Blog

“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