“[I]t’s important to have a clear understanding of what you want to do within and get out of a role. You need to ask yourself what it is that you absolutely want to do, as well as what experiences you need in order to be able to get yourself in that position.” – Carol Elderfield, Consultant HR Director for Inclusion, Change, and Transformation at Amey, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.
As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success.
This week, we had a great conversation with Carol Elderfield at Amey, who began her HR career as a Personnel Manager at RHM Foods before joining the team at Greggs PLC as Personnel Director for the Midlands. In 2005, Carol took on a role as Head of HR at Dollond and Aitchison, later moving to an interim role as HR Director for the Cross Country Bid Team at Virgin Trains. In April 2008, Carol became joint Group Head of HR and Director of HR for Wickes within the Travis Perkins Group, later transitioning to Holland and Barrett to serve as Director of Human Resources. In June 2011, Carol became Human Resources Director at Initial Facilities, later moving to TNT Express to become Global Interim HR Director for ICS and GBS. Carol joined the team at Amey in April 2015 as Divisional HR Director for Local Government before transitioning to her current role in September 2020.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
I was originally qualified to work in Hospitality, so I fell into HR as opposed to it being my initial career choice. I started off in an operational role running restaurants, then moved into retail and started to develop an interest in Training. While I was at RHM Foods, the Personnel Manager went on maternity leave, I was asked to cover it, and that was it. I’ve stayed in HR ever since. Hospitality can be a good gateway into HR in some respects, because you end up managing high numbers of people from a young age, so you have to understand how to lead people very quickly, and that stays with you.
Even as I began covering the Personnel Manager role, the intention wasn’t for me to build a career in HR from it. I went into it wanting to dip my toe in the water and see what happened, and I really enjoyed it, so it stuck. It helped that I had a really good mentor who taught me the fundamentals of employee relations. For me, that was the most challenging aspect of HR—I think most of HR aside from that is about having good judgement when it comes to decision-making, and my commercial skills and operational experience really helped there. That particular manager decided not to come back from maternity leave, so I stayed in the role and ultimately decided to make HR my career—both because I enjoyed it so much and because it enabled me to have the work-life balance I needed to start a family of my own.
I have a very active mind that constantly needs to be challenged, so I’ve moved across a range of sectors throughout my career. I’ve never really been a steady-state HR person, so my career has been change and transformation oriented because it keeps those new challenges coming in and is perfect for keeping my brain ticking over. It has been challenging to change roles at times, but what I’ve found is that the People challenges are no different across sectors—the dimensions of them you tackle are what’s different. I’ve never found it difficult to move across sectors.
When I joined Amey, they really embraced the fact that I’d got different sector experiences and seen things done differently elsewhere, because they recognised that they were very traditional in their way of thinking. If you have different sector experiences and position new viewpoints to your business as something that might be worth trying rather than something that other businesses are better at, that can be really powerful. It’s a great place to be.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
I think the key themes and challenges I’ve seen throughout my career have probably been the same in all the different sectors I’ve worked in. There’s a big challenge around leadership capability and getting enough of the right people to do jobs that need to be done, and I think that remains true at all levels of a business. It’s getting even more challenging as time goes on, because the market is becoming increasingly competitive.
In terms of commercial challenges, there’s always a need to do more for less, so businesses find themselves constantly resizing. I think HR professionals are always being challenged by that, particularly if they’re seeking to prove that you don’t always have to turn to downsizing to achieve better results.
Linked to that is the issue of motivation and reward strategy. At Amey, we’ve got a really forward-thinking Chief Executive, and she made a commitment as soon as she was appointed to pay the real Living Wage. She’s taken that leap of faith because she knows we’ll have better people and better performance as a result, and therefore that we’ll win more work. She’s at the forefront in that regard—other HR professionals I speak to say that their organisations are nowhere near that point yet.
Diversity is a huge challenge for us going forward. We’ve got to be able to attract difference into any industry that we’re working in because the way that younger people coming through want to work is very different to the way that we might have worked 20 years ago. People expect a different work-life balance, and you’re not going to be able to create that unless you’re open-minded about the way you recruit. That’s an ever-changing challenge.
COVID has also been a challenge for everyone, but it’s seen us move forward about five years in 10 weeks from a flexibility perspective. Pre-COVID, about 25% of our office-based staff at Amey worked flexibly, whereas now, about 80% of our desk-based workforce will be doing so moving forward. However, that comes with challenges in itself in terms of keeping people connected and collaborating, so we are currently trying to find ways to ensure that wellbeing is at the forefront of leaders’ attention and encourage them to continue to carry out one-to-ones on a regular basis to keep our people engaged.
Organisational design is also going to have to change. We’re very fixated on spans and layers as a sector, and we need to move past that to be more agile and less restrictive towards innovation and creativity going forward. They are what’s going to drive and differentiate businesses going forward. To retain our talent, we also need to be more cognizant of what our people need and allow them to speak up about it. It’s about opening up the channels of communication to enable people to stay and continue to grow within our organisations.
For all business leaders, the central challenge will be in working out how to grow businesses profitably as we move forward. Our CEO is very focused on helping people develop the right commercial skills and client relationship building skills in order to grow, so there’s going to be huge emphasis on how we continue to do that going forward. We can never take our focus away from costs management but not to the detriment of growth
The agenda at Amey is very much about putting people first, and we absolutely understand that we won’t deliver on that commitment unless we give people freedom to perform. Our key themes around that are engaging people and empowering them to be able to be at their best. For me, that’s been a significant change from the way that most organisations work. It’s really refreshing to be in an organisation that’s living its guiding principles. Although we’ve had challenges brought about by COVID to deal with, and many of our front-line staff have been nervous and cautious at times, our focus is completely on them and keeping them safe, and they can genuinely see that.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
I would say that HR definitely has the potential to be a great career for anyone with good judgement who knows the basics of employee relations.
Once you’ve embarked on your HR career, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what you want to do within and get out of a role. You need to ask yourself what it is that you absolutely want to do, as well as what experiences you need in order to be able to get yourself in that position. Be honest with yourself about that as time goes on. You can aspire to be the Group HR Director of a business, but actually, when you get there, it might not be for you. You’ve got to make sure that the positions you go for as your career progresses involve things that you enjoy doing, because you spend a lot of time at work, and doing things you don’t enjoy can become draining.
Get as much breadth of experience around HR as you can, and if you’ve not had an operational role before, get a secondment into Operations so that you can really understand how the commercials of an organisation work. It really does help, especially when you’re sat around a table of people who automatically get that because it’s their day-to-day job. You’ve got to keep up with them, and that can be more difficult for people coming into HR now, because when I grew up in HR, you learned all the different disciplines as a generalist before advancing your career.
The Ulrich model of HR makes it more difficult to do these days, but my advice would also be to try and get a couple of specialisms under your belt alongside the generalist aspects, because they just give you that bit more breadth and understanding of the whole HR function.
Carol has been working as Consultant HR Director for Inclusion, Change, and Transformation since September 2020, and provides support for the continued development of Amey’s Freedom to Perform strategy and inclusion agenda.
If you are interested in having a confidential conversation about your career or would like support growing your team, please get in touch today.