Senior Employee Relations Manager - UK&I

£80-100,000 + bonus + LTIP + benefits

High-profile, multi-site consumer organisation

Location: Remote with minimum one day a week in head office (Northern Home Counties)

About the Role

There are Employee Relations roles that manage complexity. And there are roles that give you the opportunity to change how an organisation manages its people. This is the latter.

We are partnering with a major UK&I consumer organisation to appoint a Senior (Head of) Employee Relations Manager into a highly visible leadership role with a breadth of remit that would readily be recognised as Head of Employee Relations in many businesses. This is not a turnaround and it is not a blank sheet of paper.

Over the last couple of years, a credible and respected Employee Relations function has been built and embedded across the organisation. A specialist team is in place, relationships have been established with operational and senior leadership teams, and ER has earned its position as an important business partner.

The opportunity now is to take that platform and determine what comes next. For an ambitious ER leader, this offers a compelling combination: strategic ownership, operational complexity, Industrial Relations, leadership development, colleague engagement, employment policy and the opportunity to build an entirely new ER proposition for a significant wider business network.

You will operate at senior leadership level, but remain close enough to the organisation to understand what is really happening. This is emphatically not a “that’s not my job” environment.

The Role

You will lead the development and delivery of the organisation’s end-to-end Employee and Industrial Relations strategy, ensuring it supports the wider People Strategy and responds to a rapidly changing external employment landscape. You will inherit an established specialist team and a function with strong foundations. Your challenge will be to build on that success rather than unnecessarily reinvent it.

Key Responsibilities

• Developing that team, technically, commercially and as future talent for the wider People function will be an important part of your leadership contribution.
• Building genuine leadership capability. A significant priority will be continuing to shift appropriate people ownership back to line managers. The ambition is not to create greater dependency on Employee Relations. It is to develop leaders who have the confidence, capability and judgement to manage their people well.
• Shaping the frameworks, tools, coaching and interventions that enable first- and second-line managers to deal effectively with everyday people matters such as absence, conduct, performance and capability.
• Providing high-quality, consistent and commercially pragmatic support where specialist ER expertise is required, but equally, challenging unnecessary escalation and helping leaders understand where accountability properly sits with them.
• Setting the ER and IR agenda across a complex UK&I organisation encompassing multi-site operations, supply chain and Head Office populations.
• Providing leadership across trade union and employee forum relationships, ensuring the organisation takes a proactive rather than reactive approach to Industrial Relations.
• Retaining oversight of escalated and sensitive ER matters, including complex cases, litigation and Employment Tribunals, working effectively with both your internal specialists and external legal partners.
• Playing a leading role in creating a practical, scalable and commercially relevant ER proposition and toolkit that provides meaningful support without creating inappropriate dependency for the wider network of independently operated businesses.
• Using colleague insight to understand what is happening across different parts of the organisation, identify themes and translate that intelligence into meaningful action.
• Developing the organisation’s ER dashboard and insight capability, using data to identify emerging risk, patterns and opportunities for targeted capability interventions.
• Contributing to significant organisational projects and change programmes, ensuring ER considerations are understood early and that implementation balances commercial objectives, employee experience and organisational risk.
• Evolving the HR policy framework, using external benchmarking and emerging best practice to ensure policies remain relevant, engaging and easy for managers and colleagues to navigate.