HR ER & Policy Manager

The HR ER & Policy Manager enables the success of the organisational strategy by ensuring that our employment policies and guidance reflect the changing landscape of employment law and empower our managers to easily understand and apply the policies and practice in a constantly evolving work landscape in formats that are accessible to everyone.

This role identifies, designs, and delivers innovative employment policies and guidance ensuring successful implementation and integration. It plays a crucial role in supporting the execution and delivery of the organisational strategy and underlying people strategies to include the people plan.

This role is key in building and enhancing the workforce capacity and ability by ensuring that leaders, managers, and employees are aware of and continually develop their understanding of their responsibilities in the employment relationship. It plays a crucial role in ensuring risks are effectively identified, managed, and mitigated which requires a balance of pragmatism with an understanding of leading-edge (digital) people management policy approaches, an up-to-date knowledge of emerging employment law issues and deep professional insight.

This role requires effective collaboration across HR and the entire organisation, working closely with the Business Partners and HR Officers to ensure the successful development and integration of people practices into our systems, structures, processes and behaviours.

• Contribute to high level research and analysis, to ensure that our employment policies and practice are continuously improved and evolve to support SBC in achieving its organisational strategy.
• Lead the HR Service Centre (Astro) to deliver to Service level agreements driving performance and capability across the council.
• Proactively respond to forthcoming legislation changes, undertaking discovery work to identify the impact of the change, ensuring risk is mitigated through the compliance of statutory obligations and effective communication and stakeholder engagement.
• Actively participate in the sharing and building of knowledge across the HR community and wider organisation including the provision of workshops and training for HR colleagues and managers as well as development of tools for further support and guidance.
• Proactively contribute to the development and continuation of communities of practice and networks to share best practices, ensuring a cohesive approach to employment practice and proactive management of the employment relationship across the organisation.
• Build organisational capability through effective collaboration with leaders and stakeholders across the council to address organisational challenges by identifying designing and delivering HR practice and behavioural interventions.
• Build strong relationships with key customers, seeking formal and informal feedback on solutions delivered in order to evaluate the impact of employment practice and people policy initiatives, measuring key performance indicators and providing recommendations for continuous improvement and refinement of organisational processes.
• Develop a feedback mechanism which enables formal feedback to be sought to measure the impact of the HR Service Centre and BP model across the organisation.
• Manage the ER case load to ensure ER cases are dealt with in line with our policies and our statutory obligations. Utilise case data to identify trends and insight across the council, working with Business Partners on services which require HR interventions.
• Work collaboratively with the HR team and across the council to ensure that our HR Practice is appropriate for our current and future business need and desired culture.

• Budget – Nil
• People Management – up to a team of 5

• Educated to degree level or equivalent by experience.
• Evidence of continuing professional development and expert knowledge in relevant professional area, such as CIPD qualified or other post graduate qualification in human resources.
• Deep understanding of HR functions, practice, and procedure in a modern HR environment together with experience in a complex, unionised environments.
• Sound knowledge of employment law and evidence of being able to develop and interpret Employment Policy and Practice.
• Demonstrable experience of developing capability, mitigating risks or delivering results.
• Ability to gather, analyse and present data to support with ER-related communications, policy issues, union engagement and feedback.
• Relationship management, with proven ability to develop strong, mutually beneficial relations with external and internal stakeholders.