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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