Yvonne Gardner

Yvonne Gardner is a Managing Principal with Gallagher's Compensation & Rewards Consulting practice. Upon receiving her B.A. degree in Political Science — Public Service from the University of California at Davis, Ms. Gardner moved to Germany to study German language and culture. She returned to the US to join the HayGroup's San Francisco Bay Area office, where she provided leadership to several of the firm's national compensation, benefits and organization effectiveness surveys. It is during this time that she developed a deep knowledge of best practices in organization design, and compensation & benefits and published several related articles. This experience led Ms. Gardner into Hay's consulting practice, where she provided services to clients across a variety of industries (health care, high-tech, transportation and telecommunications) in the areas of broad based compensation, performance management, incentive design, executive compensation, competency assessment, pre-merger due diligence and post-merger integration.

Ms. Gardner then joined Sutter Health to assist with acquisitions and mergers, including pre-merger due diligence, post-merger integration and strategy development and implementation. Most recently, Ms. Gardner was a Vice President at Sutter Health, where she held responsibility for executive and broad based compensation, performance management, workforce planning & analytics, talent acquisition, development and succession planning, diversity & inclusion and Sutter Health University. Ms. Gardner was also the senior most human resources business partner to Sutter's executive team and senior staff to the Compensation Committee of the Board, where she facilitated the development of the firm's compensation philosophy, compensation (salary, short and long term incentives) & benefit designs (including SERP design and implementation), senior executive succession planning and organization wide performance indicators. She is also experienced in the area of Board effectiveness, having facilitated the assessment and development of subsidiary boards throughout the firm.

In addition to her management and consulting activities, Ms. Gardner is often called upon as a speaker in the area of performance management and total rewards and has presented for national conference audiences as well as regional and local associations and employers.

Ms. Gardner maintains active memberships in the Bay Area Compensation Association and WorldatWork (formerly the American Compensation Association), the American College of Healthcare Executives & Women Healthcare Executives of Northern California.

Ms. Gardner received her B.A. from the University of California, Davis, and her M.B.A. from Saint Mary's College of California.