“I think the best thing about working in HR is that no two days are alike, although that can also be challenging. You can plan for anything, only to find that one thing happens and everything changes, and you just have to roll with the punches.” – Alys Martin, Head of People at Zappar, 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 Alys Martin at Zappar, who began her career as Events Assistant at Raymond Gubbay Ltd, later transitioning into roles as PA to the HR Director at Penguin Random House UK and PA to the Publisher at Little, Brown Book Group. In September 2010, Alys embarked on an HR career of her own, taking on the role of PA to the HR Director and HR Coordinator at FremantleMedia, where she would later ascend the ranks to Assistant HR Business Partner, and later International Reward Analyst.
In April 2015, Alys became HR Manager at Runpath, which was followed by subsequent HR Manager roles at Bounty UK Ltd, The Leading Edge, and Naked Communications Europe. In March 2017, Alys became HR Business Partner at Reach PLC ahead of transitioning to her current role at Zappar in February 2019.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
My transition into an HR career really came as a result of my PA work within the HR sector. I started off working as a PA in an HR department in the Publishing sector, and then I took a job as PA to the HR Director working in Television. Around that time, I decided I wanted to go back to university and do a Master’s in Medieval Literature. I began saving for it, but my boss at the time approached me to ask if I’d ever thought about doing a Master’s in HR instead because she thought I’d be good at it.
By that point, I knew I loved working with people, and I was conscious of the fact that unless I progressed in the job, I would be doing the same thing year in, year out, whereas the Master’s would keep things interesting. I took the offer and did a part-time MA in HR Management while I stayed in my job, which gave me some amazing generalist experience. As well as working with a number of specialists within the HR department, I got to work across all our different client groups and experienced two major restructures as well.
At the end of my MA, I went into a junior Business Partner role, and then took on a specialist Reward role for about a year. That was a really interesting global role that gave me great exposure to working with senior management, but after a while, I realised I was disconnected from those who worked around me and I didn’t like that very much. After over four-and-a-half years at FremantleMedia, I knew it was time for a change.
I was then offered two jobs—one as a standalone HR Manager in a tech start-up and the other as a Senior Advisor in a massive HR team within Affinity Water. The jobs themselves and the industries they were situated in were very different, so I found myself having a bit of a crisis of confidence at first, but I opted to take a leap and go for the standalone maternity cover job in tech. That was a bold choice, but the best thing I’ve ever done. It was a great opportunity to test the knowledge and experience I’d gained, and I not only got to drive growth in a really interesting role, but also discovered I absolutely loved working in the tech industry.
After the maternity cover ended, I took on a few HR Manager roles in other sectors, then went to Reach PLC. I engaged with the tech client group in that role as well, but on a much greater scale and with all the added process that came with being a public limited company. While it was a great experience, it was definitely slower-paced than my other roles, and I found it hard at times to balance the procedural element of being in a large HR team with my direct work with client groups.
Following my time at Reach, I was offered my current role as Head of People for an augmented reality company called Zappar. The fact that the role was based in tech, standalone, and back in a smaller team really appealed to me, so I took it. I was our first HR hire, so I put in a lot of work setting everything up and building organisational structures to facilitate growth, implementing more flexible ways of working as well as upskilling managers to equip us for the future. I love being back in a close-knit environment; it’s so exciting to implement something that makes a massive difference to the people you work with and having that impact seen as well as feeling it instantly.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
At Zappar, we have quite a young demographic in our workforce; for many, this is their first job. When I first joined, some members of staff who had been with us for longer were acting as ‘middle management’ for the newer cohort. They didn’t always have a massive amount of experience with management themselves, let alone managing others. To address that, we focused on how to promote those management skills to get the best out of people and on modelling what that ‘middle management’ relationship might look like.
Another challenge I faced when I first joined was that I overestimated how much people would know about the commercial side of the business. A lot of people come to us from areas like game design and have almost turned their hobby into their job so getting them to see the flip-side of how that passion makes money and the different processes involved with keeping people employed and the business running can be tough.
You can put in wonderful employee engagement measures and do everything you can to make your team’s working life brilliant, but getting them to understand why your business operates, where they fit into that, and how they can make an impact is really important. That’s been one of the biggest challenges with our specific population.
What we’ve tried to do to overcome that is to be incredibly transparent, particularly during COVID. Since we’ve moved from office to remote working, we’ve been doing weekly Zoom updates on our numbers. Right at the start of the pandemic, we talked to the whole team about both the amount of money we were used to making a month and what we needed just to keep the business running, as well as where we were in terms of sales every week. We’ve kept that going to better illustrate the financial impact of the projects our teams are working on, and our openness has gone down really well.
Our CEO has also done a couple of ‘Lunch and Learn’ sessions on running a business, why he got into business, the things that a business owner needs to consider, and the challenge of conserving our resources to keep the business going. He was very open and honest, and took a ‘warts and all’ approach to sharing his own experience, and that was very well-received as well.
I think the fact that we can openly explain why we’ve had to turn down requests for pay rises and things of that nature has been really helpful. There’s no point dressing difficult conversations up, because if you choose that approach over honesty, you lose people. If they have all the facts, they can make their own decisions, even if that means they need to move on. You should absolutely treat people like adults. We would always want people to stay with us, but in that case, we can at least equip them with the right skills and training for when they do choose to move on.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
As someone who fell into HR, my biggest advice would be to remember that you can truly be your best in jobs and working environments where you fit, no matter your background. Be honest with yourself about your likes and dislikes about work and what does and doesn’t suit you—there are such a range of workplaces you can go into with HR that you’ll find the right fit. Your business won’t get the best out of you unless the working environment suits you and you’re happy in your job, and understanding how the business works can make implementing fixes when things do go wrong easier and more effective.
The best way to find out what type of environment you suit and what you enjoy is to take opportunities. If I hadn’t taken the opportunity to do a Master’s in HR when my boss saw potential in me, I might not have ended up where I am today. Always keep trying new things and be brave enough to take steps if you can. In the worst-case scenario, if you make a mis-step, you can learn from it and come back from it as your next decisions will be better informed. It doesn’t have to derail you forever.
I would definitely say that smaller companies can be a great environment for gaining experience. There’s so much more license to try things in smaller companies, decision-making is a lot more flexible, and everything happens so fast that you’re constantly learning.
I would also say that HR only gets more interesting the more senior you get. I think the best thing about working in HR is that no two days are alike, although that can also be challenging. You can plan for anything, only to find that one thing happens and everything changes, and you just have to roll with the punches. While it can sometimes be incredibly frustrating, I enjoy that process of solving problems and fixing things for our people in order to enable us to achieve our goals as a business. I love the jigsaw puzzle of keeping everyone happy and getting to our end goals.
Alys has been working as Head of People since February 2019, and provides leadership across all aspects of Zappar’s People function, driving growth, change, and the continuing evolution of organisational structures and processes.