Head of talent and culture at Ardene oversees HR, payroll and internal communications for roughly 4,000 employees
Martine Lamoureux started her career working in stores, and she has gone on to spend more than 20 years in retail as part of a successful career in HR.
She joined H&M in 2005, eventually moving into regional HR, and then left for Ardene in 2017. Today, she leads HR, payroll and internal communications as head of talent and culture for Ardene's roughly 4,000 employees and 220 Canadian stores.
"I do feel that retail is a great leadership school," she says. "You can have seasoned leaders in the business, but there's a lot of people that are entering the leadership world through the store leadership. So, it's an interesting population to work with."
The pace suits her too. "Retail is easy in a sense that if we want to implement a new program, you don't need to go through all of those approval processes, right? You do it because it's fast, it's easy. The population has that fast adoption as well. That is very interesting for an HR leader."
From audits to HR
Lamoureux didn't plan a career in HR, she says. From 1998 to 2005, she was a training manager at Priszm, which ran KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants. The job was closer to compliance than training, she says, in moving from restaurant to restaurant doing audits and rolling out new products.
"In the food industry, it's very strict. So, it was a very black-and-white audit that I was doing — no gray zone interpretation," she says.
Lamoureux joined H&M in 2005 as a department manager, as the company was opening Eastern Canada. "There were only a few stores in Ontario at the time, and they were building their SWAT team, basically, to open Eastern Canada."
She ran stores, opened stores, and recruited and trained staff.
"It just happened that I discovered a passion for training people, spending time with them. I developed a way of having the tough conversations and all of that."
Lamoureux was offered the opportunity to fill in for a maternity leave in HR. Around the same time, she was asked to become H&M's master trainer for Canada. She travelled for train-the-trainer sessions on programs developed globally, then trained trainers in Canada and kept the content relevant to the market.
"Those two put together ignite my passion for HR," she says, adding she then went back to school at HEC Montréal to “validate that learning.”
Expansion mode at H&M
From 2011 to 2017, Lamoureux was regional HR manager for Eastern Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada. She was responsible for recruiting and training managers, succession planning and new store openings.
"H&M is a beast. It's a global brand that has very well-established processes," she says. "And you're coming into that new market and you need to apply those processes diligently, but with that little adaptation to the market, to the country."
Prince Edward Island was one lesson in finding people for full-time work, says Lamoureux. "We've learned that living on an island is actually not the same. So, people, they're not looking for a year-round job. They want a summer job because winter is very slow."
To hire efficiently at that pace, she designed a group interview for sales associates. Candidates went through three activities over about 45 minutes while H&M assessed collaboration, teamwork and communication.
"It resulted in a very good hire decision because we were able to watch them in action," she says. "I'm pretty sure that they still use that approach today, after all those years."
HR leadership role at Ardene
A headhunter brought Lamoureux to Ardene in 2017. While H&M had been a good school, she says she was very curious to learn more on the strategic aspect: “It's great to be provided with a tool and make it live; it's even more interesting to create the tool.”
Location also matter to the HR leader, with Ardene being Montreal-based.
“I'm sitting with the decision-maker, with the HQ, where it's a bit different when you work for a global brand. So, that was the number one reason why I said yes to that challenge."
Ardene has about 4,000 employees, a number that fluctuates with the retail calendar. Most are in Canada, where it has 220 stores across all provinces; about 100 are in the U.S. The brand is in seven other countries through partners, whose staff are not Ardene employees. None of its workforce is unionized.
Lamoureux was hired as an HR manager to lead the HR business partner team, which had not yet earned credibility with field leaders, she says.
"HR was still perceived as, ‘Hey, I need a termination letter, write it to me.’ Very administrative, not perceived as a partner."
She credits her operations background for closing that gap quickly. Over time, Lamoureux took on total rewards, learning and development, and then payroll and internal communications. She has led HR for about five years and has been head of talent and culture since June 2022.
"Because I wore their shoes, I will always keep in mind that HR is one aspect of what a leader does," she says. "We need to make it easy and make them want to do that HR part of their job."
Not every new leader is comfortable with the people side of the role, says Lamoureux.
"Sometimes it's just because they've never done it. They don't have the experience. They're scared. They might not have that emotional intelligence. So [t’s about] how do I equip them to do that?"
Turnover, level by level
Lamoureux says much of retail's turnover comes down to the type of people who work there. Many store employees are students who stay two or three years while they finish school.
"We need to accept that part, and that is the portion of the turnover that we'll never be able to impact," she says. "But we provide great employee experience during that time, and we're setting them up for their future."
Turnover is highest among sales associates, while store manager turnover runs around 20 to 25 per cent, which she describes as very good for the industry: “It does create a lot of opportunity for people to grow.”
The churn keeps store managers in a constant recruiting and training role, which may be why new HR tools get adopted quickly, according to Lamoureux: "It's not a tool that sits on a shelf, right? It's something that they can apply the day after."
Technology and EOS
With payroll and internal communications now in her portfolio, Lamoureux says HR has a lot of administration to cut. Ardene is implementing a new HRIS and working with AI tools to increase efficiency.
"If we're not using AI in internal communication, we're totally missing the boat," she says.
As part of the leadership team, she is also involved in rolling out EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, across the business: "It's basically reshaping the way we lead this business altogether, like the leadership team."
The goal, says Lamoureux, is "bringing some rigour and discipline to how we lead this business, getting very clear and very aligned because Ardene is growing and we're expanding internationally and we need to make sure that our model is very solid."
Focusing on mindfulness
On the topic of wellness, she is very proud to say Ardene is the only retailer in Canada that has embedded mindfulness into its practices. It’s a program that grew out of a problem HR couldn't fix directly.
"There's a lot that we don't have control [over] as an HR team, right? We're talking about traffic, mad customers — nice customers too," she says. "The influx of merchandise, all of the tasks that needs to be done, like visual maintenance, we have no control of that. But one thing we can do is to equip our employees to better manage those emotions."
The need for this kind of program became apparent around the pandemic, says Lamoureux.
"It was very obvious that emotion control and emotion management was not something natural in that new population, and we really had a responsibility to tackle that."
The program is built around the idea of being above or below the line.
"If you're below the line, [it’s about] ‘Let's recognize that you're below the line. Understand the why. But here’s a toolbox so you can go back above the line,’” she says. "Because you know what? As an employer, we need you to be above the line. And you know what? As an individual, you'll feel much better to be above the line."
Ardene now has more than 150 practices, most of them lasting about one minute long. New store employees watch four mini lessons during onboarding on what mindfulness is and how it can help them.
In stores, a mindfulness box holds cards colour-coded by category: individual, group, physical, reflection, gratitude. One side describes the practice; the other describes its benefit. Every October, Ardene runs a mindfulness challenge across all business units. Last year it was a bingo card that store teams filled in together.
The emphasis is on choice. "If we push and force one specific practice, I think that this is how we will fail."
Ardene surveys employees about the program twice a year and the findings show employees applying the practices in their personal lives, along with more camaraderie in stores and lower stress.
