“Never be afraid to challenge yourself, be open to different routes into different roles, and remember the value in stretching beyond your comfort zone.” – Euan Graham, Principal Consultant at EG Advisory Ltd, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership and Employee Relations.
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 Euan Graham at EG Advisory Ltd, who started his HR leadership career as a Team Leader within the Employee Relations Field Specialist team at HSBC ahead of ascending to the role of Senior Employee Relations Manager at the bank.
In July 2013, Euan went on to become Employee Relations Manager at Lloyd’s of London, later continuing the role at Norton Rose Fulbright before becoming the UK Head of Human Resources at the law firm. Euan then took on the role of Head of Employee Relations role at Dyson in May 2019. In March 2020, Euan founded EG Advisory and transitioned to his current role within the business.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
My interest in HR started way before I actually did it, and goes right back to growing up in an industrially-minded family on the west coast of Scotland in the time of Thatcherism and the miners’ strikes. My family had always had an interest in unions and industrial relations, and I ended up taking that forward into my career when managing large elements of the trade union relationship at HSBC.
I started out as a workplace trade union rep dealing with issues on a day-to-day basis alongside my day job, but I got the opportunity to work for what was then the Banking, Insurance and Finance Union full time via a secondment from First Direct bank, which of course is a division of HSBC. That was really interesting—it gave me the opportunity to hone a lot of the skills I was developing already around handling difficult cases, but also to expand my learning enough to train others to hone skills of their own.
Just at the time my secondment was coming to an end, the bank was restructuring their HR team and creating a new role for Employee Relations Field Specialists who managed casework issues like disciplinaries, grievances, investigations and capability matters. I was offered one of those roles, which I took, and I’m very proud of the fact that I was the first secondee ever to go straight into an Employee Relations role and not a generalist HR role. I moved from Scotland to Yorkshire to do that job, and became the team leader of the function within a couple of years. That’s where I found my home in terms of where my interest really lay and what I wanted to do. A lot of my peers in that job had gone through generalist HR roles before settling on Employee Relations, but I knew I wanted to go straight into ER from the moment I came across it.
In the same way, I had always known I wanted my career to be people-focused, and I worked in people-centred sectors like hospitality long before I worked in finance. The idea of sitting at a desk surrounded by piles of data rather than having conversations and interactions with people has never appealed to me, and that’s why I’ve stayed in a people-related field since I was in education.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
In terms of both the issues that are facing me and those facing the clients I work with, COVID has definitely been the most challenging.
The end of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme drawing closer means that people are thinking more and more about the future of the workforce. We’ve seen some devastating numbers across industry in terms of redundancies, which may well continue. Planning what happens after the furlough scheme ends is a real challenge on employers’ minds at the moment.
The other challenge, I think, is in dealing with employee relations in a remote environment. We have learnt that as much as issues do still happen when we are remote, they can also still be tackled when we are remote as well—we just need to adapt our way of working to do that.
As someone who has been directly helping businesses tackle challenges like this throughout the crisis, I would say first and foremost that it’s important to recognise that we’re working in different ways in the wake of COVID, but that we should still set clear expectations of our people. Working remotely doesn’t mean that our behaviours or the way we work with each other should be any different in a virtual environment to what they are in a face-to-face environment, and we shouldn’t hold back from doing the right thing by the organisation and dealing with Employee Relations matters virtually for as long as we are working remotely.
I would advise businesses to make sure that their policies and messages are clear around that, but also to be mindful of the fact that remote working does create extra stresses and strains that might manifest in the work environment, and that needs to be managed. Recognise that people might need extra support by way of greater flexibility, emotional support, or time off, and offer that where you can. If you’re dealing with a disciplinary or investigation, for example, you may also need to adjust your modes of interaction to ensure that the people involved feel as supported in a virtual environment as they would in a face-to-face one.
Factors of mitigation are always important in any Employee Relations context, and a big part of the investigations into issues that I do for businesses is taking those mitigating factors caused by remote working into account, and being aware of the fact that they might well be influencing behaviours in ways that businesses haven’t otherwise seen.
It’s always unfortunate to go through Employee Relations issues, but it’s worth remembering that dealing with them properly can give businesses insight into their organisations that they might never otherwise get from focus groups or opinion surveys. When clients ask me what insights I’ve gained from my work and what they could be doing differently to improve the work environment, it can be a really pleasing outcome from what might otherwise be a negative experience for them.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
Never be afraid to challenge yourself, be open to different ways into different roles, and remember that it’s important to stretch beyond your comfort zone. Finding my niche in Employee Relations so early on in my career was great, but equally, becoming Head of HR and then taking on a more generalist portfolio was also a much-needed challenge.
I’m also a very passionate believer in lifelong learning and the importance of keeping up to date more generally as well as with the things you might need to as a specialist. I wasn’t able to go to university when I left school and went straight into the workplace, but HSBC supported me through both my CIPD and my postgraduate degree, and I’m still so grateful to them for giving me the opportunity to challenge myself and learn. If you have the willingness to do it, there are always ways for you to develop. One of the things I had wanted to do for a number of years was become an accredited mediator, which I managed to achieve during the first national lockdown. I had the ambition and managed to create the opportunity for myself with some time and money, but if I hadn’t decided to just go for it, I might never have achieved that goal.
Find yourself a good mentor or coach to help support you on your career journey, whether that’s through a formal or informal arrangement. Building relationships with people can be invaluable whether you’re the mentor or the mentee—I’ve been on both sides of that experience, and they are both hugely rewarding.
Euan has been working as Principal Consultant at EG Advisory since founding the business in March 2020, using hIs wealth of experience in Employee Relations, Industrial Relations, and HR to successfully support businesses across the UK through a range of transformations and Employee Relations issues.
As a trusted ER professional, Euan also offers training—drawing on over 20 years of practical experience to upskill HR professionals, People Managers, and business leaders in the nuances of Employee Relations—as well as both commercial and workplace unemployment mediation services to guide businesses and their people through even the most complex of Employee Relations issues.
For more information on how Euan and EG Advisory can help your business, visit: www.egadvisory.co.uk.