“I think people often have it in their heads that HR is about designing stuff from a policy point of view. But we’re coming from it as if it’s a customer journey. I want to bring that user experience approach into how we reposition HR for the future.” – Simon Cunniffe, HR Shared Services Director at easyJet, 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 Simon Cunniffe at easyJet, who began his career as a consultant for companies including Oracle and Openreach before transitioning into HR. From 2013 to 2016 Simon was HR Shared Services Director for BT in London, before moving to Serco in Hampshire. Simon has held his current role at easyJet since January 2020.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
I didn’t come from a HR generalist background, rather I began my career in consulting, delivering solutions all across Europe for a wide variety of differing industries. In 2013, I joined BT on their MBA Fast Track programme this included a rotation in working for the HR Director of their largest Engineering function. While there I was supporting the HRD with board level papers, Strategy, understanding diversity trends within the business it was my first opportunity to dip my toe into HR. At this point I become clear that a career in HR was the career direction that I wanted to take.
Working at a large organisation like BT meant I worked across multiple different business units all significant in size and complexity, before being approached to design BT’s HR transformation programme. They wanted to redesign processes at a global level including changing all their providers and technology. It was significantly complex, a £60 million investment across 60 countries and 120,000 employees.
From a typical HR career perspective, some of the things I’d done previously were quite unusual and were all about managing complex businesses change and people. For example, I’d managed a large scale P&L, employing up to 5,00 people in my team and had experience writing business strategy papers. From that experience at BT, I fell into the passion of Shared Services and more importantly Employee Experience. For me Shared Services is the key experience for how the majority of employees and communicate and interact with HR. (Getting it right can make managers jobs easy or really difficult if overly complex).
What really made me realise I wanted to continue my career in HR was looking at things from an employee perspective. Answering questions like, how do employees interact with HR? How do they get activities done? How do you manage processes internally? How do you get value in terms of automating and streamlining? What services do remote workers require from HR?
After leaving BT, I went to two other organisations in very different industries to do a similar type of work, Outsourcing and Aviation. Now I’m at easyJet and the flex point for the role I’m doing is the multi-country piece. We’re delivering a very similar model for easyJet but across eight different countries in Europe with significant variations in employment terms and conditions. The experience again is about how do you get this right for a remote work force who do not work from a fixed office location.
I’ve always been driven by a curiosity around business and a desire to simplify and improve the experience from an end user point of view. The combination of those two drivers led me into HR and if I look back on my early career, that’s also what you do in consulting – understand problems and come up with solutions that work for customers
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
The last two years have been very difficult from an aviation perspective. I joined easyJet only a month before the global pandemic hit and we had to ground all our flying programmes. Since then, things have been extremely tactical. We had to deliver furlough across multiple countries in a quick turnaround, while working closely with our employee representatives on changes in the business.
It’s been difficult from people perspective. Our business is extremely fast paced and in the last two years the need to simplify HR has never been greater. We’ve achieved a lot of change in the HR operating model in the last year, at the same time as dealing with the pandemic and ultimately, I’ve really enjoyed that aspect of my work. I am incredibly proud of the team who have constantly challenged the status quo and simplified how people interact with HR. Our HR System ‘Workday’ is being used like never before and this is a credit to the partnership we have built up between HR and IT.
We have a diverse range of people working for us, from pilots to engineers and head office staff. A significant percentage of our core operational teams have been out on furlough, so the task now is to re-engage them in our organisation and ensure they get optimal support moving forward. The easyJet employment brand continues to be very strong and we have a history of recruiting and developing a diverse range of great people, which means that we continue to have a great range of exciting opportunities for people.
Readiness is also a big focus for us, ensuring we’re ready for a busy summer flying programme. Recovery is underway and so we’re currently looking to recruit over 1,250 cabin crew and over 100 pilots. We’re putting the right things in place to get the number of high quality applicants we need as well as ensuring that they have a great experience with us in that recruitment process and and that we have a slick offer process that matches them to training courses at the right time.
I think people often have it in their heads that HR is about designing stuff from a HR policy perspective. But we’re coming from it as if it’s an employee customer journey. It’s incredibly simple to book and manage flights on our easyJet app – you don’t need to speak to anyone to change or cancel a ticket – and I want to bring that experience approach into how we reposition HR into the future.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
Think commercially from day one. If you’re in HR, you should understand a balance sheet, profit and loss and the strategy of the organisation you’re working for and have an opinion on the future
Good People strategies are about where is the business going and what does that mean? Having worked in business partnering roles, I often see HR professionals lacking the important skill set of consulting skills. My advice is to develop the abilities to listen, commercially understand, review and analyse data, and spot trends to identify themes that address real busines problems
At any stage in your career, I recommend ensuring you have regular mentor support for what you’re trying to achieve. That’s probably mentoring on a couple of levels, someone in your organisation to talk with regularly, as well as external mentors who can spot trends and help you translate what’s happening in the market to relevance in your day job. As an HR professional it also really important to understand future market trends which may have a long-term impact on your company.
Finally, have fun! If what you’re doing isn’t an enjoyable experience then get out and do something else.
Simon has over 20 years’ operating in the Telecommunications, IT and Outsourcing sectors. He has been HR Shared Services Director at easyJet since January 2020.