Alrik Boonstra is the CHRO for Roompot, which will be after the announced acquisition of Landal GreenParks, the leading provider of holiday resorts in Europe. He joined early in 2023 from the role of Global SVP Human Resources at Irdeto in Amsterdam. Alrik started his career in consulting, before moving into Sales & Marketing at Unilever. He went on to join PepsiCo and became a Managing Director and Partner at Korn Ferry Hay Group, where he spent almost 12 years.

What excites you about the culture of an organization?

When you look at Irdeto, it has a truly international and very diverse culture - and they celebrate that diversity. They're very curious about learning from other nationalities and cultures; there is no one country or dominant culture, which you would often see in some international companies.

Also, Irdeto is a true culture of empowerment in combination with accountability. The reason they have that empowerment and accountability in their culture is because it's so geographically dispersed, with 20 locations. All of them are relatively small, so it's impossible to actually manage that from a headquarters. You therefore must empower your leaders. You have to empower your teams and you have to instil trust. So, the accountability plus empowerment plus trust - that's really deep in their culture.

Roompot is different. It has a very entrepreneurial, down to earth culture with a less is more mentality. At Roompot, we celebrate that we are not a corporate in the classical sense with lots of meetings and processes.

From a broader perspective, what are the things that you think are really important when you're trying to retain talent in a business?

I believe, based on lots of research, that people don't leave companies, they leave bosses. The feeling of belonging and having a connection with your manager and with your peers is essential.

It’s important for a company to ask, on a regular basis: what is your relationship with your manager? We see that asking that question is the best predictor of people staying with the company for a longer period. Building that relationship with your manager is crucial, such as building relationships across the company, having peers - buddies, as we sometimes call it.

So, I am very much an advocate of peer-to-peer learning, mentoring and coaching, because it's all geared towards building deeper, meaningful relationships in the company to create a sense of community where people really feel connected to each other. I think that's even more important than feeling connected to the company and its mission and strategy. I’ve learned that tech companies are typically very good at building cross-functional, international, non-hierarchical relationships.

Ultimately, those interpersonal relationships will, of course, lead to commitment to the company. But, at the end of the day, people don't necessarily choose companies anymore. They choose to work for certain people who they relate to and let their choice be determined by a set of more moral values they’d like to experience in the organisation. For us, as HR professionals, it's really important to understand and build programs around.

If you start recruiting for a business, you want to understand the business, the business model and the kind of company you're recruiting for. However, I think it's becoming more and more important that you understand the leadership culture. That's where the recruitment businesses come into play, because that's something you cannot put into an advert on LinkedIn, since it’s all about setting people up for a deep interpersonal connection - the famous chemistry between a leader and his or her team.

We also have to be humble, realistic and ensure that the basics are right, as well. It’s great to create that amazing culture, that community feeling, but - at the same time - people want to have the basics right. They want their pay, short-term incentives and long-term incentives to be right, that’s – as HR – our license to operate.

I fully understand that people need that kind of stability, particularly in those times of high inflation that we are experiencing right now - that all contributes to the employee experience. The employee experience is determined by the basics, and all the other things are the cream on top of the cake.

Where do you think HR adds most value to an organisation?

The People agenda is in the hands of the line managers and many CEOs these days, if not all CEOs. They're talking about people all day long, because they now truly understand and believe that people make a difference to the value they create in the market, and to their clients.

As HR, we need to help support line managers and, in particular, the CEO to navigate that People agenda and deliver on it, and we need to build a strategy that creates business value through people. I think that’s one of the most important tasks of a CHRO - creating business value, instead of managing the costs of human capital, which I still often see.

It’s not just setting the scene and building this strategy; it's also making the strategy reality, and I think that's actually the hardest part. Talking about talent is great, but implementing true talent plans, succession plans, development plans is hard work, and that's where the HR team can add a lot of value to the business and to the shareholders. PE companies taught me they really understand that great talent can create business value, so they focus – more than I expected – on building talent pipelines and connecting great leaders in their portfolio companies to learn from each other and accelerate their development.

To create value through talent, it’s important to be the coach and navigator; but, first, HR must develop a deep understanding of what drives the business and where value is created in an organisation, and you can then focus your HR efforts there. This business driver analysis is often overlooked by HR people, but I believe that’s rapidly changing.

As I said before, get the basics rights; the foundations need to be in place. I always call my People Operations team - a soft sounding machine in the background - you don’t hear it until it’s broken, so you better ensure it doesn’t break!

If the basics are not right, I don't have a license to operate in the more strategic domains of the business. So, that's always what I try to do: get the basic rights, get the cake right, and then start building some icing on the cake to make that amazing cake we all love to eat.

How do you see the function evolving?

You can often predict the future by looking into today. Today, people have become one of the most critical assets to deliver on business strategy; having the right people in place in the right positions is going to give you a competitive advantage. It's always been like that, but - in the past - it was easier to replace or fill some gaps from the outside markets. Today, that’s more difficult.

If we don't have the right people in the right place, we're not able to deliver to our clients, our guests, and our stakeholders. So, when you talk about the evolution of HR, I think it’s becoming more and more clear that HR is going to be the strategic function in the organisation to create a competitive advantage through one of the most strategic assets a company has - its people.

In recent history, the CFO has been the right-hand person to the CEO, because there’s been a huge focus on money and investments. What I see in the next five to ten years - but I also see it happening right now – is the CHRO becoming a very important part of that group. Because, at the end of the day, money and people are the oxygen of the business – and, when you put oxygen into an organisation, it can start to grow.

So, more than ever before, Finance and HR are becoming closely connected, which makes it even more important for HR professionals to have strong financial acumen and use HR analytics to talk in that language.

In my former job, when we developed an HR analytics strategy and an HR analytics dashboard, we also engaged people from the Marketing Research department to help build it. This demonstrates that HR is not a separate function anymore, and - in the future - we will share lots of resources and skills with other corporate teams. I believe we need to break down the traditional silos between teams and, in particular, between the corporate functions and the business teams.

So, the evolution of HR will be more strategic, more data driven, more connected with other teams and, by doing that, you deserve your seat in the boardroom. At the same time, I expect organisations to become more human, more empathic. HR has a role to play in this humanization process, as well. It’s not either strategic and value focussed or human - it’s both.

I want to ask about how your career started and evolved. You were in FMCG Sales and Marketing, and then there was the transition into the HR discipline. What prompted that change?

I had just graduated and applied for a role as an HR Business Partner in Unilever. When I started the interview with the HR Director, within five minutes, they said: “You shouldn’t go forward for an HRBP role. If you want to be a really great HR person, you’ve got to learn how the business operates and how it generates money, and - in Unilever - that means working in Marketing & Sales.”

In the interview, the HR Director picked up the phone to the Sales Director and said: “I have a guy here who wants to become an HRBP, but I think it's much better for him to actually speak with you and first learn how to sell soap, detergents, personal care products…” So, that's how it started.

When I moved into Sales & Marketing, I developed a deep understanding of what drove the business, which allowed me to become a better support, coach, and guide to the business on the People agenda. It was a great experience, and it was one of the best times in my career, where I also learnt a huge amount.

Sometimes, I tell recruiters I’m working with I’d really love to see two candidates in the long list with highly diverse backgrounds, who really have a passion to move into HR; one of the best HRBPs I’ve had in my teams was a former Financial Controller. I love to hire for potential and learning agility, not for a certain CV with an amazing business school.

This has also been a shift; hiring managers are more open to hiring for skills, rather than direct experience. There are front-runners doing it now, and that will accelerate in the next three to five years.

Do you have a personal highlight from your career that stands out to you?

The part of my career that was an important transition for me was the move from my consulting over to the other side of the table to become a CHRO.

It was a really big step for me, and I learned a lot - it made me so humble. All the consulting, conceptual reports, and slick presentations we did, we always felt like it was so easy to get it done. What I learned in my first year as a CHRO was that it requires a lot of time and grit to actually implement it. It was really blood, sweat and tears.

Who’s been the biggest inspiration in your life, whether that's in business or in your personal life?

I thought about it and there's not really one person. I'm inspired by many people on a daily basis. An example would be my former US boss, who was really amazing in terms of giving feedback on a continuous basis. Now, everybody is talking about continuous feedback cycles; at that time, he just did it in a very natural way to the people working in operational roles in a business.

In my former job in a food retail company, I came across so many inspirational people working in the stores. They were so curious about how to develop themselves - not necessarily through university or colleges - but people who just want to learn on a daily basis, and they were so open to feedback.

At the end of the day, it's not about big MBAs [Master of Business Administration]. To me, it's about learning new skills or being curious and trying to be a little bit better at the end of the day than you were at the start of the day. That's what was very inspirational to me.

Finally, at Irdeto, working with a lot of Software Engineers - extremely smart people - what I learned from them, and which is really inspirational to me, is that you need to approach things with a certain level of logic. They taught me how to structure my stories and to ask questions, like, what problem are we trying to solve here? which is how you can really add value.

Have you been able to achieve work-life balance? Do you have any tips for people that you know are trying to reach that point?

I struggled with this, like everybody, especially because I think work and life are so intertwined these days.

For me, the most important thing is to actually think about what gives me energy and what takes energy away from me. It's both in personal life, as well as in business life, learning what actually drives the energy level in my own battery on a daily basis.

Of course, we all have to do things we don’t like to do, but it’s important to be conscious of balancing those with things that give that energy back and making decisions about what I do day-to-day based on that.

Did I crack it? To a certain extent, because I do feel balanced in general, but of course I do struggle with it at times. There are weeks where I say to myself, what did I do this week? It's all energy-draining stuff, and then I need the weekend to really recover, spending time with family and friends.

Finally, it’s really important to have fun in my work and to have connections with people. I learned over the years that the content of the role is actually less important to me than the context, the people you work with, and the culture and values you operate in.

A role may tick the boxes in terms of strategic positioning, highly complex projects, but that's not enough. For me, the best HR role is the role where I feel connected to the people around me on a personal level, and where we can have fun while we work - this really drives my energy. If you’re full of energy, you can move mountains. It took me 25 years to figure that out, and I’m glad I did in the end, so it’s never too late to learn…

That’s hopefully how I can maintain that work-life balance, which ultimately is all about life balance, because work is part of my life and life is part of my work.

Thank you to Alrik for speaking to Katie Insley, Associate Director in our HR recruitment team in the Netherlands.

Views and opinions contained within our Executive Interviews are those of the interviewee and not views shared by EMEA Recruitment.