The HR Heads Career Profile Series… we speak with HR professionals within our network to find out what a typical day in the office looks like, what they consider their greatest career success to be, what advice they’d give their 20 years’ old self and explore some of their favourite things.
When I joined, the team had gone through significant change and engagement was sitting at around 79%. My brief was to significantly impact upon business performance, our customer experience (internally and externally) and re-engage the team. By osmosis I have introduced a number of changes throughout the year within the team and into the business. Our latest engagement score in the team was 92%; and we’ve delivered projects in record time which has certainly paid off.
What does your typical day look like?
My day starts at 5.30am when I tend to exercise which allows me to clear my head before I start the working day. I certainly think about the day ahead on my drive into work. I arrive into the office at 8.30am and get some time at my desk and then it will be straight into meetings for the day. There is a lot of organising due to the amount of change we are currently going through. My role consists of sharing the vision with my team and other members of the senior leadership team to coach and ensure consistency of messaging. Lots of the work we are doing is about changing reward and aligning this to high performance, so thinking less as an HR team and more as a people performance team is key.
What do you both love and find frustrating in your role?
In any role there are always the bits you love and hate. I love my team so in the year I have worked here I have really enjoyed changing and developing the team in a different way. I have 20 people in my team across all disciplines and we have re-branded the team instead of restructuring.
The thing that frustrates me the most is ensuring the team get heard. The opinion of HR generally has notoriously been reactive and not business focus….. The way we have got round that is to bring our evidence to the forefront instead of bringing knowledge, qualifications or employment law to the table. It’s giving the rationale behind the decision and even though it’s not our decision to make, we give the evidence as to why you should do it this way.
Click here to read the full article…http://www.hrheads.co.uk/blog/big-interview-oliver-anderson/
