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“Expose yourself to as many environments, industries, and responsibilities as you can” – Interview with Lorna Hunt

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“Expose yourself to as many environments, industries, and responsibilities as you can, because you will experience a whole range of areas and concepts that will enrich your career and pave the way to a bigger role.” – Lorna Hunt, HR Director for NCE and Asia at Mirion Technologies, Inc. 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 Lorna Hunt at Mirion Technologies, who started her HR career in an HR Administrator role at Esso, later moving into Recruitment to work in the organisation’s graduate and internship programmes. In January 1998, Lorna became HR Administration Manager at Pfizer, then transitioned to a Business Partner role ahead of later taking on the Human Resources Manager role at First Drinks Brands Ltd in May 2004.  In January 2011, Lorna took on her first senior HR Leadership role as Head of HR for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at William Grant & Sons. In January 2014, Lorna took on the role of Head of Human Resources at TW Metals, where she remained until taking on the role of Senior Manager for Human Resources in TE Connectivity’s Aerospace, Defence & Marine divisions, and later transitioning to her current role in March 2020. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? My introduction to HR was with Esso at their Fawley Refinery base in Hampshire back in the 90s. I started off in an admin role with lots of exposure to elements like change management, union activity, and employee relations, so it was a really good initial experience in HR. On top of that, with Esso being such a large organisation, there was plenty of scope for development. As part of that, I started to study for my CIPD with Esso’s support, because I knew that I really wanted to progress, which went hand in hand with learning the inner workings of an HR team. While I was undertaking that qualification, I moved into the Recruitment team attracting young talent to the graduate and internship programmes. I was travelling the length and breadth of the UK to attract really high-calibre students backgrounds by conducting interviews and supporting presentations, which was great, but quite cyclical. Once I’d finished my CIPD, I found that I was hungry for more HR exposure, so I made the decision to leave Esso and go into an HR Manager role at Pfizer. This was my first management role, and Pfizer provided great training and support to succeed. They had a strong culture and a very entrepreneurial attitude, as well as an HR Leadership team that encouraged me to take risks, be creative, try different initiatives, and learn from my mistakes. From there, I moved into a Business Partnering role in a generalist capacity, and just continued to love working in the fast-moving, exciting world of the pharmaceutical industry. In 2004, Pfizer relocated to Surrey, but I opted to stay where I was in Winchester and move into the drinks industry with First Drinks Brands and William Grant & Sons. Although I missed working in pharma, I quickly found that that fast pace I’d loved didn’t even compare with the pace of the drinks industry. It was constantly really exciting, with lots of competition, change, and opportunities to climb. My final role in the drinks industry was as Head of HR, which again was really exciting with lots of change management. William Grant actually approached me to take on a bigger global role, but I had to think of my young family and knew it wouldn’t work for me personally, so I made the difficult decision not to take it. Instead, I started to apply for other roles which would offer challenges but I also realised that manufacturing was missing from my background.  To fill that gap, I moved into a standalone role with TW Metals, where I set up the HR function from scratch. That was quite a challenge, but very rewarding, and great for my experience in terms of knowing what needed to be present within an HR function, what the compliance areas were, where we could be more flexible, and how to introduce best practice. Following that, I moved to work for the aerospace provider TE Connectivity in a global role which entailed lots of integration and travel, and ultimately saw me spending a lot of time in the West Coast of the US and Mexico. It was a fabulous opportunity, but not what I wanted for myself at that point, so I made the decision to leave after almost three years. At that point, I joined Mirion Technologies, which is an organisation providing technical equipment for the nuclear industry. As HRD, although I’m based in the UK, I oversee the UK, Northern Europe, and Asia.  Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? When I started at Mirion, there was quite a robust induction plan in place for me, but as I joined in March 2020, the lockdown started very soon after. I was able to spend my first week in Paris, but haven’t travelled otherwise—my focus very quickly changed to furloughing people and organising home working.  I had also been due to hire for a support role, but wasn’t able to do that until August, so I was dealing with responding to the pandemic on my own until then, which was extremely challenging. Working in a global business, I haven’t had the opportunity to meet many people face-to-face either—including my manager, who is based in the US, and my business leader, who’s based in the South of France. I would say that I’m quite a resilient and tenacious person, which is definitely needed during this pandemic, but it’s still been tough at times. On an organisational level, the biggest

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Multilingual HR Director with experience across MENA

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We recently had a great conversation with a Multilingual HR Director with a depth of experience across MENA. Having returned to the UK they are now seeking an opportunity to support organisations to effect change and develop their People Strategy and / or organisational structure. They have a proven track record in identifying, coaching and mentoring successors and high potential employees to ensure a tangible ROI on human capital investment and business continuity. Please let us know if you think they can add value to your company or if you know someone they can help.

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“Having a rounded picture of the HR and People challenges of the whole business is much more valuable than drawing from a single area of experience.” – Interview with Ben Wharfe

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“If you’re interested in HR but haven’t broken into the field yet, it’s never too late. Business experience is just as much a part of HR as the People side of things. Having a rounded picture of the HR and People challenges of the whole business is much more valuable than drawing from a single area of experience.” – Ben Wharfe, Chief People Officer at Fiit, 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 Ben Wharfe at Fiit, who began his career as a Business Analyst at Accenture before branching out independently as a Freelance Business Consultant. In 2011, he joined the team at EDF Energy as Business Consulting Lead, later moving on to become Principal Business Partner and Future HR Programme Director there.  In January 2018, Ben became Non-Executive Director for Recruitment Smart, a responsibility he carried out alongside his role as Director of Operations for Fiit until December 2018. He transitioned to his current role in July 2019. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? I got into HR via a different route than normal. I actually started out as a Business Consultant at Accenture working on large IT implementations, and I was there for a couple of years before I chose to freelance and contracted mainly for BP on their business transformation projects. After another two years, I decided to go to in-house work, and took a job working in transformation for EDF Energy. When they told me I was going to be working on an HR transformation, I wasn’t that passionate about HR at first. The company explained that the project was really struggling and asked me to go in and set it up anyway on the understanding that they’d move me onto something else after a few weeks. I caught the bug, and six-and-a-half years later, I was leading all of EDF Energy’s corporate HR projects and programmes from IT implementations to HR strategy to company restructures. When you’re implementing such a range of different projects, you really get a view of every single component of the HR lifecycle. I became excited about what made companies tick and what differentiated good companies from great companies, and I saw that it came down to the same thing every time. Every company has access to pretty much the same technology and customers, and there aren’t many who offer something so unique that it can’t be copied, so the key differentiator is in the people. Around that time, I was doing a lot of public speaking across Europe—and a little bit in the States—about the future of work and digital disruption. I would talk about diversifying ways of working, the challenge around people potentially working until they were in their 70s or 80s, and the resulting evolution of our view of careers, yet I was returning to a workplace where little was innovative or disruptive. I decided I wanted to go and be one of the disruptors rather than one of the giants waiting to be disrupted,  so I made the transition from working in the big corporate world—which I had still enjoyed every minute of—to building something with a start-up; whether that meant starting something myself, joining a venture early on in its life, or starting a consultancy. Within a week of my search starting, I’d been offered two jobs for two different start-ups which I ended up taking both of, and that started my life in the start-up world. It’s been one hell of a rollercoaster!  Coming from a mammoth company like EDF Energy where everything’s set up and very structured into a place like Fiit where you’re setting up and designing everything from scratch has proved scary at times, but it’s also been very liberating.  People and businesses alike have evolved over the years, and it almost feels like the business models and HR strategies of big companies haven’t kept up, so it’s refreshing to be able recreate the world of work from a blank sheet of paper. When lockdown was brought in in the UK, for example, we gave everyone £350 to set up their home workspace, and £150 to spend on wellness, whatever that meant to them. We actually beat lots of businesses to the punch on that, because in a start-up, if you think of something worthwhile, you can put it into action within 24 hours in most cases. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? One challenge that’s always jumped off the page for me is performance management. Thinking about the processes that I myself went through before I joined Fiit, they followed the standard practice of setting objectives at the beginning of the year, sometimes having a check-in halfway through the year, and then getting a performance score at the end of the year. The infrequency of feedback and information always stood out to me as an element of the system that was broken, so that’s why we run a quarterly cycle at Fiit. It’s more engaging, more interactive, and offers people ‘real-time’ feedback on their performance and development. The other thing that I find hugely broken is the employee engagement cycle. We used to run our employee engagement survey once a year, which it took about six weeks to analyse the data from. Adding in time for each person to take an hour to complete it, we’d finally get the data about three months after the initial survey, by which point it’s already out of date. Even if it’s not, you’re only taking data from one fixed point in the year, during which time someone might be having a bad week or month, so that data might not be representative of their experience the rest of the year. Now, we

“Having a rounded picture of the HR and People challenges of the whole business is much more valuable than drawing from a single area of experience.” – Interview with Ben Wharfe Read More »

Highly focussed, values driven Senior HRBP/Head of HR

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We are representing a great individual keen to find progression in their next role. This person is a highly focussed, values driven Senior HRBP/Head of HR, available in Q2 2021.   They have received recognition for managing change and restructure programmes across a large employee, multi site base.   Having developed a broad knowledge base in HR, they are now focusing on organisational effectiveness across capability, change management, coaching, talent management and workforce planning.   Please let us know if you think they can add value to your company or if you know someone they can help.

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Career interim HR Director open to fixed-term or permanent contracts

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We are currently representing a highly experienced, career interim HR Director who is open to fixed-term or permanent contracts.   They hold experience across change management, and project management within organisations with an international and UK centric employee base. They have clear examples of delivering 7 and 8 figure cost savings.    Please let us know if you think they can add value to your company or if you know someone they can help.

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“In HR, we influence both the vision and values of our business, so it’s hugely important that we also represent them.” – Interview with Greg Austin

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“No matter what level we’re at, we all need to be aware of the shadow that we cast and how we come across; whether that’s as a leader or just as an HR professional. In HR, we influence both the vision and values of our business, so it’s hugely important that we also represent them.”– Greg Austin, HR & HSE Director at Sodexo Healthcare, 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 Greg Austin at Sodexo, who started his HR career within the UK Civil Service as an Executive Officer—and later Higher Executive Officer—at the Benefits Agency, before taking on roles within the HR functions of Anchor Housing and Boots. In 2000, Greg joined the team at Telewest Communications (now Virgin Media) as HR Manager, later taking on the HR Manager role at Allied Bakeries.  In February 2006, Greg took on the role of HR Operations Manager at Northumbrian Water, later becoming HR Director for G4S Government & Outsourcing Services in August 2010 ahead of taking on his current role at Sodexo in October 2012. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? My first job in HR was pure coincidence. After finishing my A-Levels, I started to look into career paths, and undertook my Civil Service exams as part of their direct entry Executive Officer recruitment scheme. I was offered a job in Newcastle with the Benefits Agency. When I arrived, I was placed in Personnel and given a desk, a team, the staff codebooks, and two days’ handover time, even though I had no knowledge of what Personnel was. It was a baptism of fire, but a great opportunity to learn the basics. Going straight into challenges like disciplinaries, grievances, and other employee relations activity proved to be a great grounding for my future HR career. I realised that I really enjoyed not only the influencing side, but the variety of challenges you could be faced with every time you picked up the phone. Over time, I took on more responsibility, setting up a satellite office for the Child Benefit Centre and stepping up to the role of Higher Executive Officer for a year in a secondment. When that came to an end, I realised there was no real scope to move up, so I began to look for my next opportunity. Shortly after that, I made the move to Anchor Housing—a not-for-profit charity with care and nursing homes across the UK. That was a really interesting role; not only did it feel like I was giving something back, but it continued my education in HR and allowed me to build on my ability to manage change and employee relations and get involved in projects. In that time, I also undertook a postgraduate diploma in HR in the evenings—I knew that I needed to have an HR qualification to back up my practical experience and allow me to progress. After a couple of years at Anchor, I took on a regional role with Boots, relocating to Carlisle and started a Master’s—again in the evenings—to give me a theoretical understanding to underpin my practical experience and broaden my thought processes. At Boots, I was a Duty Manager as well as in HR, and that gave me my first view of the commercial world, which was a real eye-opener. Although i enjoyed Boots, I eventually wanted to move back to Newcastle for family reasons, and ended up joining Telewest—as Virgin Media was at that time—as HR Manager. I thoroughly enjoyed working for them; it was vibrant, it was growing, and the job itself was always evolving and providing new challenges. I gained exposure to the various disciplines in HR as well as the business. I started off looking after Scotland and Newcastle, which then progressed into national roles looking after our call centres and Sales teams, and then the Technical division, handling areas such as reward principles, engagement, and growth and acquisition in all those areas.  Growth and integration was where i came into my own—colleagues had joined and were continuing to join us from other organisations and bringing with them a union presence the business hadn’t really experienced before.  Ensuring we struck a balance between keeping things vibrant and dynamic and accounting for the unionised element of our workforce in our engagement and work management systems was a challenge, but also a fascinating insight into the importance of being a trusted advisor to your business and influencing senior leaders in order to move things forward. Although I enjoyed how dynamic, fast-moving, and varied the work I was doing was, more responsibility meant I was living away from my young family four or five days a week, which wasn’t sustainable. After briefly taking on a role at Allied Bakeries, I moved to Northumbrian Water, which was another really  varied organisation where I was fortunate to experience a whole range of technical and engineering-focused blue- and white-collar environments, all of which had a huge focus on people, excellent employee and customer relations, and a great culture and value system underlying them. I felt i made a difference in my role, and the people and environment were great, but after four years there, I knew that I needed a new challenge. I wanted to test and stretch myself by taking on an HR Director role.  I pursued that at G4S, which was a very different environment, but fantastic for bringing me back to the commercial side of HR as part of the executive management team—influencing, coaching, and making decisions with not only our division’s Chief Executive, but also the regional business leaders and on occasion the Group Chief Executive. I gained some great insight into the leadership of a commercially-focused organisation, in particular in the outsourcing areas of bidding, tender management, client relationships

“In HR, we influence both the vision and values of our business, so it’s hugely important that we also represent them.” – Interview with Greg Austin Read More »

Representing an Internationally Experienced Group Chief People Officer

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As the impact of coronavirus is felt throughout the business community we recognise that companies will need to change and adapt.   We are currently representing an Internationally Experienced Group Chief People Officer, specialised in developing leadership capability to support and drive business performance.   They have delivered some outstanding results for their previous employer, including: Leading the global people strategy across 350 senior leaders, and identifying cost savings opportunities circa ÂŁ3 million.   Please get in touch to start a conversation about what this individual could do for your organisation. 

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Cost Negative Global HR Director

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In uncertain times the value of a Senior HR professional able to restructure your cost base and streamline the operating model cannot be underestimated.   We are currently representing a Global HR Director, creative problem-solver, with proven experience in aligning corporate needs with human capital strategy.   Career Achievements include: Onboarding 3000+ and achieving cost reduction of 30%. Forecasted savings of ÂŁ500K and a 16% increase in productivity. They improved Gender Diversity in senior roles from 18% to 35% in 3 years and improved Ethnicity Diversity in senior roles from 0 to 15% in 3 years.   Please feel free to get in touch if you think they can add value to your company or if you are a Senior HR leader looking for your next opportunity.

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“Never assume, and never be afraid to ask questions—HR is always full of surprises…” – Interview with Nadia Hutchinson

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“Never assume, and never be afraid to ask questions—HR is always full of surprises and things we’ve never come across before, and how we absorb and react to those new discoveries is critical.” – Nadia Hutchinson, Global HR Operations Director at Kantar, 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 Nadia Hutchinson at Kantar, who began her career as Council Administrator for the Lafferty Group. Nadia later went on to take on Project roles for Smythe Dorward Lambert, which were followed by management roles at a Telecoms organisation and Legal Clifford Chance, a magic circle law firm, respectively. In 2005, Nadia took on her first role within the HR function, joining the team at Howard Kennedy as HR Manager before returning to Consultancy through her role with Hiscox in 2007. This was followed by her role as Group HR Manager for the Global Strategies Group. In 2008, Nadia became Head of HR Service Delivery for Europe at Standard Chartered Bank before becoming part of the team at British American Tobacco—working first as Head of HR Shared Services, and subsequently as part of one of the world’s largest HR transformation information projects as Global HR Process Owner for Data and Employee Admin. At the end of 2018, Nadia transitioned to her current role at Kantar, the world’s leading data, insights and consulting company. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? My journey into HR wasn’t planned. My first serious roles were within a management consultancy, although the work that I focused on was very much around people-centred changes such as mergers and acquisitions and the evolution of leadership behaviours. That led very nicely into roles which didn’t necessarily sit within the HR department, but were very much focused around people movement, change management, and transformation, which obviously all involves the humans at the centre of any organisation. That meant that when I did formally become part of an HR department, my path just seemed to flow naturally. I would say my first dedicated HR role actually came about at Standard Chartered Bank. The HR Manager role I took on at Howard Kennedy may have been in an HR function, but it was very much similar to the role that I’d had with Clifford Chance doing practice management work. When I went to Standard Chartered Bank, I found my current home in the transactional space. Since working as a leader in shared services and service delivery, my approach to and focus within this part of the function has developed a great deal. We talk all the time about changes in the less operations-driven areas of HR, but even the operational element of the function has changed enormously over the last 15 years. Whereas back then we were talking about things like manager self-service, employee self-service, and transaction management, the language we use now is the language of transformation, data, risk, and compliance. Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? What 2020 has shown people on the more strategic side of the fence in HR is that digitisation—both in terms of the technology that we use and the changes in the use of technology that practitioners have been trying to secure investment in for years—has been completely brought to the fore. Instead of decision-makers putting off some of those investment choices for weeks or months, those decisions are being made in days. Expectations around the implementation of changes have completely changed as well. Rather than implementations still taking place over 12-18 months or even two to three years as a structured programme, leaders are now asking why they can’t be rolled out in three months. That has been both a blessing and a curse. It has brought about a great deal of change in terms of upgrading our technology and infrastructure and automating our data flows beyond the need for paper or wet signatures, but at the same time, finding the specialists who are needed to implement those changes and able to do so in a tighter timeframe has been difficult. The teams that are mobilising changes are also responsible for maintaining business as usual, so their time is limited as it is. What I would say is that along with health workers, funeral home directors, and all the other essential service workers who should clearly be applauded for all the work they did in 2020 and continue to do now, I would 100% count payroll people among them. There has been no incident where any company has not been able to pay the people they have on the ground in their organisation because of process limitations. Payroll teams have had to manipulate every single payroll technology and process globally to make sure that they meet fast-moving government standards, all in an incredibly short space of time. They’re the silent heroes of the corporate world, and a testament to the importance of what we do on the transactional side of HR. A key challenge for us in operational HR moving forward is process standardisation. When you look at many medium to large corporations out there, they seem to the outside world as though everything behind the scenes works as one no matter whether you’re in Brazil, South Africa, or Singapore, just because they’re one organisation. In most organisations, that’s not the case, but I don’t think there’s a reason why it can’t be in this day and age—there are already systems out there that will allow us to do things in a more homogenous way.  I think one of the biggest shifts we will see across organisations is a real drive to have global consistency irrespective of jurisdiction. Although we have to be mindful of complying with local legislative requirements, a process should be

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Human HR Hackathon #3

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We had such a great time at our third Human HR Hackathon.   We had great sessions discussing challenges including engagement, equity and inclusivity in a segmented workforce, overcoming the challenges related to COVID and many other issues. The aim was to build a community of HR professionals who can each help solve issues arising in a variety of ways.    The three most risen topics of the Hackathon #3 were: What can we do to increase / maintain engagement through this 3rd lockdown? How are you mitigating and managing Burnout? What does good performance management look like now?   If you want to check out the recording, please click on this link.   The next Hackathon will take place on March 31st at 4pm UK, if you have any suggestions of what you would like to discuss then and who would you like to join me as a panel member, please feel free to get in touch.   You can also register as a listener here.

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