“The whole premise of HR revolves around managing human resources. It’s about maximising the impact people have on driving businesses forward.” Richard Nolan, Epos Now’s Chief People Officer highlights the role of HR in the success of the organisation.
As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited HR Leaders from a wide variety of organisations to share their insights on building a career, the challenges they face and advice they would share with those hoping to follow in their footsteps.
This week, we had a great conversation with Richard Nolan, the Chief People Officer of Epos Now, a leading provider of SAAS technology specialising in POS & global payments. Previously, he was the CPO of THG, a leading global eCommerce business for four years with extensive exposure to the private investment world. He achieved this rise from the ranks from his early days as an HR Advisor, People Partner then progressing into the role of Group Head of People. Quite a surprising career path despite having started his career in IT & programming, but he found his true passion and calling in HR.
Richard is a firm believer in putting business culture under the spotlight with a focus on supporting businesses to strive to achieve an inclusive value led culture. He brilliantly draws on his experience and vision to lead the team to achieve its goals.
How did you get into HR and what made it stick?
After 17 years specialising within HR, the reason hasn’t really changed. As an individual that takes pride in seeing other people grow, it can be incredibly rewarding to see the outcome of people led strategies that positively influence someone’s life journey; be that supporting an employee to progress their career or assisting someone back into the world of world after a prolonged absence or recognising employees progressing key life milestones with your business, every day is filled with success measures which all HR leaders can celebrate. Personally seeing employees flourish and have success after success because you’re creating the right culture and environment for them is what makes me tick.
I’m somebody that’s driven. I always wanted to pick businesses that would challenge me and give me the ability to challenge them. I was a junior when I started in the NHS back in 2003, It was my first formal job. But it’s fair to say that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing if I’m brutally honest. However, through self-motivation, interest, and passion, I self-educated myself, and used this opportunity as a test bed to learn some of the foundations around core HR. That said, it is a different world today.
One of the more recent businesses I joined was THG. When I started, the people function was fragmented, as you would expect with a business experiencing hyper growth. The team was made up globally of c 60 people professionals across core HR, Payroll, Talent Attraction and development. This team was supporting a circa 2,500 employees globally with a big appetite for growth. During my tenure, the business grew exponentially, with revenue growth from c£700m to c£2.4b, and a global workforce reaching 15,000 with a greater focus on new global locations such as the US, Germany, Singapore, Australia. At the same time the people team grew to c160 by the time I left.
THG is a very fast-paced business that takes pride in achieving the unachievable, alongside organic growth we executed significant M&A projects valued up to £4-5b and achieved one of the largest technology IPO valuations on the London stock exchange.
Reflecting on day one at THG, it was funny how challenging the people infrastructure was, and I recall the people team didn’t even know how many people we employed. I can remember getting the whole people team in a room and asked them to scribble down our current headcount with numbers ranging from 1000 – 6000, at that point it was stark that change was needed, and the starting point was to address the complex web of HR infrastructure with circa twenty-eight different HR systems across the business, all legacy HR and payroll systems, as hangovers from various acquisitions.
Within 6 months, we had migrated all systems into our new global HR infrastructure which was supported by our own in-house data analytics platform, which then helped to drive our people strategy from strength to strength.
As Chief People Officer, what critical challenge faced by HR practitioners needs to be addressed?
Commercial awareness is the fundamental missing pillar within the HR arena. Ironically many organisations pivot commercials to finance despite knowing that results are achieved by people opposed to spreadsheets!
That said, this will only change when HR professionals invest the time to understand the commercial side of the business. A great example would be the introduction of commissions schemes. Typically schemes I see take one dimension, opposed to considering the behaviours the scheme will generate and the impact these behaviours will have on all functions in the business.
I see most business challenges as mathematical equations that can be solved with diligence and time invested to understand and solve them.
What piece of advice would you give to someone planning to pursue an HR career or stepping into an HR leadership role?
For someone stepping into HR, the primary focus should be to understand the business.
Take time to learn each step of the journey, and visually map this out if it helps – having a visual record that allows you to understand the customer life cycle and the measures of success at each stage will be pivotal in maximising impact and your success.
Once you have this, you can then start to think more about culture, purpose & values.
And to somebody going into an HR leadership role, stay true to yourself, and to achieve this you will need to be resilient. The role of a leader should never be easy, you are in that role to challenge thinking and evolve / drive positive change that enables business growth but also strives to create working environments everyone can be proud to be a part of!
The key measures of success within culture that leaders should reflect on, would be trust and empathy – both are pivotal to enable employees to flourish, and the behaviour of HR leaders will be a beacon for success for these values.
The whole premise is about creating working environments that enable people to flourish, in part drive your business forward. to achieve this need to genuinely care about your people. We need to remember that employees are dedicating a proportion of their life journey to your business and one commodity which isn’t dispensable is time!. Personally, I see employment as a deal between the business and the worker, somewhat a “give and get”, and the greater the commitment on both sides the stronger the engagement and performance will be.
Richard joined Epos Now in February 2022 as its Chief People Officer. He is also a founding member of the Experts Council of Hacking HR, a global community of HR leaders and practitioners.