Yves Herman

3 questions FOR Yves Herman

VP, Total Rewards, AXWAY

What is your background?

Yves Herman, vice-president Compensation & Benefits at Axway Software since September 2021.

I started my career a little over twenty years ago, with Alcatel, a French telecoms company, where I spent just over ten years, always in human resources, in both data management and expertise in Compensation & Benefits. 
I quickly found myself in Comp & Ben expertise and have kept with it since.

After my career at Alcatel, I moved to Merck, a German-based pharma company  where I spent three and a half years as Comp & Ben for Western Europe.

Then I took up an opportunity at Safran, in a subsidiary called Morpho, where I took the role of Comp & Ben director.

This subsidiary was then sold by Safran to its main competitor at the time. It was called Oberthur Technologies, then became Idemia, a company with some 15,000 employees in over 50 countries. And I then had the opportunity to go to the United States for three years as Comp & Ben North America for Idemia. And when I returned in September 2021, I moved to Axway, where I am now VP Comp & Ben. We have 1,500 employees in 18 countries. It's a software company. We sell our products to professionals. It’s B2B. I'm having a lot of fun.

What motivates you the most in this profession?

What motivates me most today about Comp & Ben is the expertise, and having a certain, very gratifying, recognition from the HR community for this expertise, or even from the business in general. The second thing I really like about my job is the international side. Today I manage 18 countries, with employees in all 18, and I learn something new every day, I discover something every day. I’d have a hard time going back to a French company, focused solely on France, as I love the international side.

What are your main challenges?

I took charge of setting up a software package called Workday for my company.
For HR, we’re implementing Workday and I asked to be project leader on this.
The project was launched in January for roll-out in November. It's an enormous challenge because we had no HR information system. This will be the first one for the whole company and will be deployed in the 18 countries where we operate. It’s one of my major concerns this year.

What is your hidden talent?

The only hidden talent I can think of is I'm lucky enough to have what's called a musical ear. When I hear music on the radio, TV or on my headphones that I like, I can reproduce it in a very basic way on a piano or if someone plays notes on a piano, I can identify them. Is that a talent? I don't know, but in any case, I'm lucky to have it.