How Mien grew with our HR department and now leads our HR Operations

Mien Dries’ story at H.Essers is remarkable: she is a well-known person within HR who has seen her department – and, by extension, the entire organization – grow exponentially, and she herself has always grown along with it thanks to her eagerness to learn. She is now head of HR Operations and leads a team of around 20 people.

First steps at H.Essers
”I started in the payroll department,“ Mien begins. ”I did that for warehouse workers, drivers, and white-collar workers, and I learned a lot from that. Not just about payroll. You get to know the different departments of the organization and build a personal internal network. That’s something that shouldn’t be underestimated. For me, it was the perfect foundation for further development within HR.”

Completing the circle
”A few years later, I became HR Business Partner, first for Transport and Warehousing, then full-time for Transport. It’s a role in which you once again expand your internal network considerably and deepen your knowledge of the organization,” says Mien. Her experience shows that this knowledge is essential for anyone working in a large company like H.Essers. “After a few years, I was given the opportunity to lead the Business Partners team: my first role as a people manager. I was already used to advising managers on how best to lead their teams, and now I suddenly had to do it myself. That’s a completely different experience. Fortunately, I was able to fall back on our leadership program, which supported me very well in this.””In my next step, I also became responsible for the payroll department. Back to where I started. The foundation I built back then makes it easy to understand what my team is doing every day, which helps me guide the team.”

A significant evolution
Mien is now in her 11th year at H.Essers. So it goes without saying that she has seen everything around her change dramatically. ”You could say that. H.Essers has grown enormously during that time, and of course HR has grown with it. When I started, there was a payroll department, two HR Business Partners, and one recruiter. That was the entire HR department. Now we have an internal training institution, the H.Essers Academy, where employees are trained to become true professionals and experts. There is a complete team of HR Business Partners who are involved in supporting and coaching our people managers on a daily basis. We have an entire Talent & Development team that helps our employees develop further, and an HRIS team that is responsible for the smooth running of our global HR system.But what stands out most is all the investment in professionalizing our department and the active role HR plays in helping to achieve the company’s objectives. And you can be sure that there are plenty of exciting challenges planned for the coming years. Above all, I hope that we as a department can continue to contribute to realizing H.Essers’ ambitions.”

Golden tip
”You are in the driver’s seat of your own career and must dare to jump when opportunities arise. Of course, you also need colleagues and people managers around you who believe in you and with whom you can discuss your ambitions. And you have to do that yourself; you can never assume that others know what you want to achieve.”