“[T]he most important thing to have in HR is a genuine interest in people, because if you don’t have that, it won’t matter how good your policies are or your employment law knowledge is. You’ve got to be able to talk to people and get them to explain things, and you need to be passionate about finding out what makes them tick and how you can make things better.” – Janet Sutcliffe, Head of Human Resources at United Response, 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 Janet Sutcliffe at United Response, who started her HR Leadership career as HR Project Manager at William Hill. Janet later joined the team at Anchor Trust as Group People Development Manager, later moving to the role of HR Business Partner.
In December 2010, Janet took on an interim role as HR Manager at the Cheque Centre, later assuming the same role at Sesame Bankhall. In September 2012, Janet joined United Response as Senior HR Business Partner, later ascending the ranks to the role of Head of HR Partnering & Support before taking on her current role in May 2019.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
I actually came from quite a varied background before I got into HR, as I initially worked in mortgage sales in the Banking sector. I worked at First Direct in their early days, and they were very keen on people moving departments and moving roles—I got the opportunity to go into the Training department, and from there, I moved into Learning and Development leadership. I’ve always been one to take on extra tasks, so that was how I first encountered more generalist HR. I got into it by chance, really.
I’d always had an interest in people and been looking at what was happening on that side of things, but after I did my CIPD, I moved across from Learning and Development to a generalist HR role to make it my career. I chose to make the jump because I loved seeing people develop and helping them find solutions to challenges they were facing. I think my Sales background did come into it in some respects as well—Sales has a really good resonance with HR, because you’re selling ideas and solutions to staff members and leadership teams alike.
In my role at William Hill, I had the opportunity to pick up projects that sat outside the normal day-to-day HR remit and were more in the realm of change management and redefining roles. That was a huge learning curve for me, but a great role for learning new things and getting to grips with change.
The betting industry is huge, and it changes on a daily basis, so while it’s very different to what I’m doing now, the role offered a vast amount of opportunity for development. It also taught me how much I liked working with operational colleagues—we were tackling big challenges, so there was no way we could have operated standalone. We had to be hand-in-hand.
When I moved to Anchor, I did a lot of development on a shared services centre, so it was a mixture of the Project Management aspect and the HR aspect whereas the Cheque Centre role saw me delve deeper into the HR Leadership stuff. That was a good HR role with lots of very rapid change, but it ultimately wasn’t where I wanted to be long-term.
After that, I took a role with Sesame Bankhall, who were in financial advice. I worked for an absolutely brilliant HR Director there who I learned loads from, and that’s probably where I became much more generalist. It was a smaller company with a much smaller team, so we covered everything.
Working at United Response since then introduced me to the Health & Social Care sector. Whilst the work we do here is quite different to finance or betting, it meshes really well with my personal values. I’m still very, very proud of what we do on a daily basis, even after nearly nine years.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
Our biggest challenge is recruitment, and I think that’s true of the healthcare sector as a whole, not just United Response. COVID has added a real fear factor to our line of work, because we’re working with people in care homes who are significantly more at risk from contracting the virus and getting seriously ill. To tackle that, we’re working very hard to look at people who are changing careers and sell the healthcare sector to them as an option, but that’s not always easy. In terms of the type of people we’re looking for, we want to bring in anyone who has a passion for helping people and making life better for those with disabilities. The job is incredibly diverse, so it’s much more about people’s values than previous experience.
Following on from that, we’ve been working really hard to retain the people we have, which has been difficult. COVID hits us right at the front line, and keeping staff working whilst ensuring that they’re safe has been a massive challenge.
For me, our biggest challenge moving forward is going to be the transition back to normality, whatever that looks like. People are great in a crisis, but I worry that we will lose some of the culture of coming to the fore to overcome challenges as things start to get a bit easier and we start to see changes as a result of more widespread vaccination.
There are lots of small challenges under the umbrella of COVID, but a constant challenge throughout the pandemic has been that people have expected HR teams to know all the answers ,when in fact this has been all new to us as well.
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 would definitely recommend getting a breadth of experience, whether that’s through gaining qualifications and applying them practically or by taking on a range of different roles in different sectors.
With that said, the most important thing to have in HR is a genuine interest in people, because if you don’t have that, it won’t matter how good your policies are or your employment law knowledge is. You’ve got to be able to talk to people and get them to explain things, and you need to be passionate about finding out what makes them tick and how you can make things better.
It’s also important to be very resilient. As Head of HR, a lot of my job is about talking to people, listening to people, and making sure my team is okay, but I’ve also got to think about Recruitment, Learning and Development, and the transactional side as well as the HR advice side. As a leader, it’s about constantly balancing plates and making sure you’re not missing anything. As I said before, Sales skills are brilliant for that, because a big part of HR is listening to people, seeing what they need, and being able to sell them solutions. Project Management has also stood me in good stead—that was where I was first put in the position of needing to constantly balance my priorities.
It’s vital to understand what your business does as an organisation, because once you do, you can really put the values out there. For the HR team at United Response, that also means that we can integrate with our operational colleagues and understand what they do on a day-to-day basis to make sure we are a support for them rather than a hinderance.
Janet has been working as Head of Human Resources since May 2019, and provides leadership across all aspects of United Response’s HR function.
To find out more about United Response and the work they do, visit: www.unitedresponse.org.uk/