Milliken Names Bethany Smith As New Chief Human Resources Officer

A new CHRO at Milliken and what the appointment signals

Milliken & Company, the global diversified manufacturer headquartered in Spartanburg, South Carolina, has named Bethany Smith as its new Chief Human Resources Officer. The appointment brings a seasoned HR leader into one of the highest-stakes people roles at a company that operates across textiles, chemicals, and floor covering with a workforce spanning multiple countries and business units.

CHRO appointments at companies of Milliken's scale rarely happen in isolation. They reflect where the organization believes its people strategy needs to go and what capabilities it lacks or wants to strengthen. For a company that has historically emphasized innovation, manufacturing excellence, and associate-centered culture, bringing in a new top HR leader at this stage signals a continued commitment to treating human capital as a genuine competitive differentiator rather than a support function.

The CHRO role has changed fundamentally over the past decade

The Chief Human Resources Officer position has evolved significantly from its origins as a senior HR generalist responsible for benefits, compliance, and labor relations. Today's CHROs are expected to sit at the executive table as strategic partners — advising on organizational design, leading culture change programs, managing workforce planning across economic cycles, and increasingly, overseeing the integration of technology into people processes.

The skills that make a CHRO effective now overlap considerably with those of a business strategist. They need to understand how organizational structure affects execution speed, how talent density in critical roles drives competitive advantage, and how the workforce of today needs to be developed to meet the demands of five years from now. The mistakes that prevent HR from being a CEO's strategic partner are well-documented — and avoiding them is exactly what boards and executive teams expect from a modern CHRO from day one.

Milliken's appointment of Smith into this role comes at a time when manufacturers broadly are grappling with workforce challenges that are structural rather than cyclical: aging skilled trades workforces, competition for technical talent with technology companies, and the need to build organizational capabilities around data, automation, and sustainability without losing the operational expertise that defines manufacturing culture.

What the search for manufacturing HR leaders actually looks like

Manufacturing companies face a distinctive challenge when searching for senior HR leaders. The most accomplished HR executives often come from industries — technology, financial services, consumer goods — where the workforce profile is very different from a manufacturing environment. Someone who has spent their career scaling software company people programs may not immediately understand the complexity of managing a multi-shift hourly workforce alongside a professional and technical salaried population.

The best manufacturing CHROs typically have either grown up in manufacturing HR themselves or have made a conscious effort to understand the operational realities of running a plant before attempting to design policies that affect people who work in them. They know that a benefits program that looks generous on paper can land poorly if it doesn't account for the shift differential structure, that performance management frameworks designed for desk workers often don't translate to production floor environments, and that the informal culture of a manufacturing facility is usually stronger and more persistent than any formal culture initiative.

At the same time, manufacturing CHROs who have only operated within manufacturing can sometimes be slower to adopt innovations in talent acquisition, employee experience, and workforce analytics that have become standard practice in other sectors. The ideal candidate brings cross-industry perspective while being genuinely curious about — rather than dismissive of — the specifics of the manufacturing context. AI-powered recruitment tools that have reshaped talent acquisition in tech and finance are increasingly relevant for manufacturing companies competing for engineering, technical, and analytical roles.

Culture as a source of competitive advantage at Milliken

Milliken has long maintained a reputation for an unusually strong internal culture — one built around continuous improvement principles, associate empowerment, and a commitment to safety and ethical conduct that predates these becoming mainstream corporate priorities. The company's culture is not incidental to its business performance; it's been treated as a strategic asset that has enabled sustained innovation and customer loyalty across market cycles.

Maintaining that culture through leadership transitions — including the transition of the CHRO role itself — is a real challenge. Culture is easier to erode than to build, and a new senior HR leader who moves too fast to change things that are working can damage organizational cohesion even while believing they are making improvements. The most effective CHROs coming into established, culture-driven organizations typically begin with a genuine listening and learning phase before making significant structural changes. Managing organizational change effectively at that scale requires understanding what people value about the current state before proposing what needs to be different.

Workforce development and the future of manufacturing talent

One of the central challenges facing any manufacturing CHRO today is building a workforce development strategy that bridges the gap between the experienced workforce of the present and the capability requirements of the future. Advanced manufacturing increasingly requires workers who can operate sophisticated automation equipment, interpret data from connected systems, and apply continuous improvement methodologies not just in production but across the full value chain.

That capability building requires investment in learning and development infrastructure, partnership with educational institutions, and internal mobility programs that give current associates a visible path to develop new skills and take on expanded roles. AI-assisted performance management tools are increasingly being used to identify skill gaps, recommend development paths, and track progress in ways that make workforce development programs more targeted and measurable.

For a company like Milliken that operates across multiple business segments — each with different technology intensity, market dynamics, and workforce requirements — the workforce planning challenge is particularly complex. Building a unified people strategy that serves the needs of a floor covering business, a specialty chemicals operation, and a performance textiles division simultaneously requires both enterprise-level thinking and genuine attentiveness to the distinct needs of each operating unit.

The CHRO's role in sustaining long-term organizational health

Perhaps the most important function a CHRO can serve at an established company is protecting and developing the leadership pipeline that will carry the organization into the next decade. Succession planning at the executive level, high-potential identification and development at middle management, and the cultivation of frontline leadership capability all ultimately sit within HR's domain — and all of them have compounding returns over time.

Companies that invest consistently in leadership development tend to be more resilient through economic disruption, more capable of executing strategic pivots, and more successful at retaining the kind of people who have options. The CHRO who builds that pipeline quietly and systematically over a five-to-ten-year tenure often creates more lasting organizational value than any single initiative or program. Using HRMS data and predictive analytics to measure engagement is one of the tools that makes it possible to identify at-risk talent and intervene before the loss rather than after.

Milliken's decision to appoint Bethany Smith as CHRO reflects the organization's recognition that people strategy at this scale requires dedicated, senior executive leadership. What Smith does with that mandate — and how she shapes the company's approach to talent, culture, and organizational capability over time — will be worth watching for anyone interested in how established manufacturers navigate the workforce challenges of the coming decade. Investing in the right HR technology infrastructure will be one early signal of the strategic priorities her tenure is built around.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Why Workday New Hire Onboarding Breaks Down for Frontline Employees and What Actually Fixes It

Image
The Onboarding Gap Nobody Talks About Workday's onboarding module is well-designed for its intended audience: office-based, desk workers with reliable computer access, personal email addresses, and the digital literacy to navigate a web-based portal. For this population, Workday onboarding works well — it automates tasks, routes approvals, collects documents, and creates a reasonably smooth first-week experience. But most organizations using Workday have a substantial population of frontline workers: warehouse employees, retail staff, manufacturing workers, healthcare aides, food service workers, drivers. For this population, the standard Workday onboarding experience frequently fails in ways that are predictable, documented, and — crucially — fixable. Understanding why it breaks down and what actually works is increasingly urgent as labor market competition for frontline talent intensifies. How Standard Workday Onboarding Is Designed Workday's new hire onboarding (delivered th...
Read more

AI Agents in HR: How Autonomous Workflows Are Transforming Onboarding, Offboarding, and Compliance

Image
CloudApper AI automates routine HR workflows including onboarding, offboarding, and compliance monitoring without replacing your existing HRIS. Most HR teams have used automation for years: rules-based workflows that trigger an email when a form is submitted, or integrations that push data between systems when a field changes. AI agents are a fundamentally different category. They don't execute rules — they reason. An AI agent can receive an ambiguous input ("this new hire's visa status has changed"), determine what it means in context, decide what actions are required across multiple systems, execute those actions, and report back with a summary — without a human scripting each step. The distinction matters practically. Rule-based automation breaks when inputs vary. AI agents handle variation by design. For HR — where every employee situation is slightly different, documentation requirements shift with jurisdiction, and processes depend on role, location, depa...
Read more

ERP Solution Guide: How to Choose the Best ERP for Your Business

What Is an ERP System and Why Does It Matter? An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is software that integrates the core functions of a business — finance, inventory, procurement, human resources, manufacturing, and customer management — into a single, connected platform. Instead of data living in separate spreadsheets or standalone applications that don't talk to each other, an ERP creates one source of truth for the entire organization. For growing companies, the question is usually not whether they need an ERP but when and which one. Getting this decision right has long-term consequences. A poorly chosen ERP creates more problems than it solves — forcing teams to work around the system, creating data integrity issues, and consuming IT resources in an endless cycle of customization and maintenance. A well-chosen ERP, on the other hand, becomes the operational backbone that lets a company scale without proportionally growing its administrative overhead. Understandin...
Read more

Apple Targeting to Increase Average Selling Prices (ASPs) Instead of iPhone Volume

The shift Apple made that changed how the smartphone industry counts success For most of its history as a smartphone maker, Apple played a numbers game it wasn't going to win. Samsung, Huawei, and a dozen Chinese manufacturers could always out-ship Cupertino on raw unit volume. The market share charts told one story — and it wasn't Apple's story. What changed, gradually and then all at once, was the metric Apple decided mattered. Instead of chasing the most iPhones sold, Apple started engineering for the highest average selling price (ASP) per iPhone sold. That shift explains more about Apple's financial performance over the past decade than any product launch, any carrier deal, or any tariff negotiation. Understanding why Apple made this pivot — and how it executes the strategy — is worth the attention of anyone who follows business strategy, consumer technology, or premium product markets. The ASP playbook Apple runs is precise, deliberate, and widely misread as s...
Read more

How to Select a Business Process Outsourcing Vendor

Image
What Is Business Process Outsourcing and Why Does Vendor Selection Matter? Business process outsourcing (BPO) involves delegating specific business functions — payroll, customer support, IT services, HR administration, data entry, and more — to a third-party provider. Done right, BPO reduces overhead, gives you access to specialized expertise, and lets your team focus on core competencies. But selecting the wrong vendor can cost you far more than doing it in-house. Poor vendor choices lead to data breaches, compliance failures, missed SLAs, and damaged customer relationships. This guide walks you through the practical criteria for selecting a BPO vendor that actually fits your organization. Step 1: Define Exactly What You're Outsourcing Before you evaluate a single vendor, get precise about scope. Document: Which processes are being outsourced (not just "customer service" but "inbound tier-1 support, Mon–Fri, 8am–8pm EST") Volume expectations — cur...
Read more

Does Workday Track Employee Location During Check-In and Check-Out? A Clear Guide for Admins

If you're an HR admin or IT manager trying to understand how Workday handles location data during employee check-ins and check-outs, you're not alone. The question comes up constantly — especially as organizations expand their use of Workday's mobile time-tracking features and start wondering exactly what data is being collected, how it's stored, and what employees can and can't see about their own location history. The short answer: yes, Workday can track employee location during check-in and check-out, but only when certain features are explicitly enabled and configured. It doesn't happen automatically by default. Here's what admins actually need to know. How Workday location tracking works Workday's time tracking module includes GPS-based location capture as an optional feature tied to mobile clock-in events. When an employee clocks in or out using the Workday mobile app, the application can record the device's GPS coordinates at the moment ...
Read more

Managing Mixed Payroll Frequencies Across Countries: A Practical Approach for Global Teams

Image
The Hidden Complexity of Global Payroll Running payroll for a team in one country is manageable. Running payroll for teams across five, ten, or twenty countries simultaneously — each with different pay frequencies, different regulatory requirements, different currencies, and different definitions of what constitutes payable time — is one of the most technically demanding operations in global HR. The mistakes are costly, the regulatory exposure is real, and the employee trust implications of getting it wrong are significant. Mixed payroll frequencies are at the center of this complexity. In the US, weekly and bi-weekly payroll are common. In Germany, monthly is legally standard for most employees. In the UK, weekly payroll is common for hourly workers while monthly dominates for salaried staff. In Canada, bi-weekly and semi-monthly coexist across provinces. Managing these different cycles within a unified HR and payroll system, while maintaining accurate accounting, correct benefit dedu...
Read more

10 Benefits of HRMS Software for Your Business

Image
What HRMS Software Actually Does for a Business Human Resource Management System (HRMS) software consolidates the core functions of people management — hiring, onboarding, payroll, time tracking, performance management, benefits administration, compliance, and reporting — into a single platform. That's the straightforward definition. But the business case for HRMS adoption goes considerably deeper than administrative convenience, and understanding the actual benefits helps organizations make better implementation decisions and extract more value from the platforms they've already bought. Here are 10 meaningful, concrete benefits that well-implemented HRMS software delivers. 1. Dramatic Reduction in Administrative Labor Costs Manual HR administration — data entry, paper filing, chasing managers for approvals, reconciling payroll spreadsheets — consumes enormous amounts of HR staff time in organizations that haven't automated. Studies consistently show that HR professionals i...
Read more

The Evolving Role of HR Leaders in Performance Management to Meet Modern Workplace Needs

Image
The Annual Review Is Dying. What Replaces It Matters Enormously. The annual performance review — the cornerstone of performance management for decades — is in unmistakable decline. Adobe eliminated annual reviews in 2012. Accenture dropped them in 2015. General Electric, the company that popularized forced ranking distributions, abandoned the practice. Deloitte surveyed its own leaders and found that 58% believed their performance management approach drove neither employee engagement nor high performance. Goldman Sachs and Microsoft made high-profile changes. The direction of travel is clear. But dismantling the annual review is easy. Building something better requires genuine redesign — and that redesign increasingly falls to HR leaders who must shift from administrators of evaluation processes to architects of continuous performance systems. Understanding how this role is evolving, what the research supports, and what the pitfalls are matters for every HR professional navigating this...
Read more

10 Things You Should Consider Before Choosing Paylocity HR Payroll Solution

Image
Why Choosing the Right HR and Payroll Platform Matters Selecting an HR and payroll solution is one of the most consequential technology decisions a growing organization makes. The wrong platform creates compliance risk, payroll errors, frustrated employees, and costly migrations down the road. Paylocity is a well-regarded option in the mid-market HR technology space — but like any platform, it isn't right for every organization. Before signing a contract or beginning an implementation, there are ten critical factors every HR leader should evaluate when considering Paylocity. 1. Company Size and Scalability Paylocity is built for small to mid-sized businesses — typically organizations with 10 to 1,000 employees. If your organization is in hypergrowth mode or anticipates scaling beyond that range, evaluate whether Paylocity's architecture will grow with you without requiring a costly platform switch in two or three years. Ask specifically how Paylocity handles multi-entity s...
Read more