In this episode of EDGEtalk, Aniela Unguresan speaks with Armelle Saint Raymond, Chief Human Resources Officer at TAG Heuer, about how inclusive leadership drives innovation, performance, and lasting cultural transformation.
With 30 years of HR experience across consumer industries, Armelle shares why she frames diversity not as a moral duty, but as a business imperative. She explains how TAG Heuer is building a workforce that mirrors its global customers—and why patience and humility are essential to changing a culture.
Also read the full story: The Time for Change: Why TAG Heuer Believes Diversity Is a Business Imperative
In this conversation, you will learn:
- Why inclusive leadership is the key to better decision-making and innovation
- How TAG Heuer uses real-life microaggression training to empower allies
- Why your internal organisation must reflect the diversity of your customers
- What it takes to drive cultural change: “Start small and be patient”
Transcript
On personal values and role models
Aniela Unguresan: Armelle Saint Raymond, you are the Chief Human Resources Officer at Tag Heuer. You have 30 years of HR experience in consumer industries, including a big part of those years in senior HR roles within family control businesses. You have supported the transformation of traditional businesses into innovative ones driving organizational transformation, cultural evolutions, one of the cultural evolutions being the one of building inclusive and diverse workplaces. In your bio, you generously talk about the important women in your life, who inspired your choices and shaped your professional identity. Could you please tell us how your personal values and role models influenced your career choices and career path?
Armelle Saint Raymond: Okay. It’s a very interesting question. Well, first of all, my mother used to be a teacher for people who cannot hear. It was my first initiation to the world of handicap. It opened a window on this non-valid word, and maybe gave me my first lesson of tolerance. Also, in my personal choice, I married a man who didn’t have the same religion as mine, who was born in Morocco. We had a different culture, different religion, and we had two children; we educated them in both religions. I have a Christian background, and this double religion gave them the opportunity to see the plurality of the world. Maybe the last thing that really structured my values and personal choices: my daughter is lesbian. She’s super feminist. And she’s a musician. And feminism and equality are really her battle, and she’s super committed. It’s also a way for me to understand better different orientations and the question of discrimination and minorities. All my family around me taught me how to be a better person, more open, more tolerant, and more open to diversity.
Aniela Unguresan: And thank you so much for sharing that. I’m so grateful for you being so open about how our personal lives are important for our professional lives, because we do tend to look at that relationship the other way. We bring our profession into our personal lives and take that for granted. But when it comes to the other very important influence we very often shy away from it. Business is personal, business is emotional. We just like to tell ourselves the story that’s not the case.
Armelle Saint Raymond: We’re human first. And I’m the kind of person that trusts that personal experience and personal values have a strong impact on professional choices, and not the opposite, because I bring the person I am in my job; I can’t do it differently. For me it was just obvious to consider diversity, equity, and inclusion as a main priority for TAG Heuer. Building an inclusive culture was the most important thing I had to do.
Why diversity is a performance issue
Aniela Unguresan: And because you are talking about your commitment, your ambition, your accountability to contribute to making workplaces and TAG Heuer’s workplace more fair, more diverse, more inclusive, could you please share with us why do you think that diversity, fairness, and inclusion are important in today’s world. Of course, I think that maybe one year ago this question would have been such a superfluous question to ask, but here we are in 2025, it appears that this question still deserves to be asked and answered repeatedly. So why do you think it’s important?
Armelle Saint Raymond: Well, there have been a lot of studies that demonstrate in a very scientific way that inclusive environments are more keen to bring innovation, creativity—that when you put around the table different brands that think differently, that have a different vision of the world it’s much more creative. So I strongly believe that diversity and inclusion bring more creativity. But I’m also pretty sure that if you have diverse people taking decisions around the table, it’s also the best way to take good decisions. The final objective is to bring more performance. So, um, it’s not only a moral perspective, it’s not only because it’s a duty or a moral aspect, but it brings more performance to our economical world. So this is where I stand. I don’t bring, uh, DE&I as a moral requirement or as duties. It’s not a question of morality, it’s a question of performance, at the end of the day. This is also the best way to be heard by our leaders. If you talk about performance, they’re more ready to listen than if you talk about moral or duties. The thing is that especially the young generation, but not only, they’re more keen to join a company that has an inclusive culture. So in terms of employer branding and how to attract the best talent, being an inclusive company and being the champion of diversity, equity, and inclusion is also a way to attract the best people. So again, we’re talking about performance and it’s most of the time my best argument in front of CEOs.
Engaging leaders and employees
Aniela Unguresan: And I think that, you know, when we talk about performance, we actually create this alliance between values and economic value creation. Because people with disabilities or women in the workplace are used to being seen as economic drains rather than drivers of growth and opportunities. I think standing behind that competitiveness case is very important. And you mentioned briefly that the leaders of your organizations, of course, you are one of the leaders of TAG Heuer at the global level today, but who else are the stakeholder groups that you find in your day-to-day work are the most important, the most instrumental, in making the workplace fair, diverse, and inclusive in TAG Heuer?
Armelle Saint Raymond: First of all, management is key. Not only the top management, of course, they need to be on board, but also the middle management, who have day-to-day interactions with employees. So for me this is a very important target. But the employees themselves are absolutely instrumental. That’s why, for example, we created a champions community in order to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also to raise the hand and say “Hey, we think we have an issue here. Can you help us?” So it’s in both senses. Our partners are not only the top management, but also all the employees themselves, because they are the good people to promote those values.
Aniela Unguresan: Any stakeholder groups that you have experienced as the ones that need a little bit more convincing than others? Internal or external?
Armelle Saint Raymond: Of course, when you talk to business leaders, they have to be convinced that it’ll drive some added value, that it’ll contribute to the performance, to the competitiveness. Of course, you will have to demonstrate that. These are maybe the most difficult to convince because they always oppose diversity, equity, and inclusion and oppose cost reduction, savings, profits, and so on. At the end, for me, it’s not an opposition. You can go in the same direction; it’s just the way which is different. So probably the business leaders are the most difficult to convince. We have someone who is in charge of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and this person has been very useful and helpful for us, in the sense that she also contributed to educate our top management. Because we’re talking about education here. And top management has to be educated like the others.
Training allies through real-life examples
Aniela Unguresan: Armelle, can you share with us when you educate the business leaders, who tend to be the most demanding stakeholder groups, what are the concrete examples that you share with them, to tell them: “because we invested proactively…”
Armelle Saint Raymond: Actually, we design a workshop, one day workshop, for everyone. For the top management, for the middle managers, but also for the employees. We designed this workshop based on concrete examples, situations that did exist within the company. So we ask our employees, “can you bring your testimony of situations where you observed discrimination.” Not big discrimination, but you know, this small daily discrimination that you face. And we collected all these examples and we built a business case on that example.
And the objective was to share with the employees what you could have done if you had been a witness of such a situation. In order to equip them to be in the position of being an ally. So it was really the purpose of this workshop and it was super useful. And the power of this workshop was that we designed it based on real life, because we took examples from the company. Of course it was anonymous. We told them, you know, it’s not a fake example that’s happened in another company, it’s in TAG Heuer. So there was a list of microaggressions, situations of discriminations, and so on. And the idea was to make people aware of what is a microaggression, what is a situation of discrimination, and how I can act. How I can behave in front of such a situation. What can I do? What can I say at my level? And everybody can do something. It was super powerful because it was based on concrete cases.
Mirroring your customers
Aniela Unguresan: So you told us, okay, we worked on this to say when people experienced concerns related to discrimination, how they can correct their behavior. And, about the more proactive side of saying, because we invested in this, we were able to design better products, or we were able to create stronger loyalty among the diverse customers that we have. Could you also say something like that?
Armelle Saint Raymond: Well, it’s true that having a chief product officer who is a female helps a lot to target the female segment. So we have lots of women in the product team, in the product and design team. Of course it’s good for the business because we target the female segment. Today, 15% of our net sales are made with female customers, but we target to have at least 30% of female customers. So, of course, having women in the product team and in the merchandising team helps a lot to understand better in a more intimate way the female customer’s wishes and expectations. So of course it helps, but it’s not only that. Having a diverse profile within HQ helped a lot to understand better our customers who are everywhere in the world because we sell watches in China, in Korea, in Japan, in United States, in Latin America. So having a diversity of profiles within our HQ team, marketing & product, helps to understand in a very intimate way the expectations of our customers who are diverse by essence. So it’s a must. It’s not a nice to have, it’s a must. Because if we have a European-centric vision, we will never address the expectations and wishes of our Chinese or Japanese customers. So it’s also good for business. For me, our internal organization has to be a mirror of our customers. We have women, we have multiplicity of cultures among our customers. We have also people with disabilities. So we need to address all these segments of customers in a better way. And there’s only one way to do it: to have exactly the same people within our team who are designing the watch and making the watch.
Aniela Unguresan: This is excellent, Armelle. Just one follow up question. So you talked about the gender diversity. Is generational diversity, in addition to disability, gender, cultural, and ethnic diversity, something that is important?
Armelle Saint Raymond: Yes, absolutely. Generational diversity is also key. Today we have—our, I would say, hearts of customers are male over 45 and we are targeting women younger. So if we do not change, if we do not bring this diversity within our teams, we will never capture these new segments we are targeting right now.
So it’s important to have different generations at work. Today we have four generations at work: we have people around 25 and we have people above 55, and it’s quite well balanced. Of course, the core is between 30 and 45, but we also have young, very youngest generation and the eldest generation, and I’m part of it. For me, it’s essential to have the reflection of our society within our company. We cannot design and make what is for young people if we do not reflect this category within our employees. The aspirations of the youngest generation, you cannot capture it if you are over 50, it’s not true. We need to have those people in our teams.
The value of external validation
Aniela Unguresan: Fantastic. This is really nice. To round up the conversation, Armelle: why EDGE? What working with the EDGE methodology, undergoing a rigorous independent third party assessment and certification, brought to your journey towards a fair, more diverse, and more inclusive workplace?
Armelle Saint Raymond: First of all, it forced us to answer what is requested by an official label. It provides us some guidance, because there are some aspects that we didn’t take into consideration. It’s very interesting to have the conversation during the audit process with you, because some aspects we never took into consideration. So it’s a way also to broaden our approach. Also, it allows us to measure the progress, because every two years you can measure the progress, and you do not progress if you cannot measure. With EDGE, you have this capacity to measure where we are in terms of action plan, so it’s like having a roadmap and following step by step how we progress. And the last thing is that it’s not possible to pretend by ourselves that we are the champion of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It has to be said by a third party. And you are this third party. It has to be an independent level to say, okay, you are at this level taking into consideration the benchmark of the profession, and so on.
So we are not the best people to tell the rest of the world that we are good at. So we need to also get this credibility on an external level, in order to strengthen our position and to give this credibility outside.
Aniela Unguresan: Top reactions, Armelle, that came out of your work with EDGE that you found useful to add to your roadmap.
Armelle Saint Raymond: Equal pay. It was interesting. So, even though we are not yet certified for equal pay, because it’s scheduled for later on, it allowed us to have the big equation in mind. Like having 30% as a minimum within the management team, or the gap between men and women. It gives us, I would say, all the material and guidelines to be ready for the next certification. This was very useful. But also we revisited some of our programs to ensure that they give opportunity for all. Just give you an example. We have a mentoring program, which is open to a certain portion of the population, certain targets of the population. And, after having discussed with you, we realized that it was not inclusive enough. It was more an exclusive program. So we reviewed it in order to have this program more inclusive than what we initially designed. So that kind of thing was very useful because we revisited our practices, programs, and policies to ensure they’re really a hundred percent inclusive.
Start small and be patient
Aniela Unguresan: Armelle, anything I didn’t ask you that you think would be important to add to the conversation?
Armelle Saint Raymond: No, I think we had a discussion around the most important things. To conclude, it’s very important to be super humble and to accept to implement small things at the beginning, because it’s never a big bang. It takes time. You do not change a culture like that in five minutes. It takes time to install this inclusive culture, so it’s very important to be super patient, and also to be very humble. Sometimes you win very small battles, but it’s okay. Because, at the end, small battles after small battles make a big thing. Start small and be patient. It’s the only way to change a culture.
