Head of Employee Relations in Hertfordshire

Senior Employee Relations Manager - UK&I

£(phone number removed) + bonus + LTIP + benefits

High-profile, multi-site consumer organisation

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

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 mandate

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.

Developing that team, technically, commercially and as future talent for the wider People function will be an important part of your leadership contribution.

But this role extends considerably beyond leading an ER team.

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.

You will therefore shape 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.

Where specialist ER expertise is required, the function must provide high-quality, consistent and commercially pragmatic support. But equally, you will challenge unnecessary escalation and help leaders understand where accountability properly sits with them.

Ultimately, success means leaving behind better managers, not simply a busier ER function.

This reflects a central requirement of the formal mandate: developing line-manager understanding of employment law, policy and ER practice to improve consistency and ultimately increase manager accountability.

Employee & Industrial Relations

You will set the ER and IR agenda across a complex UK&I organisation encompassing multi-site operations, supply chain and Head Office populations.

You will provide leadership across trade union and employee forum relationships, ensuring the organisation takes a proactive rather than reactive approach to Industrial Relations.

With dedicated IR expertise within your team, you do not need to personally be the answer to every question. You do, however, need the technical credibility and experience to lead the agenda, challenge appropriately, anticipate risk and provide sound judgement when situations become complex.

You will also retain 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.

The formal remit includes responsibility for proactive trade union and Employee Forum relationships, as well as leadership of escalated complex cases and tribunals.

Creating something new

One of the most exciting dimensions of this appointment sits beyond the organisation’s directly employed population.

The business operates alongside an extensive network of independently operated businesses, and there is now an opportunity to consider:

How can the ER capability and expertise that has been developed centrally be used to help that wider network become even better employers?

You will play a leading role in answering that question.

The opportunity is to create a practical, scalable and commercially relevant ER proposition and toolkit that provides meaningful support without creating inappropriate dependency.

That may encompass employment-law updates, manager guidance, toolkits, learning interventions, best-practice frameworks, insights and other solutions that help independent businesses navigate increasingly complex employment legislation while also protecting the reputation and standards of the wider brand.

With significant employment-law change ahead, this will require somebody who can take complexity and make it simple, useful and actionable.

The formal brief specifically identifies supporting this wider network through the Employment Rights Act and other employment changes as a key priority.

Engagement, insight and change

Your remit also includes the organisation’s colleague engagement agenda, including responsibility for a new engagement system and programme.

The expectation goes considerably further than implementing a platform or running an annual survey.

You will use colleague insight to understand what is happening across different parts of the organisation, identify themes and translate that intelligence into meaningful action.

Similarly, you will continue to develop the organisation’s ER dashboard and insight capability, using data to identify emerging risk, patterns and opportunities for targeted capability interventions.

You will contribute to significant organisational projects and change programmes, ensuring ER considerations are understood early and that implementation balances commercial objectives, employee experience and organisational risk.

You will also continue to evolve 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.

These are substantive elements of the role rather than peripheral responsibilities: the formal mandate includes engagement strategy, Employee Forums, colleague surveys, organisational projects, policy development and ER analytics.

Who are we looking for?

Degree educated and with L7 HR qualifications

We are deliberately keeping the sector background relatively broad.

You may currently be a Head of Employee Relations, Head of ER/IR, Senior Employee Relations Manager or operating at an equivalent level within a substantial organisation.

What matters more is the complexity and breadth of environment in which you have operated.

Your experience is likely to have been developed within sectors such as retail, manufacturing, FMCG, logistics, distribution, supply chain or another large-scale, operationally intensive consumer environment.

Critically, you must understand both sides of an organisation.

You will have worked successfully with operational, frontline and blue-collar employee populations across multiple sites, while also possessing the credibility and sophistication to operate within Head Office and white-collar environments and influence at executive level.

Candidates whose careers have been almost exclusively corporate/Head Office are unlikely to have experienced the operational complexity this role demands. Equally, highly operational ER experience without evidence of strategic and senior stakeholder capability will not be enough.

We are looking for the combination.

You are likely to bring:

- Significant ER leadership experience within a complex, multi-site organisation, with strong employment-law expertise and meaningful Industrial Relations/trade union exposure.

- Experience across both operational and corporate employee populations, ideally incorporating supply chain, logistics, manufacturing, retail or similarly complex environments.

- Evidence that you can set strategy and execute it, comfortable shaping the longer-term agenda without losing your appetite for operational delivery.

- A track record of developing high-performing ER teams and, ideally, creating talent that progresses into broader People roles.

- Demonstrable experience of improving line-manager capability and accountability, rather than creating dependency on HR.

- Strong judgement around complex ER matters, tribunals, litigation, ACAS and the wider employment-law framework.

- The commercial acumen to balance legal, employee, reputational and operational considerations and reach pragmatic decisions.

- Experience of organisational change and significant projects requiring ER leadership.

- Strong analytical capability and the ability to convert ER and engagement data into targeted interventions.

- The presence to influence, challenge and coach senior stakeholders while remaining credible with operational leaders and frontline populations.

- High emotional intelligence, resilience and the ability to navigate sensitive or ambiguous situations.

- The ability to take organisational strategy, operational requirements and the external employment agenda and translate them into solutions that are clear, practical and easy to understand.

That final capability is specifically identified in the formal person specification, alongside strong leadership, emotional intelligence, analytical capability, commercial judgement and senior influencing skills.

The individual

Technical credibility matters, but it won't be enough.

We are looking for someone curious, commercial, ambitious and low-ego. Someone who can operate strategically without becoming detached from the operation.

You may spend one day shaping long-term ER/IR strategy with senior leaders and another getting underneath an operational issue that isn't being resolved quickly enough. You will be comfortable with both.

You'll know when to coach rather than tell; when to challenge rather than accommodate; when something should remain with the line manager; and when an issue genuinely requires senior ER intervention.

You will inherit a function with credibility and good foundations. The challenge is not to prove yourself by dismantling what already works. It is to understand it, earn trust quickly and then identify where you can make it even better.

For someone with the ambition to progress further in their People career, this provides unusual breadth: ER, IR, engagement, policy, organisational capability, senior stakeholder influence, operational complexity and exposure to a distinctive business model.

It is a role with visibility, substance and room to make a genuine organisational impact.

To apply please email your CV