Lead People Advisor, Implementation at British Council

Role Purpose - The Job

• The Lead People Advisor will support the People Solutions Implementation Lead through the delivery of legally and culturally compliant advice and guidance, across the broad spectrum of People function activity, to support the implementation of the global change programme.
• This role will ensure the proactive management and mitigation of legal and operational risk relating to Human Resources, including adherence and advice on policies and processes and coaching and guidance for line managers to enable early resolution of workplace conflict and grievances.

Main Accountabilities
Leadership & management:

• Provide people solutions to support the implementation of business change plans across the regions. Work in partnership with people business partners to support local management to identify the people implications of their change plans across defined organisational areas, providing local insight relating to market conditions, legal context, etc.
• Lead the team of geographically dispersed Advisors responsible for providing expertise, advice and specialist support, building the capacity and capability required to deliver the agreed services. 

Relationship & stakeholder management:

• Manage the relationship with key stakeholders and develop an in-depth knowledge of the businesses and their change plans and the culture being driven in order to advise on people implications of the business plans.
• Work with Hub Lead Advisors, to support workstreams in managing Union /legal relationships with the Country Directions.
• Manage the relationship with the People Solutions and ER teams within the hub to support the implementation, and with relevant resources with People Experience and Insight to ensure consistent use of frameworks and processes.

Subject Expertise:

• Apply advanced HR functional knowledge to solve a range of complex business issues across the regions; including the use of relevant people data.
• Support understanding of complex problems and enable informed business-planning and decision-making through the change programme by providing relevant local knowledge and insight.
• Manage ER cases related to the change programmes and use standard methodologies and frameworks to drive consistency across the team. Work with ER /caseworkers where necessary.
• Build management capability through delivery of advisory services that build management confidence to address people-related challenges and encourages early resolution in the case of workplace conflict.

Service improvement:

• Takes an employee centric and service focused approach to the delivery of Advisory Services.
• Actively champion and review organisational compliance with policies and practices within the change programme, understanding reasons for non-compliance and making recommendations to address this.

Strategy and Planning:

• Feeds into the development of the PS plans to support the implementation of change

Requirements Of The Role
Minimum / essential:

• Experience of leading a geographically dispersed team delivering People function solutions across multiple geographies and time zones
• Demonstrable experience of working at a senior level with a People function team, and understanding of and ability to use, core HR policies and processes within a legal context
• Experience of working within external legal providers and internal CoEs, in particular, Employee Relations

Desirable:

• HR qualification (MA/MSC or CIPD or equivalent)