Programme Manager

Description

Why join us

Joining Sainsbury's as a Programme Manager, Retail People offers a unique opportunity to lead and drive transformative people programmes that impact colleague experience, organisational capability, and business success. With a focus on programme leadership, stakeholder management, governance, and engagement, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of retail operations. Working in a collaborative and dynamic environment, you will have the chance to deliver tangible results, influence strategic decisions, and contribute to a culture that values innovation, continuous improvement, and meaningful impact on both colleagues and customers.

What you'll do

As the Programme Manager, Retail People at Sainsbury's, you will be leading, coordinating, and delivering complex, multi-workstream people programmes aimed at enhancing colleague experience, building organisational capability, and supporting business transformation. Your role will involve translating strategic objectives into programme outcomes, managing risks and dependencies, and ensuring proactive mitigation. You will work closely with senior leaders and cross-functional teams to drive stakeholder engagement, establish effective programme governance structures, and oversee program-level change, communication, and engagement plans to support successful adoption. Additionally, you will define clear, measurable benefits, track financial and non-financial benefits throughout the programme lifecycle, and identify continuous improvement opportunities to enhance programme impact.

Who you are

As a Programme Manager for Retail People at Sainsbury's, you are a seasoned professional with a proven track record in delivering large-scale, cross-functional programmes and driving impactful organisational change. Your exceptional project and programme management skills, coupled with strong stakeholder management abilities, enable you to lead and coordinate complex programmes that enhance colleague experience, build organisational capability, and support business transformation. With a focus on simplifying complexity, clear communication, and fostering a collaborative, high-performance culture, you drive successful outcomes, engage stakeholders at all levels, and ensure the strategic objectives are translated into measurable results that positively impact colleague engagement and operational performance.

Essential Criteria 

• Proven track record of delivering large-scale, cross-functional programmes with measurable outcomes on time, within scope, and budget.
• Demonstrable application of recognised programme management methodologies to plan, govern, and assure programme delivery.
• Evidence of effective stakeholder management at senior levels, including facilitation of steering groups, reporting, and influencing decisions to secure alignment and support.
• Ability to analyse complex data, identify risks/issues, and make informed decisions that drive programme success and continuous improvement.

Responsibilities

As a Programme Manager you will proactively engage with People Centres of Expertise to support the Head of People Programme Management to translate the business and workforce strategies into a plan for the People division that enable prioritisation of activity and allocation of resource accordingly. Collate risks and interdependencies across outcomes being delivered by the People Outcomes Team and an overview of all people impacting activity across the business to support clash management. What you'll do - Support the Head of People Programme Management to translate the business and workforce strategies into outcomes that should be delivered by the people division. - Maintain and update a prioritised work plan, that is agreed with the People Leadership Team that reflects the priorities for the business to deliver the strategy and reflects the capacity available within the people function and a backlog for future development. - Maintain a live programme plan for the people division, so that all people impacting activity across the business is captured, and clear decisions can be made about prioritisation to deliver successful business outcomes. - Develop relationships with People Centres of Expertise, developing a deep understanding of their priorities, outcomes and activities, including key milestones and interdependencies. - Utilise your relationships with the People Centres of Expertise to collate and manage interdependencies, risks and issues, and provide reporting to People Leadership Team. - Bring external programme management knowledge, insights and techniques/approaches and share with Head of People Programme Management, using this insight to further drive efficiency and simplification of the People Programme. - Continually improve the People Programme and look to use the most up to date tools and materials benchmarking the People Programme across others within the business with a healthy degree of competitiveness. - Coach and upskill members of the people outcomes team to develop their project management skills so that the team create effective and achievable milestone plans to ensure outcome delivery. - Coach and upskill members of the people outcomes team to effectively identify, manage and escalate project risks, issues, and interdependencies to the programme level to provide divisional visibility. Who you are · Strong Programme Management experience. · Experience working in a People / HR function. · Project Management Qualification – desirable. · Able to plan across multiple time horizons (12 months). · Own it - takes full accountability for issues through to resolution or escalation as appropriate. · Own it – an outcome orientated individual. · Make it better - identifies opportunities to make the way we work simpler or looks for ways of improving service in the team. · Make it better – identifies opportunities to coach and develop others, especially in their areas of technical capability to grow these skills in the function. · Make it better – able to think strategically and translate high level strategic priorities into a deliverable plan. · Be human - Able to influence at a senior level (Heads of People teams) and cross functionally to drive decision-making and prioritisation.

Qualifications

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you'll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there's always the chance to try something new — whether that's as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we'll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:

Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private healthcare. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks' pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks' pay for paternity leave.

Please see for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).

---