review drew on my earlier experience but required wider authority. We reconciled depot and payroll records for 1,400 employees, made EUR 184,000 of corrections and changed the explanation of variable inputs. A lower number of subsequent queries was useful evidence about the service process, but it did not prove that every underlying employment issue had been resolved. I became more careful about reporting a correction, a process improvement and an employee outcome as different things. Combining them into a single success claim would have made the account easier to present and harder to trust.

From January 2012 I led employee relations across the group. The work required attention to local arrangements in France, Belgium and Spain, with qualified advisers and employee representatives involved where appropriate. I did not assume that a group policy could replace local consultation or a jurisdiction-specific assessment. My role was to make the business proposal clear, ensure that its employment consequences were examined and bring unresolved choices back to the executives who could change the plan. The 2015 depot integration showed how important it was to distinguish the work being moved from the individual circumstances of the people affected.

I became CHRO in September 2019. The following year’s rota review made the cost of predictability unusually visible. We could continue absorbing late changes through repeated individual requests, or fund more relief and give managers a clearer process. The chosen arrangement cost EUR 740,000 annually. I do not claim it eliminated disruption. It established that some variability was an operating cost the company should carry, rather than a permanent expectation that employees would rearrange their lives at short notice.

The 2022 overnight-distribution bid tested the same principle before a contract existed. A joint review showed that the labour provision needed was materially higher than the original assumption. Management changed the price and lost the opportunity. That was not a comfortable outcome, and I would not turn it into a celebratory story about winning through restraint. It was a decision to avoid accepting an obligation on employment assumptions the team could not support. The commercial consequence belonged in the record alongside the people rationale.

Today I lead 111 people colleagues and hold a EUR 19.2 million annual function-expense remit. I report to CEO Laurent Vessart and present workforce matters to the board in an executive capacity. I have no existing directorships. My interest in a future board contribution comes from the connection between service economics and employment assumptions, but I would need to develop a wider understanding of the enterprise in any appointment. I remain most interested in the ordinary question with which my career began: can the company explain the commitment it has made to the person doing the work?