“The central goal of HR at Portakabin is making sure that people are at the heart of the business, as they’re the heartbeat of our company. Doing the right thing with and for our people is at the heart of it for me.” – Amanda Stainton, HR Director at Portakabin, 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 Amanda Stainton at Portakabin, who began her career as a graduate trainee at British Gas before moving to the National & Provincial Building Society to offer HR planning and support services. After acquiring a broad range of experience there, Amanda took on the role of Senior HR Manager at Yorkshire Water.
In 2001, Amanda branched out into consultancy, acting as Senior Consultant for The Performance Management Group, which she followed up with the role of Managing Consultant at CDA . In 2007, she moved to Morrison plc to fulfil the role of Group HR Director, ahead of assuming her current role with Portakabin in April 2008.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
I had a very non-traditional start as far as careers in HR go. After graduating university with a BSc in Maths, Operational Research & Economics, I started working in Operational Research as a graduate trainee with British Gas. That moved more into data, planning, and analysis, and with those skills I moved into financial services and started working in manpower planning at National and Provincial. I implemented a new HR system there, then took my analytical brain into Reward, followed by Employee Relations. National & Provincial was very much a growing organisation, and we did a huge amount of process reengineering around customer engagement that was quite ahead of its time.
I later took those skills and that experience into Yorkshire Water and headed up Reward and Employee Relations there. It was a very different type of organisation—very unionised and quite change-averse at that point in time—but it gave me a real breadth of coverage across HR.
After that, I moved into consultancy for about seven years, working with a range of blue-chip organisations. Those roles involved using my analytical skills to diagnose problems, looking at cultural change, performance processes, competency frameworks, reward systems and so on. They were a good fit for me, but I later decided I wanted to get back into corporate life as I missed seeing things through to the end rather than making isolated changes when needed.
I came to Portakabin in April 2008, and I’m still being presented with new challenges every day; even now. That’s what’s so amazing about HR; no two days are ever the same because people are intrinsically so unpredictable. There’s never been a dull moment in the almost 12 years I’ve been here.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
I think our biggest challenge as a sector is that our work isn’t binary. There’s loads and loads of grey in what we do, so we’re constantly dealing with things that we weren’t necessarily anticipating dealing with. Things are constantly moving when you’re driving change through an organisation, and you can have as many plans as you like, but people are people and will respond to things in different ways.
We’re seeing huge growth within Portakabin and the provision of buildings and space as an industry, but that presents a unique challenge for us in HR. Unlike in consultancy—where you’re being brought in to fix something—we’re trying to drive change in a business that’s performing so well, and a lot of the time people can be blinkered by our results and assume that change within People and Culture isn’t needed. Portakabin is driven by the relentless pursuit of excellence, so we’re very demanding of our people and focused on creating a high-performance culture in line with that. The only reason we are as successful and profitable as we are is because we set high expectations and have clear objectives and targets for all our employees, but also ensure we have good rewards to balance that.
My biggest challenge at Portakabin is about trying to be disruptive without being destructive, and ensuring that we keep our HR systems moving and adapting in order to support the significant growth—particularly in Europe—that the business is looking to achieve. We want the employee experience to feel the same whether you join Portakabin UK or Portakabin France, for example, and the same is true of our customer experience, so it’s about streamlining our processes and keeping our values and culture consistent across all our businesses to allow that. Within those processes, we need to take into account not only cultural differences between countries, but also between our manufacturing sites, construction sites, visitor centres, and office-based operations so that all our employees are engaged with their needs met. That can be difficult, but our current feedback shows we’re doing it well.
We’ve got a very powerful brand, and everyone thinks they know Portakabin and what we do, but there’s a lot more to what we stand for than most people—particularly candidates—really understand, so another of our challenges is articulating our employee value proposition so people know what we stand for. We’re a bit of an unknown quantity as an employer in terms of our size and reach, and that’s very powerful, but can also pose challenges when it comes to recruitment. There’s always more we can do in terms of putting our core messages out there and ensuring our managers are really selling the benefits and realities of working for Portakabin to attract talent.
As a whole, we have rebranded and are moving on from being a traditional business, and that’s true in terms of our people processes as well. We’ve modernised; introducing flexible working, more consistent working hours, and a number of change programmes that have allowed us to grow. Trying to keep pace and make a case for changes like that can be challenging when a business is already performing well, but it’s a really important thing to do.
The other theme that I think is a key concern for all of HR at the moment is multigenerational working. At Portakabin, we’re moving that on a lot. Around 10% of our organisation has been with us for over 25 years, but we’re also seeing the younger generation coming in and not being attracted by the idea of joining that 25-year club. It’s about balancing that dynamic. We want our apprentices who work alongside and learn from experienced employees to create the right culture for their generation, but we also need to keep that culture appropriate for our long-serving colleagues. As a sector, I think we are all trying to find the right approaches to attract talent to our businesses, but also retain talent, and make sure everyone feels their needs are being treated appropriately rather than exactly the same.
The central goal of HR at Portakabin is making sure that people are at the heart of the business, as they’re the heartbeat of our company. Doing the right thing with and for our people is at the heart of it for me.
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 think the most important skill to have if you’re looking to get into HR leadership is business awareness and understanding. Everything is about the business first and HR second. That doesn’t mean people second, but it has to be about what the business needs. If the business is growing commercially, for example, it needs a fantastic commercial development programme to support that. Managers and leaders need to take responsibility for change, and the way they do that is by demonstrating that they understand the challenges the business is facing and have solutions to tackle them. It’s not about things being done just because HR said so; there needs to be that understanding.
I think that good HR Directors are also capable of presenting data about the need for investment or change in such a way that implementing it almost becomes a no-brainer, and the potential of doing so to bridge gaps is clear. Data is great, but good HR Leaders have to be able to take it to the next level by putting it in the context of the business to understand what it’s really telling us.
Good HR leadership is also about staying true to your own core values and beliefs. The HR leader is the driver of values around the executive table, so those have to resonate with you on a personal level for you to be able to carry them through effectively.
For those looking to start a career in HR—or in any role, really—I think that opportunities come as a result of curiosity and activity. Be curious, ask questions, volunteer to get involved! Put your hand up, get your head above the parapet and deliver, and good things will happen.
Don’t underestimate the value of a really great mentor, either. Find someone who really understands you early on in your career and allow them to guide you, teach you, and put you on the right path. A lot of senior people can identify someone who helped them make that shift, and I think it’s really important to have that.
Amanda has been working as HR Director for Portakabin since April 2008, and is responsible for overseeing all aspects of it’s HR function—including Learning and Development, Reward, and Engagement—both in the UK and across Europe.
If you are interested in having a confidential conversation about your career or would like support growing your team, please get in touch today.