Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/330423
[ 11 ] JUNE 2014 | www.hrotoday.com CHRO Awards is Roger Gaston, senior vice president of HR, at global business collaboration and communications provider Avaya Inc., where he is responsible for employee compensation and benefits, employee communications, workforce relations, organizational development and transformation, recruitment, talent management and labor relations. A respected and highly regarded HR leader, Gaston was corporate vice president and senior vice president of HR, respectively, at two multi-billion companies—StorageTek and Toys `R' Us—prior to assuming HR leadership at Avaya. At StorageTek, now part of Oracle, he led the HR organization in transforming the business into a leader in the global storage services and solutions business. He also was at the helm of a global learning initiative focused on technical, sales and leadership development for employees, partners and customers. Gaston also oversaw an early RPO deal with the Kenexa Corporation. The reason to outsource recruitment was two-fold: across-the-board cost savings and an efficient and effective recruitment system. At Toys `R' Us, Gaston was responsible for delivering programs and services to more than 72,000 employees worldwide and was charged with transforming HR into a world-class organization. During his tenure, numerous competitive challenges confronted the $11 billion toy retailer, chief among them Internet sales and the move away from board games to electronics games. As the company restructured operations to address these disruptive changes, altering everything from the floor layout of stores to the links in its supply chain. Gaston is widely regarded for his team-building skills, not all that surprising as he studied behavioral knowledge as a psychology major at Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio (he minored in business). In his senior year of college, he interned at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Although an intern, he nonetheless performed a key staffing role—recruiting students at colleges across the country to work at NASA. To this day, talent acquisition and retention are two of his primary areas of focus, and he takes great prides in having assisted many people over the decades to acquire the skills needed to achieve their dream careers. Hard work, inventiveness, tenacity, and great skill define all of this year's award recipients. Each has assisted the profession of CHRO to achieve greater respect and momentum. Winner Jan Becker, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, Autodesk Russ Banham can be reached at www.russbanham.com. These CHROs are transforming HR in an era where vital skill sets are increasingly difficult to come by, when global outsourcing decisions have never been more complex and challenging, and when the economic environment has demanded greater cost-effectiveness, particularly with respect to finding a balance between retained labor and outsourcing.