With new leadership, a refreshed strategy and plans for growth, we are looking for a dynamic Head of People to play a key role in shaping the next phase of our evolution. As an employee owned professional services business, our people remain our greatest asset. To realise our ambitions, we must strengthen our commercial focus, accelerate performance and embed a culture that enables both individual and organisational success.

As a member of the Leadership Team, you will lead the people agenda through a period of transformation, ensuring our culture, management capability and talent practices support the delivery of our strategic objectives. You will provide strategic counsel to the leadership team, while remaining close enough to the detail to drive execution and deliver tangible business outcomes. This is an opportunity to influence lasting change, balancing our people first ethos with the commercial disciplines required to build a high performing organisation.

Responsibilities

• Work with the Leadership Team and support the Main Board and Trust Board to develop and implement a People strategy to support our growing employee owned business, across all touchpoints of the employee lifecycle, but with a particular focus on culture, management development, performance management, talent and retention
• Oversee operational HR Delivery including employee queries and ER support. Advise, coach and support management to effectively manage performance, development and wellbeing in line with, policy and best practice
• Drive workforce planning to adequately resource and support the business growth
• Enhance employee experience, engagement and wellbeing through the delivery of key people initiatives, fostering the healthy culture of an employee owned business.
• Work alongside Marketing to build a compelling employer brand to attract the best talent and support the ongoing growth of the business
• Provide strategic direction on learning and development programs to build capability
• Embed our updated performance management framework to enable the measurement of performance, engage staff in development and reward strong performance
• Responsible for benchmarking renumeration and benefits, providing the insight through data analytics and proposing on an annual remuneration strategy
• Evolve and enhance people policies that support the people strategy, embody the culture of the company, employee ownership and support decision making
• Develop HR metrics and oversee regular HR reporting that is informative and useful to support key business decisions but also drive attention and focus to the right places

Skills, Knowledge and Experience

• Senior level HR experience with a strong track-record of delivering strategic and operational HR, ideally in professional service or technical business
• Degree educated, ideally within HR but business degree with CIPD qualification also considered
• Strong generalist HR content knowledge across performance management, engagement, talent, culture and development in particular.Experience of employee ownership is an advantage.
• Strategic thinker who can translate the bigger picture into operational plans with clear deliverables and value add
• Experience working with senior leaders and gaining buy in across all levels of the organisation – builds strong relationships based on credibility and trust
• High levels of emotional intelligence
• Experience of developing and delivering HR Projects & initiatives – strong strategic thinking coupled with good project management skills and a proven ability to execute
• Ability to work in a fast paced environment, working with competing priorities and under pressure
• Strong work ethic and self-starter, able to take own initiative and work under own direction
• Able to make challenging decisions with a fair, responsible, ethical and commercially sound approach
• Versatile and action oriented, gets stuff done, building process and infrastructure along the way
• Confident and effective communicator, able to engage and influence staff at all levels of the organisation, understanding that as an employee owned business you are answerable to all employee owners.
• Proven track record of building successful team cultures
• Able to think creatively and innovatively, knowing what fits the business and culture and nurturing the characteristics of employee owned business.
• Strong presentation skills, verbal and written
• Sound understanding of HR technology and how this can be utilised to improve performance, process and engagement 

Cambridge Design Partnership (CDP) is an end-to-end innovation partner, propelling global brands and ambitious start-ups to success. We build breakthrough products and services – from insight to ideas, prototypes to production – bringing innovation to life. Our teams are multi-disciplinary, uniting scientific rigor, design ingenuity, and engineering excellence for consumer and healthcare clients. People-centred, deeply collaborative, and – above all – expert, we’re uniquely positioned to shape the future for consumers, patients, and industry. Even our ownership model is innovative: We’re 100% owned by our employees, ensuring an open culture and a total commitment to our projects’ success. As part of our benefits package, we offer:

• flexible working
• a discretionary bonus
• excellent learning and development opportunities
• a 12% non-contributory pension
• private healthcare
• electric vehicle lease salary sacrifice scheme
• share incentive plan
• 33 days holiday inclusive of bank holidays