People Partner

We're looking for a commercially focused People Partner to support M+C Saatchi's Shared Services functions and UK Specialisms. This is a permanent role that will report into the UK Senior People Partner, whilst working on a day-to-day basis with the Senior Leaders of the Shared Services function and the UK Specialisms.

This is a full-time position (5 days per week) based in London on a hybrid working basis, with a minimum of 3 days in the office a week.

About the Role:

This role is a fantastic opportunity to be part of an ambitious and energised People team. This is a varied and multifaceted role, which will execute on several core processes and projects that support the delivery of global people strategy. This role will work closely with the UK Senior People Partner, the Shared Services leadership team, UK Specialisms leadership team, Senior People Partner and People Partner.

What you'll do:

Delivery of the Global People Strategy:

• Feed specific insights from your business areas into broader global and regional People strategies.

• Ensure the plan works in alignment with the UK Group People Strategy, and other local regional People plans where applicable.

• Feed specific insights from your business areas into broader Group and regional People strategies.

• Define a detailed plan of delivery against key initiatives and execute upon the plan, working collaboratively with the UK Group People Team and regional People roles, where applicable, to ensure connectivity, avoid duplication and leverage work underway.

• Comfortably wear multiple hats, knowing how to leverage the best of group initiatives for your business areas.

• Creating and leading bespoke plans, where necessary, to address specific individual challenges for your business areas.

Proactive Partnership + Counsel:

• Provide thought leadership and counsel around People related thinking and plans.

• Regularly share people data, insights, employee sentiments and emergent trends in HR with leaders to drive better people decisions.

• Be a voice of advocacy on People topics in the business, ensuring the impact of all decisions is considered through the lens of employee experience.

Manager and Leadership Coaching:

• Have coaching conversations with leadership and managers, on people issues to support their individual development journey towards becoming exceptional leaders of people.

• Challenge or hold up a mirror where greater understanding is required and role model providing honest feedback to encourage an open, learning culture.

• Support the business leaders in ensuring each member of the business' leadership team has specific commitments relating to their demonstration of behaviours that support the cultural vision.

• Leadership effectiveness and personal contribution towards the delivery of the People Strategy across Shared Services, supporting the delivery within the UK Specialisms.

Performance + Talent Management:

• Work with the Talent Acquisition Team to futureproof the business by ensuring internal and external talent attraction plans are aligned with client groups' workforce plans and needs.

• Own the coordination of our performance management process across the UK. Ensure proactive communications to ensure employees have clear and measurable objectives, are receiving regular feedback and performance reviews from their line managers.

• Track compliance around performance management and create useful insights and metrics in relation to performance ratings to feed into individual talent decisions.

• Attend key performance and talent management meetings and help prepare content and slides and summarise key takeaways e.g. performance calibration meetings. Maintain overall performance and talent management data and records.

• Provide managers with first line guidance and support on questions relating to performance and talent management.

• Support managers and the UK Senior People Partner in addressing performance issues, including implementing Get on Track plans (informal and formal).

• To work with People Operations, to own the regular creation of insightful, accurate and up-to-date HR management reports that support business and HR decision making e.g. Gender Pay Gap, attrition and exit data reports.

People Advisory Support (Employee Relations):

• Act as the go-to person on all employee relations (ER) and individual matters, providing on the spot advice and signposting to additional support where needed (performance improvement plans – formal and informal, grievances, disciplinaries, flexible working requests to name a few) acting as a trusted partner to employees and management, fostering a positive and inclusive work environment.

• Coordinate the execution of DSAR requests working closely with IT to confirm the search parameters and ensuring all requests are met in a timely and compliant fashion. We will provide training in this area.

• Escalate any high-risk ER matters to the UK Senior People Partner.

• Support Senior People Partners in the UK with the coordination of ER case management. Practically this means attending meetings to take notes, and managing an ER case tracker, extracting key metrics and insights to enhance our understanding of ER cases.

• Lead or support on restructures, redundancies and TUPE projects.

• Ensure there is a safe space for colleagues to confidentially share concerns, support them in resolving issues early, and in doing so, mitigate the creation of formal ER issues where possible.

• Draw on specialist expertise from our external legal counsel (Halborns) and the Senior People Partners and support on the upskilling of managers across the client groups to be more self-sufficient, when managing people related matters.

People Operations:

• Partner with the UK Group and regionally specific People Operations to ensure seamless delivery of HR processes and group standards into the client groups.

• Be an advocate for our HRIS (Work Day) and ensure that managers and employees are utilising the self-service functionality – this will include coaching and training on certain Work Day processes, as well as signposting managers and employees to training guides and how to videos on our internal intranet, Huddle.

• Ensure that Work Day data for your business areas is accurate.

Onboarding:

• Manage and coordinate the delivery of the People section of Hello, our onboarding programme in the UK for all new joiners.

• Act as ongoing point of contact for new joiners in the UK in their first 3 months.

• Provide guidance to new joiners on their three-month probation review including training, documents and coaching. Be a point of contact to support any emerging poor performance issues during probation for both employees and managers.

Wellbeing, Diversity + Inclusion:

• Support the UK Senior People Partner with driving initiatives aimed at enhancing employee wellbeing including our Self Space 1;1 therapy programme and regular workshops.

• Play a key role in the coordination and logistics of local DE&I plans, including helping to set up regular ELNs (Employee Led Networks) meetings and other events aimed at building our employee culture.

People Projects + Other Tasks:

• Take a leading role in delivering against M+C Group initiative’s that will have an impact in key strategic priority areas such as DE+I or Wellbeing.

• Take ownership in either the delivery or supporting the delivery of projects for your business areas. Projects to be agreed with the UK Senior People Partner.

• Naturally as with all roles there will be some administrative aspect to this role. Typically, we’d expect this role to coordinate and see through tasks such as raising PO’s, insuring inter-company cross-charges for external invoices e.g. legal fees, occupational health referrals and so on.

About You:

Given the impact this role will have on the People offering across our Shared Services function and UK Specialism teams, we're looking for someone with a stellar mix of relevant experience and skills.

What you'll bring:

Credible, Commercial People Partner:

• Demonstrable experience of designing and delivering a People plan that supports key business priorities and metric and delivers change. You will have significant experience in a People Partner or related role where you have driven material change and impact to your client group or business.

• Ideally, you have worked within a fast-paced organisation and supported a business through transformation. Ideally, you will have worked in communications, media, professional services or technology industry so you understand how to hit the ground running and can share progressive HR best practice - although this is not essential.

• Prior experience working amid commercial pressures a business and its clients are facing and adapting plans with agility to support that.

• Ability to build trusted relationships and demonstrate expertise across a broad spectrum of technical HR topics including Employee Relations, Talent Development, Reward, DE+I and People Operations.

• Skilled at using your voice and insight in a compelling way to influence and drive forward progress. Comfortable leveraging business financials, data, and insight to add weight to discussions.

Collaborative Thinker + Operator:

• A track record of delivering impact in a complex, global and matrix organization.

• Collaborative and adept at navigating the complexity and ambiguity inherent in operating across different markets with varying local customs and legal frameworks, and across a variety of different teams in other regions.

Quality Communicator:

• An eye for precision and acute attention to detail in all communications.

• You can distil ambiguous ideas and thoughts into succinct, clear, and beautiful communications, and articulate proposals and narratives that create clarity and understanding for the reader and audience.

• Highly skilled on PowerPoint, Excel and Word, your business copy is elegant and engaging and you're comfortable with presentations with an appetite to be a fabulous facilitator.

Exceptional at Delivering Change:

• Delivery is enabled by the ease at which you plan in detail and anticipate the work required.

• You are meticulous in carving out a clear pathway for progress whilst being agile and responsive to changes and blockers on the way.

• You are diligent in reporting on progress and outcomes, and work tirelessly to keep everyone fully up to speed and engaged and ensure nobody gets left behind.

Resilient Multi-Tasker:

• You enjoy the challenge of juggling several projects and challenges at the same time and can identify priorities and switch focus with ease.

• No task is too big or too small, and you will willingly roll your sleeves up to immerse in what needs to be done to create the right People experience.

• You work well under pressure, remaining focused and tenacious, and thrive in a fast-paced, environment.

WHAT YOU'LL GET:

ABOUT M+C SAATCHI GROUP

M+C Saatchi Group is a creative solutions company that connects specialist expertise, fuelled by data, technology, and culture, to help clients navigate, create, and lead meaningful change. The Group operates across five core divisions: Connected Creativity; Passion Marketing; Global & Social Issues; Brand, Experience & Innovation; and Performance Media. Headquartered in London, operations span 23 countries with major hubs in the UK, Europe, US, Middle East & Africa, Asia and Australia. M+C Saatchi Group’s two principles, Diversity of Thought and Brutal Simplicity of Thought, guide how they build teams and solve problems.

M+C Saatchi Group is an Equal Opportunity Employer which does not discriminate, celebrates diversity and bases all hiring and promotion decisions solely on talent and capability, without regard for any personal characteristics.

All employee information is kept confidential according to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

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