In 2021, a few months into his role as the chief HR officer at UPS, Darrell Ford got his first taste of company culture in action. As a snowstorm blanketed the Midwest and other delivery companies were sidelined, Ford’s HR team sent him photos of UPSers out on their routes, working “arm in arm, like a human supply chain” to get the job done.

“When you talk about discretionary effort, I don’t think it gets any better. When everybody else is down, our folks are out there,” says Ford, who notes the culture of UPS is focused on “hard work, heavy grit.”

“There are high expectations on accountability: Do what you say and mean it,” he says.

That’s a mandate Ford took to heart when he joined UPS, which was in the midst of an HR transformation that he says “was going sideways.” He leaned into his experience having successfully completed four HR transformations at scale to rightside new technology deployments, reimagine the HR operating model and reinvest in the HR talent of tomorrow—work that earned him a place on HR Executive’s 2024 HR Honor Roll.

“Darrell has delivered impact on an impressive scale,” says Diane Gherson, former CHRO of IBM, the 2015 HR Executive of the Year and a judge for this year’s competition. Ford came to UPS at a time when the workforce was experiencing a “drain on its people” from the pandemic and the organization was facing the potential of the largest labor strike in U.S. history, Gherson notes. Ford tapped into his experience as a three-time CHRO—at DuPont, Xerox and AMD—as well as his “curiosity, optimism and bias for action and turned the situation around,” she says.

“He brought a different way of leading, listening and making decisions,” Gherson says, “and has made a historic impact on the culture and business results.”

Driving a new strategy for HR

One of Ford’s first tasks was a SWOT analysis to get a sense of the HR landscape at UPS, which uncovered significant gaps around the HR Centers of Excellence. For a company of its size—more than 500,000 employees and an annual revenue of $93 billion—its COEs, Ford says, weren’t as mature as they should have been.

Among his early moves, Ford brought in new COE and other key HR leaders—half of the current HR leadership team was brought on after Ford took on the role.

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“Before you do anything, you have to think, Do I have the team that’s capable of running at the pace we need to run to accomplish this charter?” he says.

A key component of that charter was reestablishing trust in HR—repositioning and rebranding the function so it’s viewed as a strategic business contributor, driving value and outcomes.

To support that aim, Ford says, he elevated the emphasis on training for HR through the establishment of the HR Academy. The learning platform connects HR professionals with skills training—consulting, data analysis, design thinking and lean, for instance—structured around developing strategic HR business partners. It was a commitment that was in line with UPS’ long history of developing its employees and promoting from within; nearly 130,000 UPS employees started out “moving cardboard in operations,” Ford says, and have since progressed into other roles, including in leadership.

“The promise at UPS is that you can start out touching the cardboard and become the CEO. So, how does someone start out as a part-time seasonal worker, come into UPS with the right work ethic, and become CHRO some years out? We wanted that promise to be real,” Ford says.

He also worked to carry out that promise by enhancing the pipeline of incoming HR talent. UPS now recruits master’s level HR interns from top universities who participate in robust developmental activities during their intern experience. In the last four years, 22 interns have participated and 92% went on to join the organization—with a 100% retention rate. That new talent then rotates through the HR Leadership Development Program, which gives them experience across several roles in HR’s Centers of Excellence.

As HR transformed to ensure talent was at the center of its work, leadership was key—but the company lacked a good dialogue about what leadership really looked like.

During his time at DuPont, Ford developed a leadership model known as “Head, Heart & Hands,” a concept he brought to UPS. The framework was tailored to UPS’ particular leadership needs, encouraging leaders to strategize, inspire and deliver.

“We didn’t have a lexicon for how we communicate the expectations of leadership,” Ford says, noting that challenge was especially tough to navigate—but important—given that its half-million workers and their leaders are distributed around the world and speak multiple languages.

“It’s got to be simple, it’s got to be memorable and it’s got to be impactful,” he says about the goals of the leadership model. “We created this framework to communicate our leadership expectations, with three simple constructs that are relevant. When you create a dialogue around what ‘good’ looks like, you can actually anchor around that.”

A new view for HR, employee experience

As HR rolled out such changes, they moved fast—and, Ford says, they needed to keep their finger on the pulse of how the transformation was going. Earlier this year, the team launched the Voice of the Customer survey to gauge sentiment about HR’s strategy in everything from development to workplace safety.

“Part of what we missed in the early days [of the HR transformation] was that we didn’t really bring our stakeholders along in the change we were trying to accomplish; that’s part of the reason I was brought here,” Ford says. “After we stabilized technology, fixed processes, we had to pause for a second and say, ‘Let’s go back to our customers and calibrate with them, make sure we’re still on the right track.’ ”

That feedback is guiding refinements in HR strategy, he says, driving a continuous improvement mindset that will shape HR’s top priorities in the coming years.

“My expectation is that each year we’re better than we were last year—and we’ll continue to improve year over year,” he says.

Another method of measuring HR’s strategic impact is through the annual Culture Survey, which showed a 22% improvement in the likelihood to recommend score—and a 100% increase in survey participation—from 2022-23. The LTR metric examines employees’ views on how involved they are in decision-making, whether UPS has an open and trusting work environment, if they are empowered to innovate, and the state of recognition and appreciation.

As the role of HR at UPS has evolved, Ford has made recognition for HR professionals’ work a particular priority.

In his first year on the job, he was impressed by the HR efforts that went into preparing for and executing through peak season—Q4 through Q1 of the next year, for which HR has to hire more than 125,000 people in about 12 weeks to contend with holiday delivery and return demand. HR professionals were working with new tech, a new operating model, new leaders—all amid the pandemic and the Great Resignation.

“We came through peak season and we delivered it. The business said so, the clients said so: It was the best peak season ever,” Ford says. “Me sending out a note or a memo saying thank you just felt hollow relative to the task.”

To convey that appreciation, Ford conceived of a “Pass the ‘Preesh” music video featuring UPSers from around the world, with graphics and lyrics like:

“This past year came and went. UPS did represent. Many obstacles to ascent, so I must pay some compliments. A digital transformation, the pandemic tribulation, a supply chain situation—nothing can stop this operation.”

The effort has since evolved, with the creation of an HR-branded recognition platform and recognition training that has been viewed more than 2,000 times. In the first half of 2024, employees nominated more than 250 HR team members for Pass the ‘Preesh recognition. HR leadership starts every HR town hall event with a Pass the ‘Preesh segment, and those recognized are highlighted in a weekly leadership report and bi-weekly HR newsletter, and they receive a personal congratulatory email.

Recognition was especially key for HR as the function had to keep speeding ahead on its priorities amid labor negotiations in 2023—with the 325,000-member UPS Teamsters group, the largest organizing union in the United States.

HR worked closely with functions around the organization on communication and contingency planning, while prioritizing both employee and customer experience.

“We really had to think strategically. Where is the business going to be in five years? Where should it be, and what labor agreements do we need to enable that strategy?” Ford says. “Early planning and bringing along our stakeholders were key.”

Becoming a ‘tech-first’ org

Another primary driver of the HR function becoming more strategic, Ford says, was more effectively integrating technology.

HR needed to reimagine its processes through a number of lenses, including offering a consumer-grade tech experience to employees while keeping people at the heart of their work.

“If you find that right combination there, there’s truly an opportunity for the organization to have both—which then frees HR professionals up to do higher value-added services and engagement and to drive the business, which is really what we’re after,” Ford says.

At UPS, that formula has involved maximizing the capabilities of both ServiceNow and Workday and incorporating robotics and AI into daily routines. For instance, Ford has led improvements to Annie, the HR chatbot, to become even more conversational and capable of solving more complex problems.

Through targeted communications strategies and by leveraging forums like the HR Academy, HR leaders have been focused on encouraging their teams to “embrace the technology, embrace the change,” Ford says.

“Touch it, play with it, try and break it, go learn,” he says is the message he tells his HR teams and the workforce at large. “And then we’ll come together, collaborate and create good products and services for our employees.”

That aim is being realized through the India Technology Centre. About two years ago, the company’s new chief digital and technology officer identified the need for a technology development center to build out UPS’ tech capability. HR put together a team to stand up such a center in a few weeks and within about nine months got the project off the ground in Chennai, India, with its first 100 hires—a staff that has since grown more than tenfold.

“That’s HR making an impact, delivering on a need that is strategic in nature, scaling this idea that started out with a small, agile team and we now have a technology center up and running with 1,000-plus employees who are having a great experience and delivering for us,” Ford says.

The ITC’s rapid growth has also allowed UPS to integrate AI into the HR processes deployed, with a pilot of Workday’s AI-powered candidate skills matching that ultimately reduced recruiter time and cost by 44%.

Meanwhile, advanced tech is being incorporated throughout the workforce, including vehicle dashcams that offer driving alerts and loop in supervisors for coaching. The tech is now in its fourth year and will be rolled out to almost half of U.S. vehicles by the end of 2024.

“We want to be a tech-first, digitally enabled organization,” Ford says. “We want to lead with that.”

Aligning DEI and HR

As UPS expands its investment in tech, it’s not losing sight of the investment in people, Ford says. In particular, diversity, equity and inclusion have been a top business priority in recent years.

Two years after Ford joined the organization, the then-chief diversity officer transitioned out of the role and Ford assumed a dual title. He envisions DEI as a core piece of HR and says DEI strategies have been embedded throughout talent practices, making the role fitting.

Since he took on the position, Ford has been a very visible champion for DEI, both within and outside UPS, such as through the annual UPS Impact Summit and extensive work to grow the organization’s business resource groups and their impact. Between 2022-23, the number of UPS BRGs increased by 9%, and membership grew by 12%, with 17,000 employees across 36 countries participating in a BRG. In the same timeframe, the number of BRG events grew by more than 40%, and members’ volunteer hours jumped by 63%.

Beyond the positive business impacts of DEI investment, Ford says, the commitment is personal.

“It’s something I believe in—from the core of who I am and how I grew up,” he says.

Ford grew up in Brooklyn, where he says “diversity was a real thing every day.” He would play stickball with the Italian kids. He would play handball with the Hasidic Jews. His best friend was from Jamaica; he taught Ford how to play soccer, and Ford taught him how to play basketball.

“I grew up in this melting pot, and so some of my best lessons in diversity were learned on the streets of New York,” he says. “And no matter where I travel in the world, I’ve never forgotten those.”