“Small organisations tend to combine the finance and HR roles, so there is demand for that dual skill set. It was a beautiful sweet spot for me. I have been able to learn about many amazing smaller organisations that need a person to help them with their growth journey.” – Lily Bissett, Operations Director at Justice Studio, 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 Lily Bissett at Justice Studio, who began her HR career with exposure to workplace culture and organisational management while working in the financial services industry. In 2015, she took up a position as a Finance and Operations Director at The Access Project where she held functional responsibility for HR.
After leaving that role in 2017, Lily continued working as a freelance consultant in Finance and Operations before joining her current organisation, Justice Studio as Head of People, Operations & Finance in 2019. In May 2020, Lily transitioned to her current position as Operations Director.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
My degree was in maths and computer science. When I graduated I had no idea what I was going to do with myself. I decided to join a graduate programme at an investment bank because the idea of doing rotations and variety appealed to me. Through the process I became a qualified accountant and worked in many different areas of the bank, including looking at workplace culture and organisational management.
After a number of years in banking I realised the industry wasn’t a good fit for me. I wanted to do something different with my life and I became a freelance lecturer. I lectured in workplace culture and organisational management for a while – the aspects of my banking work that had really caught my eye.
I didn’t want to work in academia for the long-term and very fortuitously I stumbled across a position as operations director for a charity. This role was a wonderful mix of finance and HR elements, overseeing the end-to-end people operations. I found it such a wonderful experience and during my time there the charity doubled in size. It was exciting to grow together and I was able to formalise a lot of the things I’d previously learnt ad hoc.
That role made me realise that while I like finance from a logical point of view, I’m more passionate about the people side and that’s what I wanted to focus on going forward. Having always worked at very large organisations, I hadn’t realised that small organisations tend to combine the finance and HR roles and there is demand for that dual skill set. It was a beautiful sweet spot for me. I was able to learn about many amazing smaller organisations that need a person to help them with their growth journey to becoming medium sized. On the other hand, my role does eventually come to an end because the two responsibilities of finance and HR get spun out into separate functions, but I’m happy with that and enjoy finding the next challenge to move onto.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
Our main challenge is, perhaps obviously, COVID and how we’re managing things like hybrid working and our strategy as an organisation.
Justice Studio is a physical organisation and we have no desire to be a fully remote company. Due to the nature of our work and the way in which we interact and work on projects with clients, we feel it’s really important to have a physical office presence and ensure we facilitate those in-person interactions.
Figuring out what that means and what it looks like for our people is really tricky. Pre-pandemic our people were all London based, during the pandemic some of our staff moved outside the capital and now we’re coming out the other side and barely any of our people are left in London. So we’re looking at what kind of foundations and infrastructure we need to establish so we can get to a place where we’re not telling everyone to come in at times that don’t work for them, but at the same time, the magic that happens when people are in the same room can still occur.
It’s very much about flexibility but also about structure. If you leave people to do it on their own, which we have tried, people don’t synchronise, it doesn’t all come together. There needs to be some kind of organisational structure underlying it that provides the key touch points teams can use to figure out what makes sense 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?
If you are just entering HR, my advice is to keep your options open. Gain experience of different areas because you never know what doors will open or what’s useful and what’s not.
Secondly, understand what the people in the business do. When you’re recruiting for a role, don’t just read a job description, actually understand what it means to be doing that role. When you have a conflict, for example between an employee and a manager, get to know what a typical day for them looks like. What are the stress points? What are the triggers? What are the things that we, as an organisation, need to be mindful of and maybe address in a different way to resolve these issues. Sometimes I think it’s too easy to look only at the individual in a situation like that, rather than considering how the wider organisation might be contributing to the situation.
It can be quite a challenge to grow from a micro or small company to being a bit larger and realising that you can’t just let people do whatever they want all the time. Structures have to be put in place and this is where you start having tensions within the organisation that can be quite challenging. HR people who come in saying, “I’ve studied HR, this is what I do”, tend not to have the same understanding and insight into what it’s like to be a person doing a job within the business. That’s why putting yourself in other people’s shoes and understanding them is so important.
Lily has 15 years of experience in finance and operations. She has been working as Operations Director at Justice Studio since May 2020 and is responsible for all internal functions including HR, IT and office management.