Monica Anderton, CHRO at DS Smith

Show Notes

Solving the Manufacturing Talent Gap: DS Smith’s CHRO on Engagement, Integration, and AI that Pays

Summary

Struggling to recruit and retain frontline talent while driving transformation?

Monica Anderton, CHRO at DS Smith North America—and a recognized top CHRO voice in manufacturing—shares how her team stabilized a complex post-acquisition landscape and built a “sticky” culture in a tough labor market.

Monica walks through DS Smith’s North America journey—from consolidating plants and launching a highly automated greenfield site in Lebanon, Indiana, to importing the company’s sustainability DNA (“redefining packaging for a changing world”).

She breaks down Project Engage, a data-driven turnaround that moved poor survey scores by treating engagement like any other operations initiative: executive sponsorship, site-level ownership, transparent communications, targeted training for frontline leaders, and rigorous measurement.

On the technology front, Monica details where AI is already creating ROI—saving millions by translating content across 7–8 languages and building an RFP answer library that speeds responses—alongside pragmatic HR ops wins like automating ATS and onboarding to reduce admin and rehire risk. Expect candid lessons on automation tradeoffs, funding realities, pacing change for frontline teams, and why HR must keep learning (including Monica’s own AI coursework) to act as business leaders first.

Timestamps

[01:54] – Guest intro and DS Smith’s North America growth story

[02:24] – Integration, plant consolidation, sustainability, and the Lebanon, IN greenfield

[06:07] – The manufacturing labor gap and making work “sticky” for the next generation

[08:23] – Project Engage: turning poor survey results into measurable improvement

[12:24] – Running engagement like operations: metrics, ownership, monthly exec reviews

[13:41] – Automation vs. ROI and where AI makes sense today

[15:58] – Saving millions with AI translations; building an RFP knowledge base

[17:47] – Modernizing HR ops: ATS/onboarding fixes; inspiration from AI coaching at scale

[21:53] – Career advice: keep learning, know the metrics, be a business leader in HR

Takeaways

- Treat engagement like an operations project: secure executive sponsors, assign site-level owners, communicate transparently, and measure before/after.

- Compete in the labor crunch by building “sticky” workplaces: develop frontline leaders, clarify career paths, and align culture with daily behaviors.

- Target AI where ROI is clear: automate translations to cut costs and standardize voice; create a reusable RFP answer library to move faster.

- Modernize people ops to reduce friction: automate ATS and onboarding, clean data, and prevent costly rehire mistakes.

- Pilot AI-enabled coaching and support where scale is needed; set guardrails, learn from usage data, and iterate content.

- Keep learning to lead credibly: deepen your AI literacy, know the business metrics, and operate as a business leader in the people function.

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Emily Fenech (00:34)
Welcome to HR Voices. I'm Emily Fenech and today I get to chat with Monica Anderton, the CHRO at DS Smith and recently recognized as a top CHRO voice in manufacturing. Welcome Monica and congratulations.

Monica Anderton (00:47)
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Emily Fenech (00:50)
Yeah, that's a wonderful recognition. I also read that, you part of that you've been very busy rebuilding the HR team and the functions there at DS Smith North America from the ground up. So I would love to hear a little bit more about the organization, about DS Smith and about what you've been doing over there.

Monica Anderton (01:08)
Yeah, so it's a great story. So DS Smith is a paper and packaging manufacturer based in the United Kingdom. And in 2018, they made their first foray into North America by buying some assets from a company called Interstate Resources. And before that, they're a global entity predominantly in Europe. There's about 34 different countries and we have over 300 plants.

And so they're very well saturated in Europe and usually one or two in the markets that they serve. So North America really is kind of their growth engine and focus. And when they bought the assets back in 2018, it was made up of a bunch of different other acquisitions. And so when I came in two years into the deal, they didn't really feel like the merger integration had occurred.

and that we were really leveraging the global resources, brand, tools, data sets that we could. And so part of my mission in joining and sort of my mantra to go do was to kind of do the merger integration. And so we've spent a lot, a lot of time doing that. And Dia Smith is very well known for their sustainability platform. So we brought that over. Kind of our tagline is changing.

redefining packaging for a changing world. So we're very passionate about sustainability. We really sell unique services to our customers that meet them kind of where they're at and what their needs are. And at the time, and we have been a very small player in the U.S. market because there's a lot of other competitors that are much bigger than us. But that uniqueness and how we tailor our product is very enticing to the customers that we have. We also have lots of

global national accounts that we have serviced in Europe that were very, very excited about the products and services we offer. And they actually were part of the impetus of why DS Smith went to North America because those customers said, hey, we would love to have you in the US. When are you going to go? When are you going to go? So it's been a really fun journey. have, when I started, we were about 23 plants and about over 3,300 employees. We've really looked at the

the organization, we're down to 17 plants. We've kind of sold some, we've closed some as we've kind of looked at our org model and design of sort of what is optimal for North America. And then the really cool thing that's happened at the same time is we have a Greenfield startup plant in Lebanon, Indiana, a packaging plant that's probably one of the biggest packaging plants in the globe with best in class automation, talent. And so we also, I also got

the joy of working with that team of building that facility and having it come online in the last couple of years. And we literally just celebrated their fifth year anniversary. So that's been another really neat component as part of our growth story.

Emily Fenech (04:04)
Yeah, gosh, seems a lot's going on. I'd love to hear. I'd love to unpack some of the challenges along the way in this journey. I think this show is all about learning from other leaders' experiences. And so you've been through a lot. Acquisitions are hard. Mergers are hard. Integrating teams. It's all very challenging in and of itself. But I'm wondering if you could talk to me about what's top of mind.

Now that you've been on that journey, what's now top of mind the biggest challenge that you're thinking about?

Monica Anderton (04:33)
Yeah, I would say, I thought about this because I had the question and I had a time and I would say for us, it remains sort of the labor market. And so I always like to share because we're in manufacturing and it's not super glamorous. In the US labor market in the next decade, there's going to be about 3.8 million manufacturing job openings. And in the US,

there is only about 1.9 million people that are going to be able to fill that gap. And so for us, and that's because we've got boomers retiring, mean, everything that everybody else is experiencing, but the nuance for us is how do I get that younger generation to want to come and work in a manufacturing environment? We have a huge plant, there's probably not air condition, your in-shift work, it's maybe not as glamorous as going to work at a

you know, a Microsoft or an Amazon or something high tech and how do I get that next generation of wanting to come in and be part of our team and grow their career in our business when it's kind of not as prevalent as other opportunities that are out there. And I think it's really critical for us and our success, especially post COVID. We've really had a journey of sort of how do we get people in the door.

And to me, it's not how do we get the people in the door, it's also how do we create the sticky factor to keep them and how do we help them understand that there is a career development journey, that there is growth with us and what does that story look like? So culture and engagement and environment are just as important as me getting them in the door. And we had a lot of attrition issues when I first came in. So we've spent a lot of time focusing on culture engagement, sticky factor, and sort of what is our brand.

What is our leadership brand and voice and how are our leaders at the ground level? Because they're the ones that drive this, not Monica in Atlanta. It's the people on the plant floor that really drive this business and keep the team engaged and moving forward.

Emily Fenech (06:39)
Yeah, what has been, how have you risen to the challenge? Like what has been the most successful, what's been sort of the most successful learning, experiment, playbook, strategy?

Monica Anderton (06:49)
Yeah, we had an employee survey a couple of years ago and the results were terrible. And again, we're in this terrible staffing crunch of trying to find people. And a lot of it is when you don't have the resources, then you have to make people work overtime. It affects their time outside of work. It's a self-fulfilling sort of, it cascades down and creates more issues. And so we...

got these survey results and we had a couple of hotspot plans. And so we put together a project that we called Project Engage and we involved the business leaders in this project because what I said is I can put all the programs in the world out there. If you don't drive it, if you don't believe it, if you don't engage, it's garbage in, garbage out, right?

And so we got the business leaders on, we talked through all the facets, we got a project manager, and there was two executive sponsors, me and the business leader for that business unit. And the other thing was we had accountability at the executive level because the CEO said, what are you going to do to fix these engagement scores at a couple of these plants? Not all of my plants, but at these low performing plants as far as it goes with employee engagement.

We started out, we were very regimented. met, we had leads over each of the functional areas that we focused on. And we drove a project from end to end. So there was accountability with the executives, there was accountability with the employees because the two, the sponsor and I actually did a complete communications campaign. Because we went back to the employees and said, look, we get that we've got some things that we need to improve and do better. Here's how we're focused, here's who's involved.

So we were very transparent along the way. And then we sort of counted the beginning employee survey. We did a post employee survey after we implemented a bunch of stuff. We did some training and development, all of our first line supervisors and managers. This wasn't training and development on.

core leadership, what we literally did is we went out and created a class and talked about what does engagement mean and how you become engaging managers and what is your sticky factor and how do you build culture and what's the cost of not doing this? What is the attrition cost? What is the recruiting cost? What is the impact your business? What's the morale cost? So we kind of.

It was full scope and sort of what's the impact to you, because it's impacting your financials, not mine, but we're all in it together. So was very much common sense things that we did, but the focus on it and making sure that the ownership was at the site level really, really made a change. And what we ended up doing at the end of that year, we ran another survey and we saw our score significantly increase from the work and the ground.

efforts that the leadership at the plants were doing and it was a huge, huge success for us. And I don't think it ever ends, but I think it really changed the narrative of this is not an HR thing. This is a leadership thing. Our culture, how we treat people, it's all part of this. It's part of the DNA that helps people want to be here, want to stay here and want to grow with us. And we need you to help us and tell us what you need. And we ask lots and lots of questions of the leadership team.

but huge, huge impact. And I think the thing that was really important in that is we're a manufacturing company. We measure quality, on-time delivery, over time. We measure, measure, measure. Because we put together a project with a project plan, with a project leader, we were very direct in our communications with the larger team, with the executive team, and we were accountable to report every month at the senior level of what we were doing.

We really had the focus on this is just the same as putting in a million dollar piece of equipment or driving quality initiatives. And it was treated that way. So it was viewed as very important. And I didn't have to sell it because the business leaders were on the team with me and they were heading up work functions.

Emily Fenech (10:50)
There's so much I like about this story, but my favorite part is I think you started with the data that ties it to business impact. And I think that's where a lot of projects, not just HR projects, a lot of projects sort of missed the mark. We're doing this because it's important. We're doing this to reach customers. We're doing this because, you but showing the revenue impact, showing the bottom line impact, like you said, really gets people's attention, right?

This isn't just to make people feel good. That's a positive thing. You want your employees to feel good, but that's not all it's about.

Monica Anderton (11:25)
No, and the CEO doesn't like fluff, right? mean, our CEO is an engineer and has a finance degree. He's all about the number and the metrics. And we have a very hard-driving team that understands that. But I think that really pushed us up to another level of accountability of, look, this needs to run like a project. And it's not my HR project. It's our company project in North America.

Emily Fenech (11:49)
Well, that's a great story. Thank you for sharing that. I wanted to ask about the use of technology. I know when you think about the challenge you brought up, the labor market being tough, right? Is technology helping you fill that gap? What are you guys thinking about in the manufacturing space? Not just this year, but five years, 10 years from now?

Monica Anderton (12:07)
Yeah, we have a lot of automation, especially in that startup plant, right? We've got lots of automation. We've got some equipment that has robotics that do loading of paper, offloading, but it is really, really expensive. And so our automation will come. We've tested Google Glasses and all kinds of different stuff.

But it's how do I compete with the capital for the equipment that we need to run the plans and show the ROI of what that automation or that AI is going to do for us. So I would say we're not as far ahead as some of my friends are around the world or some of my peers in Atlanta where I've seen them doing really great things. But what we have tried and has been really successful for us is we did a trial on our own sort of AI tool.

And we did a couple high profile things in there. So we did two projects. One, we did language translations. Remember I said we're in 34 countries. And so we're translating stuff into seven or eight primary languages all the time and spending lots of money doing it. Cause there's nuances and pronunciations and all that kind of stuff. We started running it through the sandbox AI tool.

And we actually ended up saving millions of dollars. It got very iterative because it was understanding how we speak and what our voice is in the DS Smith culture. So it really was really, really successful. And so that was one really good example. And then a second one we did was we, because we are servicing customers, we get RFPs all the time, request for information, request for proposals, and you're answering.

a lot of the same questions, but in different formats and lots and lots and lots. Like I've talked about ESG and ethics and a million times for a bunch of big, big customers in different formats. So we started feeding those in because the answers don't change our policy, our approach to ethics or behaviors or whatever, it doesn't change. So that we were sort of creating our own database of our own responses and data that we could seamlessly use as we got these in. And it's been

wonderful. And it's been an interesting journey of kind of learning, look, there is some value creation here. So now what else can we test? What else can we do?

Emily Fenech (14:24)
Yeah, that's wonderful. I met with the CHRO of UltraDent. They're in manufacturing of dental products. But his ability to communicate with the front line, that was one of his favorite sort of AI use cases as well. They have a lot of different languages as well. And his advice that he shared was to think like a content creator. He's using a lot of short form video translated into languages and just making it

easier for people to hear you.

Monica Anderton (14:51)
Yeah,

that's amazing. And part of it for us is doing the ROI, but sometimes I think it's just being innovative and taking the leap and kind of showing what the art of possible is versus trying to build a use case on some of the stuff. The sandbox, yes, and it's been successful, but it's now how do we kind of push it forward and evolve it a bit. Yeah. I think it's my starting.

Emily Fenech (15:14)
Mm-hmm. And it sounds like you guys are not starting with use cases. You're starting with like problems. Yeah, which is the way it should be done.

Monica Anderton (15:23)
But it made sense to the executive team because it was easy to rationalize it. We're spending millions of dollars on translations. This is not value add. It's a pain in the keister. We get the translations back and sometimes the phonetics are wrong and then we've got to re-edit it again. So they're like, it's terrible. mean, they're right there with us. They understand what we're talking about. Good stuff.

I wish we were further ahead, it's, you know, some of it's also getting the funding for it. How's that?

Emily Fenech (15:51)
Yeah, right. Yes. I wanted to ask you too about the HR team specifically. I know you just mentioned that some of your policies and things are being used as sort of like knowledge base. Is there any other fun technologies or experiments that you've run specific to people, not just to communicating with your employees, but running the people function? Is there any other use cases you could share?

Monica Anderton (16:13)
Yeah, I will tell you one that's not my use case. How about I'll tell you one I saw in AI recently that was very, very cool. I mean, we're doing all kinds of stuff. Let me not discredit my team. We've been automating, and this is like, you're going to laugh at me, like this is 100 years old, but we automated our applicant tracking system. And then we automated our onboarding. And again, we found some creative ways to do this stuff because we couldn't get the funding and yet.

it's made a huge material difference in the amount of hours we spend in admin just messes. And we did it all manual. So for the whole first couple of years I was here, we had applicants at the plant level that they would hire, they'd enter them in the payroll and then all of a sudden they'd figure out it was somebody that worked for us before that we might've let go for a.

you know, a policy violation. I'm like, how can you get to that point? Well, we've had attrition in the plants, there's new leaders, and you don't know. So part of it is just trying to get your data house in order. And so we've done some baby steps that have been huge steps for my team. But let me flip back to the other example of AI that I saw recently that was really, really cool. Delta is using an AI coaching tool called...

Valencia, and I don't know if I'm saying it right, but they have rolled out an AI coach for all of their managers. And they've trained it, they did a lot of testing on it, and now it's out and they're using it day to day for their frontline managers, for their season managers. And I think the tool's called Nadia is the AI lady's name. It's not a lady, but the tool's name.

And it was an amazing story of just sort of how they're iterating of here's our culture, here's our beliefs, loading it in, and then actually letting an AI coach be out there and really helping these people, looking at their calendar, saying, hey, you need to do this, going back and saying, hey, did you talk to that employee about the issue that we talked about? So there's an accountability perspective to the tool too. Very, very cool. I would love to see that.

Might be a little more progressive for me with my plants because I have a lot of people who aren't wired back to the example you gave me. But I think we've got to start saying, look, the new normal is not going to be the same old same old. And we've got to figure out what that looks like. And then I think we've got to be bold just to pick something up and test it. And I'm ready. I'm just not sure what yet. How's that?

Emily Fenech (18:41)
No, mean, it sounds like you're where a lot of people are. It's funny you mentioned AI coaching. met with CHRO at New York City Public Schools. And you think of that like a government, you think slow, I think slow. They are doing some really cool things with teachers where they can't possibly offer one-on-one coaching to 140,000 teachers and yet they need support. They need better support. And so they are running an AI coaching tool.

Because even if it's not, the teachers love it, the feedback's great, and they're learning from it. They're learning based on anonymously what they're asking about and getting coaching on. What do they need to do better to support these teachers at scale? And I loved hearing even the most unlikely industries.

Monica Anderton (19:22)
That's awesome. And I think it's iterative, right? So you can see the data of what they're asking. You can load more content on. You can kind of put a wheelhouse around or kind of some barriers around. Let's not answer those questions. Let's direct them to your, you know, whatever HR partner. I think it's great. And I think we do need to speed it up, but I think it's also, you've got to make money and service your customers and it's a balance. So I love, love, love hearing stuff like that. And I feel like I'm behind the eight ball, but

I think you do what you can do. How's that?

Emily Fenech (19:52)
And you also have to make sure that the change that you're rolling through, not just your people team, but your whole company, you're rolling it out at a speed that people can metabolize. You can't change everything overnight.

Monica Anderton (20:02)
No, no.

Emily Fenech (20:04)
Awesome. Well, do you have any, first of all, I just really love the stories that you brought today. You have so much great experience. Thank you for being here. Do you, I love to end it with a word of advice or encouragement for people working in people.

Monica Anderton (20:19)
Yeah. gosh, I've got lots of parting words of wisdom, but I would say always keep learning. So you might be surprised, but I actually went and took a couple of AI courses online that I found for free because I felt like I didn't know enough about AI. So I feel like I can say, what's a large language model? Like I knew what LLL is. I hope that's what it is. But anyhow, you know, I took some classes because I felt like I needed to understand what's happening out there. And I think

know your business, know your metrics, know what makes you profit and build strong relationships, but also always keep learning and always keep understanding what's going on in the space because you may bring in some kernel into the business that's going to change the fundamental way you do business and you're the HR person. And I always feel like we're business people that happen to be in the human capital function.

And so we've got to keep up with the trends and what's going on in the marketplace. So keep learning and keep being curious of what's going on out there.

Emily Fenech (21:20)
That's great advice. Thanks again, Monica.

Monica Anderton (21:23)
Thank you, awesome.