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‘If you’re early in your career, take the opportunities that come to you.’ – Interview with James Smith

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“A large part of the job is having difficult conversations and managing difficult situations. We speak to people at their lowest ebb and if you can help them, support them and make a difference it’s such a win, both for them and for the business.” – James Smith, Head of Human Resources at Merseyrail, 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 James Smith, who began his HR career straight out of university on a graduate scheme with Veolia, later taking up the role of HR Advisor at the company. In 2015, James joined Network Rail as a HR Business Partner where he spent two and a half years before moving to High Speed Two (HS2) Ltd. In 2018, James returned to Network Rail as a Senior HR Business Partner based in Manchester. He took on his current role as Head of Human Resources for Merseyrail in January 2020. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? At university I studied a generalist business management degree. In our final year you could specialise in a particular area and I picked HR as it had such a broad range of potential opportunities. My dad’s friend was a HR Director who told me you can make a great career out of it – it was that simple really. After graduating I was lucky enough to join a graduate scheme at Veolia which involved various rotations over a two year period. I was able to apply my learning from university but also learn on the job as well which was great because until you apply the theory in real-life situations you can’t really grasp it.  The Sheffield division of the company was going through a big restructure at the time and I was doing major elements of that. It was a complex restructure that involved negotiations with trade unions, management and potential redundancies – you can’t learn that through theory alone. That exposure at such an early point in my career was key in building some of the knowledge and expertise that I’ve got now.  After I completed the graduate scheme at Veolia I was offered a permanent role as a HR Advisor. I enjoyed the wide range of responsibility, the travel, the variety of contracts I was looking after and the small but growing influence my role had and I knew that HR really was for me. I visited the sites for my oil and gas clients and was able to see some of the front line operations, it was so interesting.  Since leaving Veolia I’ve worked for some great organisations and been involved with national level projects at Network Rail. That was a really interesting experience as it’s a huge and complex organisation. I personally feel very lucky in my career. I’ve been guided by some great people, had some great opportunities and have progressed to a Head of HR position in a fairly short space of time. HR can be a challenge, there are days when you pull your hair out and think, “is this fun anymore?” But actually the rewards and what we get out of it far outweigh the negative side. A large part of the job is having difficult conversations and managing difficult situations. Sometimes we speak to people at their lowest ebb and if you can help them, support them and make a difference it’s such a win, both for them and for the business.  Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?  COVID has been a huge challenge. After I joined Merseyrail in January 2020 there was probably only one month where COVID wasn’t the main topic of conversation and that month was spent getting to know the business and looking at what we needed to do as an organisation, before the world completely changed..  Despite the pandemic, we’ve still been able to give great train performance and continue to receive positive customer feedback despite the obvious challenges.  During the pandemic, the challenge was trying to continue to run services for key workers but also to protect our workers as well.  We introduced a new business strategy during the pandemic to help the business recover that had three simple yet powerful strands: reduce costs, increase customer confidence and maximise revenue. We also have the challenge of launching our new fleet of trains shortly. Our current units are 40+ years old so once we have these it will transform travel for the Liverpool city region. They’re quicker, modern,more spacious and will give us the opportunity to expand the network.  My current challenge is the delivery of a post COVID-19business strategy and designing the people element of it. One of its elements very much focuses on health and wellbeing and how we support our people in a post COVID world because there are so many different factors now. Like a lot of the rail industry, we have an ageing workforce and with all of the NHS resources diverted to fighting the virus, other health elements have started to compound. Illnesses people would normally be able to get treatment for have been postponed or were inaccessible. The industry has had large amounts of absence either through COVID-19 isolations or issues that have manifested following shielding or  quarantining.It’s really affected people’s physical and mental wellbeing and there’s a lot of long-term work that we need to do to support people going forward. That’s one of the main challenges, how do we support our people when we’re not healthcare professionals? At Merseyrail we’ve got lots of fantastic support mechanisms in place. We have a fantastic physio service, occupational health providers, a counsellor, psychologist, mental health first-aiders, virtual GPs and good healthcare benefits.. The amount of support in our business for our staff I

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The Human CEO Article with Ahmet Zeytinoglu, CEO at Sodexo Onsite Services Turkey

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“Without empathy, a leader is missing a key ingredient to success.” – Ahmet Zeytinoglu, CEO at Sodexo Onsite Services Turkey, speaks to us about developing a career in Leadership. As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some CEOs and business leaders to share the secrets of their success. This week, we had a great conversation with Ahemt Zeytinoglu at Sodexo Onsite Services Turkey, who began his career working as an engineer and Production Manager. In 1998, Ahmet became the Assistant Technical Office Manager at GAMA Holding A.S. where he stayed for three years before joining Ingersoll Rand as Production Manager in 2001. In 2003, he joined 3M as their Production and Outsourcing Manager where he worked before becoming Industrial Operations Manager at Perfetti Van Melle in 2006. In 2006, Ahmet became Factory Manager at Ülker. In 2010 he switched to the services sector and became General Manager of Catering Services at ISS A/S. After three and a half years at ISS, Ahmet left to join his current company, Sodexo, becoming their CEO for Turkey in September 2014. Can you tell us what your organisation is working towards / stands for? I’ve been the CEO of Sodexo Turkey onsite services since 2014. We are an integrated facility management company with around 5,000 people working for us in Turkey, and over 400,000 globally. Sodexo started operations in Turkey in 1992 and we are one of the largest integrated services companies. Primarily we provide catering, cleaning and facility management services including maintenance, technical and electrical aspects. What are the biggest challenges in your industry right now? In my opinion, the most important thing for any company is people. Since I started as CEO I have really focused on the motivation and engagement of our people. As a service company, our employees are at the centre of everything. We have lots of innovation however, the clients understand our company through our people because that’s who they interact with, hence face to face communication is so important. In order to understand our people we conduct engagement surveys. In 2014 engagement was around 44%, today it is around 76%. Tell me about your journey into Leadership – how did it start, when did you know or when did someone tell you you’d be a great leader? I have a mechanical engineering background and when I started working my aim was to be a factory owner. I began working in a small manufacturing company with around 15 people that was a sub-contractor of New Holland Tractors. After the economic crisis of the 2000s, I switched my career to working with corporates rather than trying to be an entrepreneur. I began working at a British company that had a factory in Turkey producing car parts.  I worked as a production manager before becoming a factory manager and then managing multiple factories. In 2006, after 13 years working in production, I decided I wanted to move away from the factory environment. I was ready for a change and discovered I would be well suited to the service sector, which was booming in Turkey. I convinced ISS, a competitor to my current company, to hire me as General Manager. Although it was a big change, I was able to show them that at my factories I was managing 600 people, I was familiar with food production and other aspects of general management, like cleaning. I was the first general manager with an engineering background in our sector in Turkey. I worked hard and had a lot to learn. I was very successful at ISS, I grew the business by 300% in three years. Sodexo heard about my achievements and invited me to work with them in 2014. How do you define a great leader? In Turkish culture, and the Mediterranean region, leadership is very important, but we also treat each other like brothers. I do not behave like a CEO, I behave like a regional manager or operations director – everyone can reach me. Anyone working for us can contact me by phone or messenger and I solve all problems that I can solve. I believe a leader should be available and open. At Sodexo we have a very effective ethics committee that I’m a part of and we communicate with our people directly. I drive 5,000 km per month to visit our sites and speak to our people. Every site will receive a visit from me once in six months and my managers can communicate transparently with me so we can see what the problems are. In our organisation, I do the final interviews for white-collar jobs. I don’t ask them about their experience, rather I ask about their character and their ego. I tell them three things are very important in our sector: health and safety, food quality, and diversity and inclusion. We are very strict about sexual harassment and any issues that might arise on our sites. In Sodexo Turkey, 40% of our people are female. I am a professional women’s network equity ambassador and I will do everything I can to make everyone feel safe and included in our workplace. It is going well and we’re seeing positive results in our people engagement and happiness levels. What’s the best piece of advice anyones ever given you? My father worked at construction companies and it was because of him that I became an engineer. He told me that you have to behave as you are. Don’t change yourself to suit a role. For me, communication and good relations with people are really important. What’s the best piece of advice you could offer someone in a leadership role? Firstly, work hard. Secondly, experience different things and when you see something new that you can learn, jump in. A combination of experiences is important and valuable. Thirdly, communication is priceless. You can have the highest IQ but in business life if you don’t have communication skills and a network it is

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“Be open to learning and let values drive you.” – Interview with Sue Swanborough

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“I believe that HR plays a critical role in enabling a culture of trust within organisations through learning and developing the self-esteem of its people, so playing our part in delivering commercial benefit rather than seeing ourselves as a support function. It’s a brilliant way to help people grow and if we’re not thinking about the commercials in the business then we’re not doing our job.” – Sue Swanborough, Human Resources Director at Europe Snacks Kolak, 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 Sue Swanborough at Europe Snacks Kolak, who began her career in R&D and Operations  roles at Boots Company Plc. In 1989, Sue joined Mars as a Production Manager and held various roles across Supply Chain before moving into her first HR roles, OD and L&D. Subsequently she became Head of HR for UK Snackfood. In 2006, Sue moved to General Mills as HR Director UK & Ireland, where, after four years, she also took on responsibility for the Nordic Region. In 2015, she was promoted to HR Director for Northern Europe, a role she held for just under two years before joining Whitworths LTD as HR Director in 2017. Sue joined her current company, Europe Snacks Kolak as Human Resources Director in July 2020.  Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? My move into HR was by chance. After studying Physics and Chemistry at Uni, I wanted to work for an organisation that would enable me to put my science into practice, so I joined Boots. My role involved applying science to the product lines and the people. One of my projects was to relocate part of our manufacturing from one facility to another. This involved starting up a new production line from scratch and I experienced first hand the importance of having the right leader and a team organised in the right way with the right skills to deliver the business requirements This prompted me to apply for a manufacturing manager role where I could apply this learning for myself.  Having held several roles in manufacturing at both Boots and Mars, I had the opportunity to manage a project looking at ways of working on our production lines.  In effect, it was a strategic organisational development project and my first HR role, although it was still sitting under the supply chain at the time. Through the project, we looked at all aspects of the line operation – the people, roles, skills, development paths, remuneration, training etc. It gave me a great insight into many aspects of the role of HR. I enjoyed it immensely and was fortunate to be successful in becoming the manager for the manufacturing training team where I had the opportunity to put into practice some of the insights.  Why do I stay in HR? On my journey, having experienced a range of roles, I realised the importance of having an HR team who is both commercial and people focused. I could see the potential to make a difference to organisations.  What career defining moments cemented you as an HR professional? When I became responsible for manufacturing training, I drew on the insights from the OD project I mentioned. I chose to refocus the team approach from training to learning. Everyone has an important role to play in learning and sharing together to deliver business results. My vision was to create an environment of trust where everyone shared their knowledge and expertise freely and we each released some of the untapped potential we all had within us to thrive and grow together.  I believe that HR plays a critical role in enabling a culture of trust within organisations through learning and developing the self-esteem of its people, so playing our part in delivering commercial benefit rather than seeing ourselves as a support function. It’s a brilliant way to help people grow and if we’re not thinking about the commercials in the business then we’re not doing our job. This insight highlighted that HR was where I wanted my career to be. Following the L&D role, I moved into a business partnering role and completed my CIPD professional accreditation. Leaving Mars was the right decision for me, I had had a fantastic experience both as a manager and as an HR professional and I was ready to apply my learnings in a new context.   In 2006 I became HR Director for UK & Ireland at General Mills, which gave me almost a blank sheet of paper. The acquisition of Pillsbury in 2002 hadn’t been fully integrated into the organisation and a lot of basic things weren’t in place. For example, when I joined there was no HR system for the UK and Ireland, there was no clear grading or role structures. It felt like a real opportunity to step back and consider those things to focus on locally at the same time as working with the head office and to develop best practice.  It was entrepreneurial and transformational which was very exciting.   That was another career defining moment for me, an opportunity to define our approach to culture and the transformation of our leaders, our people and most of all our HR function.  We talk a lot in HR about transformation. To me it doesn’t mean just implementing an organisational restructure, it means taking the time to really transform the business. That is my passion. I joined Whitworths to be part of the transformation journey there and later Europe Snacks Kolak to again work with the leaders on an exciting transformational programme.  Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? We can’t talk about HR without talking about the business. In common with organisations the world over, the big things that are impacting us currently

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“A huge desire for learning is really important in HR.” – Interview with Anne Leivers

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“I fundamentally believe the relationship between a leader and a team member  is the most important relationship and, for me, the role of a HR professional is about to train, guide, coach, support and empower leaders and managers to be the best leaders they can, not do it for them.” – Anne Leivers, Head of People and Development at Nottingham Building Society, 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 Anne Leivers at The Nottingham, who began her career at Marks & Spencer on a personnel graduate training programme. In 2001, Anne joined Boots UK as a HR Manager, a role she held for four years before becoming a HR Business Partner in 2006.  After five years in that role, Anne left Boots to join Rolls Royce Aero Engine Controls as a Senior HR Business Partner. In 2013, Anne spent time at Wincanton on an interim contract as Senior HR Business Partner before joining her current company, Nottingham Building Society as their Head of People and Development in February 2014. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? I was a retail graduate trainee with Marks & Spencer where I had the choice to pick a specialism and I chose personnel, as it was then called. Previously, I’d studied Business Studies which included people-related elements and organisational design modules. I found the organisational psychology elements really interesting and enjoyed learning about how people think and behave and how you get the best out of people.  From this I have built my career around my passion for helping people be their best and achieve their goals.  Since then I’ve done a wide variety of roles in HR, including 14 years at Boot UK. I’ve led and built teams, led the people workstreams in major change projects including redesigning organisations and people processes due to large scale business and technology changes.  The variety has kept me interested and for me, it’s always been about helping the business improve by making good people decisions.  After Boots, I spent a while at Rolls Royce and although it’s an iconic brand and an amazing company, I missed being close to customers in a service orientated business, which is why I moved to my current role in financial services. I fundamentally believe the relationship between manager and individual is the most important relationship and I don’t believe HR should get involved in the middle of that unless it’s absolutely necessary. For me, the job is about empowering leaders and managers and building their confidence to be the best they can for their people, not doing it for them. I’ve built a team and a people and development capability which seeks to engage and empower our leaders to build high quality teams to deliver their business goals. In addition I am privileged and proud to sponsor our CSR strategy here at The Nottingham. Our focus is to help communities thrive, and over the last year in light of all the challenges faced during and following the pandemic, we’ve been doing a lot in the employability space, working with young people and charities who help young people build better futures, especially those most at risk of being NEET (not in Education, Employment, or Training). We’ve developed our flagship Career Academy programme to support young people across our heartland communities and more widely to realise their career goals. Alongside this within our own organisation, we are reinvigorating our apprenticeship programme to provide more roles and opportunities for young people. I think it’s so important for us as a mutual and community-based organisation to focus on these really difficult social issues and it’s so rewarding to be able to help and support this work as well as it being very aligned to the people agenda.  Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?  The biggest challenge we have currently is talent, both recruiting and creating the right opportunities for talented people to grow. In financial services there’s some areas where we continue to see a shortage of skilled people, so there’s a challenge around attracting, engaging, motivating and retaining those individuals. One of the ways we’re seeking to address this is a focus on developing our employee value proposition (EVP) into something that engages and enthuses people about what it means to work for a mutual organisation that is purpose led. We want the best people to join us who share our mutual ethos and values and who are focused on ensuring we’re doing the right thing for members.  As a result of the pandemic people are being more thoughtful about where they work and what they do, so I think an organisation built on purpose, like The Nottingham, can be attractive because people want to be part of something that’s meaningful, not a company that’s simply out to maximise profits. Equally, the pandemic has also led to people reflecting on their working lives and we’ve seen more people move on from us than we would have wanted. We know we’re not the alone here and some might say ‘The Great Resignation’ movement has also resulted in talent coming through our doors too.  Just like every other business we’re grappling with the question, what does the future of work look like? Post-pandemic people have different expectations or work. For example, three years ago I’d never done a work Teams call, now they are the majority of my meetings. So how do you create the right balance for people? How do you make your office environment somewhere that people want to come to collaborate and have that sense of connection and belonging as well as offering flexibility to work remotely as well? For us we also have an additional challenge that we have many

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“Open your mind to the idea that you can gain the skills to be a great HRD by doing different things.” – Interview with Susan Martindale

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“If you’ve got the right skill set, behaviours and leadership competencies, you do not need to have a technical HR background to be a great HRD.” – Susan Martindale, Group HR Director at Mitchells & Butlers 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 Susan Martindale at Mitchells & Butlers Plc (M&B), who joined Bass plc as a graduate and has developed her career in marketing, procurement and operations before transitioning into HR. Susan rejoined M&B in 2000 as a Retail Operations Director, a role she held for eight years with responsibility across a number of brands before being promoted to Divisional Operations director.  Following a colleague’s retirement Susan moved from operations to become Purchasing Director in 2009. Susan’s career at M&B continued with a move into a Brand Operations Director role for All Bar One in 2011 and at the same time she held overall responsibility for leading the “Change Transformation programme” across the business as Project Director. It was after this successful project that Susan took on the role of Group HR Director, a position she has held since November 2012 . Since this time she had responsibility for various roles across other functions including returning to operations in mid 2018 to lead the Restaurant division as interim Divisional Director until Oct 2019 in addition to her HR responsibilities. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? I’ve been working for the same organisation, Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) since late 2000. My background at that time was essentially in marketing and procurement but in 2000 I moved into Operations, and I’ve now spent over a third of my career there. In 2011, the Chairman of M&B decided to embark on a transformation programme to ensure that the business remained in a strong position for future years, at the heart of that programme was a drive to achieve a real guest obsessed culture. I was approached to take on the role of director of the Transformation Programme, working for the Deputy Chairman. Due to my breadth of experience across the organisation the Board felt I had a strong understanding of the business and I’d be well placed to lead the transformation required, my experience meant I could understand what would resonate with both our Support Centre and our teams at the Frontline.  I started that role in September 2011 and six months into the programme it became evident that if we were to be successful in making the transformation stick once the project team disbanded, we would need a strong HR platform to help drive the culture of the business, build strong levels of engagement and support the business in becoming truly guest obsessed. Leading the transformation programme was a stepping stone for me in taking on the HRD role. From a technical point of view, I had no formal expertise in HR but I had a strong understanding of the business, and I had worked very closely with HR across my operations roles.  It was a steep learning curve around certain technical aspects of HR however I was fortunate to have a strong team around me. As a company we have 42,000 employees and there are c.200 people in HR covering all aspects from Operations, Culinary Skills, Shared Services, Learning & Development, Talent, Reward, Internal Communication and Recruitment. Centrally, I have five direct reports and a Head of People in the field for each of our four operating divisions who work directly for the Divisional Director whilst maintaining a strong dotted line to myself.  Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector? In the last six months M&B have faced the most severe challenges that I’ve witnessed in over 35 years in the sector. Supply chain and recruitment have been ongoing challenges, as well as the number of COVID outbreaks that we’ve had, and like others at times we have struggled to keep some of our businesses open.  If I distil that down into my key HR challenges at the moment, it would be recruitment, retention and developing talent. I think the pandemic has made a lot of people sit back and review what they want from life. We’ve seen a lot of people leave us from the front line to go into other sectors that don’t have such unsociable hours. We’ve also seen other businesses emerge that offer the same flexibility in working that we do, such as delivery and online shopping channels.  In terms of retention, it’s really about making sure that we continue to make M&B a great place to work and live our EVP. We are seeing a few green shoots in the sense that people are returning to us because hospitality is such a great place to work. It’s fun, and although it’s long hours there is no glass ceiling, you can start in pot washing and could end up on the Executive Committee, and I think we need to shout about that more as a sector.  The key levers underneath our EVP are flexibility, being a part of the M&B family, career development, the fantastic training we can supply and security. When we researched our EVP in 2014 we were quite surprised at how important security was to our employees, but if you think about it, many of our employees in 2014 would have seen their parents lose their jobs due to the 2008/9 recession. Coming through the pandemic, security is again important. We’ve really tried to look after our people, and we were fortunate that we were able to protect most jobs which was our key priority. As we enter 2022, we are still in recovery mode and focused on repositioning ourselves once again as the leading hospitality company in the UK. We’re

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Human: HR & Leadership Hackathon #9

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On March 30th we hosted our 9th Human HR & Leadership Hackathon, this time joined by a special guest speaker. We were joined by Paul McGregor, Founder and CEO of Everymind at Work and a great panel of HR Leaders. The discussion took place around mental health in the workplace and how to use digital technology to design and deliver better mental health support at work. You can watch the entire session here. PS: You can also find the schedule of our next Hackathons here. Make sure to register!

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“My advice is to keep your options open…Secondly, understand what the people in the business do.” – Interview with Lily Bissett

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“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

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“…understand yourself and what makes you want to be in HR” – Interview with Ajun Budda

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“HR shouldn’t be a rules, regulations, policies and procedures function. There is a cultural change needed to shift it to an enabling, agile function.” – Ajun Budda, Senior Interim HRBP at Nelipak Healthcare Packaging, 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 Ajun Budda who began his HR career after university working for a local council. In 1989, He joined Yorkshire Bank Retail Services as Head of Human Resources, a role he held for nine years before becoming General Manager in 1998. In 2002, Ajun joined Armstrong World Industries as General Manager HR EMEA and led the restructuring of their European Operations. In 2005, he moved to Lloyd’s Register EMEA where he spent five years as Head of HR EMEA. Ajun then joined a U.S. family owned manufacturing business called Fellowes Brands as European HR Director and worked there for nine years before leaving in 2019 for a career break. Ajun began his current position as Senior HRBP at Nelipak Healthcare Packaging in July 2021. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? In my final year at university, one of the results I received from a careers quiz was ‘personnel’. I remember very clearly discussing it with my university careers advisor who essentially said, don’t go into that because they always fill HR roles internally. He implied that HR was an area where people who couldn’t make it in the main business would end up. I thought, I’m not sure that’s quite right, I’m going to look into this further. After graduating, I got an opportunity with the West Midlands County Council, an organisation that was actually being abolished by the government. They sold it to me as a fantastic training ground since all kinds of HR issues would be coming up including redundancies, selective retention, recruitment and compensation issues. They sponsored me to do my CIPD part time and I jumped at the chance.  I knew very little about the HR profession before I joined so this role was formative for me. Some early advice I received was, “you won’t go far wrong if you treat people how you’d like to be treated yourself”. It stuck with me and my focus became how to keep a human touch, develop closer connections with our working population, and develop a progressive, not bureaucratic HR.  In my early career in the public sector, they sent us on any imaginable training course, so after a few years I was highly trained and felt ready to run things on my own. At age 25 I joined Yorkshire Bank Retail Services as their Head of Human Resources. The role involved a lot of restructuring, we reshaped the whole organisation and that was where my career in HR really took off.  I’ve followed a partnership approach my entire career. It’s not about replacing managers or taking over, it’s helping the business to do things better, it’s partnership not policing. HR has a struggle for its own identity sometimes, in terms of how it’s going to add value for the business. Sometimes it’s difficult to get the HR function to connect with the business’ main goal of, for example in manufacturing, getting product out of the door. There can be a danger that HR sits in the corner nursing behavioural sciences and things that seem irrelevant while the rest of the business gets on with it. So the first challenge in any role is establishing that connection and relevance between HR and the business.   Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?  I see three strategic priorities for our HR at the moment. Firstly, is talent management, acquisition, development and retention. The whole talent management team has become the business’ biggest strategic priority in a volatile & changing market. We recently had two excellent candidates interview for a product engineer position and while we were getting back to them, both accepted other roles. It’s a real candidate market which is great for them, but means that companies have to work so much harder to attract, recruit, develop and retrain their employees. I think that has major implications for how we do talent management. Some of the conventional wisdom needs to change, we need to be prepared to adjust existing remuneration structures and all sorts of things, but then, what does that do to the people you’ve already got retained? The second priority is improving the employee experience and trying to connect with them in a different way. We’ve recently changed what was a very harsh absence management policy into something that is much more balanced and employee centric. Within HR, my crusade is trying to reduce the low-value activities that keep us away from strategic work. That means trying to be as unbureaucratic as possible so we’re not placing obstacles in people’s way. For example, there used to be a policy where HR would attend every interview to “police” the managers in case they got it wrong. We don’t do that anymore. HR shouldn’t be a rules, regulations, policies and procedures function. There is a cultural change needed to shift it to an enabling, agile function.  My third strategic priority is trying to make the HR function more agile, more of a partnership with the business. We need to understand their needs so we can drive some of the agenda ourselves. Until recently, we had a real problem recruiting shift staff and were considering partnering with more recruitment agencies. Instead, we began working more closely with our sole agency, ensuring they had a very good understanding of what we were looking for. The result was great. We recruited 30 people at the end of 2021, in a market where other companies and locations are struggling to do that. Being

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“Senior HR leaders are responsible for advocating for our people.” – Interview with Rob Wagg

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“Senior HR leaders are responsible for advocating for our people. We have a responsibility and mandate to shape, mould and maintain the right culture. Peter Drucker’s famous quote, “culture eats strategy for breakfast” has never been truer.” – Rob Wagg, Practice Manager at Atkins, 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 Rob Wagg at Atkins, who joined the Royal Air Force in 1998 and served for over 22 years. In 2013, Rob became the HR and Security Director at the Ministry of Defence St Athan, later transitioning to the role of Chief Operating and People Officer at Royal Air Force Scampton.  In 2017, Rob took on the role of Senior Portfolio Leader, Royal Air Force Portfolio Office, a position he held for three years before leaving the Air Force and joining Atkins in 2020 as a Principal Consultant. In August 2021, Rob was promoted to his current position of Practice Manager. Can you tell us how you got into HR and why? When I reflect on the genesis of my career in HR, I look back to my childhood where I played a lot of sport and was captain of my football team. What I realised through that leadership responsibility was that I needed to interact differently with different people, partly to motivate them to turn up so we had enough players to play a game, but also to get the best out of them. I think that really started my love affair with people. People are my passion and I think that naturally flowed into HR.  I decided earlier than most that HR was what I wanted to do and joined the Air Force as a HR specialist aged 19. I enjoyed the interaction and the responsibility and I served for over 20 years. I resigned my commission in 2020 and joined Atkins where I’m truly privileged to lead a practice of over a hundred management consultants. I’ve held a number of different roles including chief operating officer and chair of a charity and I credit my HR background as being the foundation for my success in those roles and my current one. There is one standout moment that I reflect back on that reaffirms to me that I made the right decision by becoming a HR practitioner. I resolved quite a complex pay issue for one of our Royal Air Force technicians. He was from Scotland and we were based in Norfolk at the time. At the time, computer systems were still binary and it took me ages to calculate the pay issue manually but I was able to show that he was owed quite a lot of money.  I wrote the case up and the correction went through the next month. He came to see me and said, “I was really worried that I wasn’t going to be able to afford to travel home to Scotland to see my family at Christmas, but I can now I’ve got my backpay, so thank you.” That for me, typifies the people and HR leadership role and the influence that we have.  At the time I thought, I’m in the right type of role. The benefit he derived, versus the time I spent working out the calculations, was exponential. So I knew, absolutely, that this is the right thing for me because I felt like I was making a positive difference.  We mustn’t see our work as performing a function, I think we fulfil a moral obligation. We are the custodians of the psychological contract between our organisation and the people that enable it, and we influence at a human level. It’s a real privilege. Just saying that story back to you is giving me goosebumps even though it’s 20-odd years later.  Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?  From a purely personal perspective, one of the challenges I’m seeing in various sectors that is also prevalent in professional services is the war for talent as we emerge from COVID. Senior HR leaders are responsible for advocating for our people. We have a responsibility and mandate to shape, mould and maintain the right culture. Peter Drucker’s famous quote, “culture eats strategy for breakfast” has never been truer. Senior HR leaders determine benchmarks and set the package for our talent. If you look at generation Z and Alpha who are next to enter the workforce, their motivators are very different to the generations before. They’re not defined strictly by salary or wanting to stay with an organisation for 20 years. Organisations have to make sure that your social value policy, carbon net zero policy are not just policies but are truths that you live by, because it’s these that attract and retain the brightest talent, and senior people leaders are at the very front of that. I see a shift from the market holding the levers to the people. The second challenge is around equality, diversity and inclusion (ED&I) and people asking, why doesn’t the board look like me? Diversity is one of the greatest gifts in enabling creative and innovative solution finding and thinking. It’s so important. Movements like race equality week are essential to raising awareness and melting barriers. The future workforce, quite rightly, doesn’t see diversity as a set of metrics to strive for or benchmark against, they see it as the norm. Organisations that aren’t embracing diversity really stand out and can be perceived to lack credibility and appeal.  People are smart and they can see when companies aren’t being sincere in their efforts. Your culture reflects your policies. If there is any delta between the two, that’s when organisations can fail from the inside-out.  ED&I is right up there in terms of priorities at Atkins – it’s a really important

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