Stockholm · Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland
Building HR functions that hold when the business scales
Head of HR at Nobina Sverige, reporting to the CEO and sitting on the executive team. Fifteen years across four Nordic countries, owning pay, collective agreements, employee data and the systems underneath. I take functions from informal delivery to something documented and measurable, then use digital tooling where it earns its place rather than where it looks impressive.
Onboarding, internal moves, absence and exit run as one documented flow with a named owner at every handover, rather than four functions improvising in parallel.
Payroll codes, mapping against schedules and cost accounts, reconciliation, collective agreements, and the trail that has to hold when someone asks how a figure was produced.
HR systems specified together with IT rather than handed over to it. Data definitions, access scope and integrity treated as the ground everything else stands on.
Managers carry most of the employee experience. My job is to make the right action the easy one, with support that arrives before the problem does.
Portfolio
Operationally heavy businesses, unionised workforces, several countries at once. Specific figures on savings, absence, hiring and negotiation outcomes are commercially sensitive, so they sit behind a time limited link rather than on a public page.
Nobina Sverige · with Operations
Absence was treated as a cost line rather than an HR metric. Working depot by depot with Operations instead of issuing policy from the centre, it came down and stayed down, with knock on effects on overtime, staffing balance and working environment.
Nobina · national bargaining and courts
Company chief negotiator with final responsibility for union and labour law matters, on the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise delegation and representing the company in the European Works Council. Has run proceedings through to the Labour Court.
Nobina Sverige · new Stockholm areas
New traffic contracts meant hiring, onboarding and putting under agreement a large additional workforce while the existing operation kept running. Tender, mobilisation, integration and contract exit handled in parallel, with contracted commitments to the public authority to meet.
SOS Alarm · around 250 managers
CV screening, supported interviewing and digital reference checking introduced as one chain rather than disconnected tools, built on clear role requirement profiles. Managers got faster and more consistent material, and the candidate experience improved as the process shortened.
Ingram Micro · Zalando logistics, Brunna
Stood up a new logistics centre built around warehouse automation and robotics. Recruited the site leadership and the first wave of employees, established the collective agreement from scratch, and owned payroll codes, schedule mapping and reconciliation lists.
Nobina Akademin · four countries
Role based digital training for key positions, produced with AI support and versioned per country and language without restarting the process each time. Service and customer experience training rebuilt so it took less time to deliver without losing quality.
Interactive
Working prototypes rather than screenshots. Each one solves a problem I have run into with a real function behind me. All figures inside are demonstration data, and no employee records are used anywhere.
Stop putting everyone through the same three weeks
Skills based onboarding that accelerates time to performance Stop treating every new hire the same. This solution connects recruitment insights, role requirements and individual capability to create a personalised onboarding journey from day one. By identifying what a new employee already knows and where development is needed, the onboarding plan focuses only on the skills and knowledge required for success in the role. Managers and employees share the same roadmap, creating clarity, faster integration and stronger ownership. The result is a faster path to full performance, reducing time to productivity by up to 15 days, creating direct business value and supporting higher retention.
Full detail
Cost savings, absence figures, negotiation outcomes and hiring data belong to the businesses I have worked in. I share them with people who have a reason to see them, through a link tied to one recipient that stops working on its own.
One link, one recipient, no account needed.
Expires after 14 days or five openings, whichever comes first.
Nothing is indexed and nothing is stored beyond the request.
Usually approved the same day
Approach
Four things I keep coming back to, in the order they have to happen.
01
A function that depends on who happens to be available cannot scale, and no system fixes that. Write down who owns what, then automate the parts that have stopped changing.
02
Decisions made far from the floor rarely survive contact with it. Absence numbers move because the work happens in the depots, not because a policy was circulated.
03
One definition per concept, one owner per field, and completeness you can actually measure. Until that holds, every report is a confident guess and every automation inherits the guess.
04
Who sees which figure, for how long, is not an afterthought once the data is clean. This page works the same way, which is the least I can ask of anything else I build.
Record
2025 to now
Nobina Sverige AB
Executive team, reporting to the CEO. Chief negotiator. HR budget ownership. Duty officer and crisis staff.
2024 to 2025
Nobina Norway
Norwegian management team, reporting to the CEO. HR budget ownership.
2023 to 2024
Nobina Group
Group initiatives and execution across four countries.
2022 to 2023
SOS Alarm
Duty officer and crisis staff including the covid pandemic. Interim HR Director when required.
2019 to 2022
SOS Alarm
National production leadership team for emergency number 112.
2017 to 2019
Ingram Micro Nordic Services
Zalando logistics launch. Robotics and automation. Three sites.
2016 to 2017
Ingram Micro
Led payroll, HR administration and reception. Nordic HR team.
2011 to 2016
Helpman Entreprenad
Operational HR and recruitment, white and blue collar.
Questions
Michaela Pehrström is Head of HR at Nobina Sverige AB in Stockholm, a member of the company executive team reporting to the CEO. She has fifteen years in HR and has held leadership roles across Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, including full accountability for the Swedish and Norwegian operations.
She has owned payroll for sizeable operational populations, including the configuration of payroll codes mapped to shift schedules and cost accounts, and has led payroll as a function. She serves as chief negotiator, sits on the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise delegation in national collective bargaining, represents her organisation in the European Works Council, and has run more than twenty labour law proceedings through the Labour Court and district court.
Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. Full HR accountability in Sweden and Norway, group level responsibility across all four. She works in Swedish and English and understands Norwegian and Danish.
Workday, SAP, Aditro and SD Worx across core HR and payroll, Teamtailor and Jobvite for recruitment, and Power BI, Mercur and Agresso for reporting and budget control. She works closely with the Nordic IT function on internally developed systems.
Developed AI agents to save time in managers’ daily work and support the interpretation and application of collective agreements. Selectively, and where the business case is clear, I implement digital solutions that create measurable value. Examples include role based leadership training used by leaders across the Nordics in several languages, a tool that interprets collective agreements for managers, and a recruitment chain with CV screening and digital reference checking built on clear role requirement profiles.
A Bachelor degree from Stockholm University in education and human resource management, a Certified Business Architect qualification from Cordial, executive education at the Stockholm School of Economics in strategy, structure and leadership, the Stellar Executive Program in digital leadership, and programmes at IHM Business School in innovation and operational control.
Contact
Including the parts that did not work first time, which is usually the more useful conversation.