I am pleased to announce the hiring of Barbara Jenks, who began her career with Bellingham Cold Storage as human resources and safety manager on Monday, June 19.
Barbara comes to BCS with an impressive resume, having had experience with the Fox Group, including as human resources director for Twentieth Television with a broad range of HR responsibilities before being promoted to executive director of employee relations at Twentieth Century Fox, where she had responsibility for several separate union relationships along with other traditional responsibilities. Later, she was made executive director over employment law research and administration. Barbara is a paralegal and has extensive experience in that area.
More recently, Barbara has been with the Boeing Company, where she had human resources responsibilities and recently lead the effort to design and develop improved leave of absence and family leave of absence programs.
We are looking for Barbara to stretch our company in several HR areas in a positive direction, and we are confident that she will both compliment and enhance the already extensive experience that our department staff members have. We are excited to have her join the BCS team!
Tim Unger, who has held the position of human resources and safety manager, will transition to a new role of human resources and safety manager emeritus while Barbara is brought up to speed on BCS-specific information related to our industry, benefits, payroll, employee relations, safety, training, reception desk and all other aspects of the job. Tim has done an excellent job since taking over the HRSM role and has moved our training program forward several steps while facilitating some outstanding educational sessions.
Tim took the lead last year successfully facilitating negotiations with our valued union employees on new five-year bargaining agreement extensions with both the Teamsters and Operating Engineers. He has facilitated the fielding and following through of multiple suggestions, opportunities and in some cases disciplinary issues. Tim was instrumental in the smooth transition from our former guard service provider to Pacific Security. Tim also led the company through its very first comprehensive employee satisfaction survey and then helped establish the monthly company-wide communication meetings as a response to the biggest opportunity resulting from the employee survey. Tim also was HRSM when BCS established our first “Job Fair” and related forklift safety training event some three years ago. This has been a very successful approach to attracting and retaining high-caliber new employees.
Tim will continue to assist Barbara with becoming acclimated to all of the BCS and cold storage industry-specific knowledge until his planned retirement in January of 2018. This has been our intentional plan all along so as to allow the new manager to work alongside the current manager for a full busy season. We believe that this will serve us all well in the coming years as Barbara will have that first season of experience when she is managing the department alone next year. This position in particular is so multifaceted that it just felt appropriate to build in a planned knowledge ramp-up period.
Long-time former HR manager Sheryl Hershey has also been instrumental in the improvements to our training programs, benefits and medical offerings, and she will continue to be a valuable member of the BCS HR team as human resources assistant specifically focused on BCS benefits while also providing payroll, reception and BCS history support to both Tim and Barbara.
Please extend a warm welcome to Barbara Jenks!
Warm regards,
Doug Thomas
President & CEO