People Business Partner - Technology and Finance (Maternity Cover) in London

We’re the feel-good fashion brand making style accessible and fun for over 55 years, on our website, mobile app and over 300 stores in the UK. By living our values - we play to win, customer obsessed, we are one and it starts with me - we deliver That New Look Feeling for our customers and each other.

THE ROLE:

We are looking for an experienced People Business Partner to cover a maternity leave, looking after our Technology, Finance and Legal teams. Experience in Tech is a must for this role. This role will need to come into our London office twice a week. The People BP is a true strategic partner to multiple functional areas, with a true sense of purpose in delivering the vision for people at New Look. As a PBP, you’ll work closely alongside your customers, understanding their business area, and developing and delivering a people plan that supports their strategy, whilst also contributing to the delivery of the broader people plan at New Look.

Providing trusted partnership to your functional directors and heads of department, you’ll understand business performance measures and identify how you can strategically support, influence and drive this. Your customer will look to you as the expert in thought leadership, coaching, and driving business performance through people. You’ll be instrumental in driving business change and ensuring your customers have an organisational structure fit for purpose. You’ll embed our talent agenda and deliver effective workforce planning to ensure our customers have the resource they need. You will support the wider business vision by helping build and embed a culture of engaged and high performing teams, that places the people experience at the heart of what we do. Working closely alongside the Senior People Business Partner and a team of PBPs, you’ll drive a high-performance culture, through delivery on key projects that not only move your business area forward, but that positively impact people on a macro level across the support centres.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU:

• 40% staff discount plus friends & family discounts throughout the year
• Access to our reward platform for external discount and offers
• Private pension scheme
• Profit related bonus scheme
• Option to join our Healthcare Private Medical Scheme
• Virtual GP access for you and your children – it allows you to speak to a doctor at a time and date that suits you
• All employees are covered by our life assurance policy from day one
• Unlock extra leave with our buy more holiday scheme.
• Celebrate YOU! Enjoy an extra paid day off on your birthday each year
• Spread the cost of your commute with interest-free season ticket loans
• Do your bit for the environment and save money with our Cycle2Work scheme

WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING:

• Business Partner Functional Directors/Heads of
• You are a true strategic partner to your stakeholders, working hard to build great partnerships and always striving to add value
• You’re customer centric, and anticipate your customers immediate, short, and long-term needs
• You’re a technical expert, with a strong depth of knowledge; able to confidently provide robust, trusted counsel to your stakeholders, but with the confidence to constructively challenge and influence them
• You engage your leadership teams on the importance of delivering the people strategy, and of adopting a people first mindset
• You’re commercially savvy, and you’ll take the time to understand your business areas roles and responsibilities, so you can best support them
• You’ll utilise data and reporting to discern insights and identify trends, which you’ll then incorporate into your people plan as appropriate. You’ll also utilise this to challenge and influence your business areas as appropriate
• Attracting and developing talent for tomorrow
• You’ll help build and develop, diverse, high performing teams by delivering a robust and seamless talent process that identifies gaps, and supports development and succession planning, moving our talent through the business, and future proofing our roles
• You’ll work alongside your stakeholders and L&D to ensure we anticipate talent requirements and have identified relevant talent interventions to support
• You’ll deliver consistent calibration of our talent across your areas, to help us develop our teams, and to understand our talent gaps
• You’ll work alongside your stakeholders and our talent attraction team to ensure that we have great talent pipelines, and that when we recruit externally, we’re able to secure the best talent in the market
• Driving Performance and Supporting Organisational Change
• Role model an effective performance management culture, educating your customer on how to link that to a reward framework with realistic objectives and business measures
• Ability to constructively challenge and influence proposals for organisational change in order to drive a high-performance culture and to enable a structure that is right for your business area
• Further support organisational change through the implementation of new structures, ways of working, changes to reward and benefit policies and skills development
• During transitions of change you will act as a positive role model, coaching your customer through the change cycle
• Employee Relations
• You’ll be highly capable and knowledgeable at supporting in ER issues (disciplinary, grievance, appeals performance management and redundancy situations).
• Working in partnership with ER, you’ll apply this knowledge to advise, coach and guide Directors and Heads of in more complex ER cases, to help mitigate risk to the business
• Through data and reporting, you’ll identify key trends and drivers of ER activity, utilising this to provide focuses or support policy review as appropriate
• You’ll stay up to date with employment law developments
• Engagement and Culture
• You’re an employee champion, and you’ll help drive a great people first culture, that prioritises values and behaviours from the top down
• In addition, you’ll lead on engagement activities that ensure our employees have a voice and clear platforms through which to express this
• You’ll be the conscience, that challenges your directors and heads of, to ensure feedback is translated into clear actions that move engagement forward
• You’ll role model our rewards and recognition scheme, coaching your customers to appreciate the intrinsic link between people and performance
• Promotes equity, diversity and inclusion across the business
• Centres of Excellence
• Building effective relationships with our centres of excellence, including ER, HR Operations, Rewards, Talent Attraction, L&D etc.
• Working closely alongside them to support the delivery of your people plan alongside the broader New Look people plan
• Helping deliver the best possible service for your client groups

WHO YOU ARE:

• Strategic leader with proven track record of partnering and influencing senior C suite level stakeholders
• Open, honest, transparent, and role models great behaviour
• CIPD qualified preferred
• Commercial acumen
• Planning and prioritisation
• Change management expert
• Comfortable in dealing with conflict and ambiguity
• High level of emotional intelligence to effectively support, challenge and coach
• Can walk the talk and understands and has worked with different leadership theories and practices
• Thorough understanding of UK employment law
• Experienced and familiar with Technology as a business area

WHY NEW LOOK?

We care about you and the planet and believe fashion should be a force for positive change. We celebrate inclusion and diversity in everything we do. We’re proud of our inclusive culture and our talented team members who embrace our shared purpose, behaviours and values. We prioritise development, offering training to support your progression, so you can be your absolute best and achieve your goals. We pride ourselves on being a flexible employer, our colleagues work a range of patterns. If you have a specific pattern in mind, we're keen to discuss this with you in line with the output needed for the role.