Employee Relations Manager

Location: North East or Bedfordshire

Working pattern: Hybrid following an initial onboarding period

Hours: Full-time, 37.5 hours per week – flexible to meet the needs of the role

The Opportunity

We’re working with a large, growing UK organisation looking to appoint a number of experienced Employee Relations Managers as they continue to strengthen and develop their ER function.

This is a busy, fast-paced role where resilience, strong people management and excellent organisation skills and time management will be key. You’ll lead a team of ER professionals working across multiple areas of the business, providing direction, coaching and support while also maintaining oversight of more complex and higher-risk employee relations matters.

The priority is strong supportive leadership, coaching and stability and helping a mix of established and new team members, to become more confident, consistent, proactive and high performing.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Leading and managing a team of approximately 4 ER Advisors and ER Assistants.
• Providing regular coaching, support and development to the team without becoming the person they rely on for every decision.
• Helping Advisors develop the confidence and technical skills to self-manage cases and make appropriate decisions.
• Managing workloads and priorities across a high-volume, fast-moving ER environment.
• Overseeing complex and higher-risk employee relations cases where escalation is required.
• Supporting with disciplinary, grievance, absence, performance, redundancy and organisational change matters.
• Managing and advising on TUPE transfers both in and out of the organisation.
• Supporting restructuring and workforce change following acquisitions or changes in business requirements.
• Providing advice around consultation processes and wider organisational change.
• Supporting more complex industrial and employee relations matters involving trade union activity.
• Reviewing casework and introducing a stronger quality and audit approach across the ER function.
• Identifying trends, recurring issues and areas of risk rather than operating purely reactively.
• Using ER data and management information to help identify themes and improve decision making.
• Supporting Employment Tribunal preparation, ACAS matters and complex employee data requests where required.
• Helping ensure the ER function provides commercially sensible advice while remaining legally compliant.
• Supporting the business as it continues to develop its HR technology and move away from heavily spreadsheet-based processes.
• Working closely with senior HR colleagues across the wider People & Culture specialisms and operational leaders across different business areas to collaborate and leverage appropriate solutions to people related opportunities.
• Contributing to wider HR projects and continuous improvement activity.