‘You have to be able to pivot fast’

Deb Arsenault accepted a job at Peel Region on a Tuesday. She had knee surgery on the Wednesday. On the Thursday, she woke up to a string of missed calls from Gary Kent, the CAO who had hired her, and turned on the television.

The newscast said that Peel Region was going to be dissolved.

Nevertheless, Arsenault showed up on her first day in May 2023. And while the dissolution was eventually quashed, Arsenault has no regrets about her choice.

"I had a conversation and I thought about it, and it’s like, ‘OK, I’m still going to come in," she says. "An organization in struggles needs a strong HR team. Because this is about people. We're not talking about selling off widgets and screwdrivers — it’s people."

Peel Region, which serves roughly 1.5 million residents across Brampton, Mississauga, and Caledon in Ontario, employs 7,315 people, with half unionized across five bargaining units. As CHRO, Arsenault oversees an organization that is simultaneously managing uncertainty about its future, modernizing its HR infrastructure, and developing a new people plan.

An unconventional path to HR

Arsenault did not arrive in HR through a conventional route. Her first degree was in fashion design. Realizing the industry in the small town of Peterborough wasn't going to sustain a career, she went back to university — and started working at a retirement home.

"I was the front person, desk person, then I was the billing person, then I was the payroll person," she says. "So, I started in payroll, actually."

By the time she graduated, Arsenault had become head of HR for 21 retirement and nursing homes.

"As I look back, I had no idea what I was doing, and I don’t know why I was so courageous," she says. "But connecting with people and making people systems work is something that I find absolutely intriguing."

From there, her career moved across sectors deliberately. Arsenault spent time in telecom — joining GT Group Telecom, she says, specifically to help shut it down. The company was in the Canadian equivalent of Chapter 11 protection, and the “profound” experience of bringing an organization through bankruptcy and positioning it for sale left a lasting impression.

"It’s the power of having everybody rowing in the same direction in an organization — we did the unachievable," she says.

Arsenault moved to Schneider Electric, where she spent just under nine years across nine different roles, including deploying HR systems across 60 countries and working with German works councils. Then she went to Citco, a private, family-run global financial services firm.

“It was really building an HR function that was credible, from the ground up.”

Arsenault had always told herself six or seven years was the right tenure in any one organization — enough to make a meaningful contribution without limiting her own growth.

"I never wanted my career to be limited by the industry," she says. "Every learning is such an opportunity to grow… You pivot — and you have to be able to pivot fast."

Walking into transformation

Arsenault was attracted to Peel Region because she’d never worked for a government organization before, and she connected quickly with the “genuine authenticity” of Kent.

On her second day at Peel Region, Arsenault learned that the organization was planning a full SAP implementation — a complete overhaul of systems that had been running, unsupported, for 35 years.

“I’m like, ‘OK, that’s interesting. We’re not going to be here in a year-and-a-half, so let’s figure this out.”

She helped scale back the scope given the dissolution context, focusing first on payroll and benefits. That phase has now been stabilized for a year.

"Lots of learning, lots of resilience, and lots of lessons learned," she says. "As we go into the next phases, it's going to be a lot smoother."

The implementation experience reinforced something Arsenault had come to believe over years of leading transformation work: the change management piece is where most projects succeed or fail.

Peel has 41 separate lines of business underneath one brand, with 50 years of independent practices built up across them. Getting people aligned to a single best-practice approach, she says, requires more communication and understanding.

“[It’s about] spending time on understanding what your processes are today so that you're not inadvertently breaking something that you had no awareness of,” says Arsenault.

"You can build the best system [but] if you don't know how to deliver that change in a thoughtful, prescribed way, the cost of what you've just implemented is easily 10 times what you spent."

The people plan 

Arsenault's current focus is developing a new people plan for Peel Region, to take effect when the current one expires at the end of this year. Its pillars centre on wellness — financial, physical, mental — and belonging.

"Everything in HR connects," she says. "Whether it's financial wellness, physical wellness, mental wellness, the growth aspect… feeling really connected and belonging is really where I'm focused."

Embedded in that plan is a stronger workforce planning function. Arsenault says she has seen this done at a global level and knows what it takes.

“You're really setting up your organization for sustainment and making sure that we have the right talent at the right time,” she says.

"As an organization fighting for talent against public and private organizations, we need to make sure that our offer is a little bit different. Investing in our people is such an important aspect of that."

RTO and AI at Peel Region

On the return to office, Arsenault says it “has been a tough one.” Peel's position is a minimum of two days per week.

“It’s been a challenge because people have got accustomed to not being in the office. But we’ve been doing a lot of connection sessions.”

She says she supports flexibility as a principle but is direct about the limits of fully working from home.

"Having 100 per cent remote is actually harmful — to socialization, to connection, and to innovation," she says. "How many times have you walked down a hall and somebody sparked something from an idea…? It has to be a healthy balance."

Peel has also been piloting AI in its employee service centre for nine months, using machine learning to monitor and improve responses before gradually expanding its role.

Arsenault sees the broader application in process re-engineering — using AI tools to surface gaps rather than relying solely on workshops and working groups.

"Instead of getting a whole bunch of people in a room, it’s ‘Here's what this is telling us — do you agree that these are our five big gaps?’" she says. "It's never going to replace the people judgment calls, but it narrows things down."

On credentials and continuous learning:

Arsenault has been deliberate about formalizing the instincts she developed on the job. She took a year away from HR specifically to complete her PMP certification — one of the only non-IT people in the cohort.

 "They're like, ‘What is HR doing here?’ And I'm like, ‘Everything we do is projects,’” she says.

“I was sitting in those classes learning how to capture data and storytelling because I think the more we can represent fact with the human side, and marrying those things together, it just makes for a stronger organization.”

That habit of reaching for formal credentials to put structure behind practical experience has continued throughout her career. Recent additions include a Chief Human Resources Officer program and a Future of Work certificate, both through Wharton Executive Education, a Certified Change Agent designation through Capillary Consulting, and earlier completions of the Women's Leadership Program at Yale School of Management and the Rotman Senior Leadership program.

"I’m very fortunate to have that natural curiosity… I'd love if I could figure out a job where I could go to school and get paid," she says. "You can never say you're done learning."