Strategic People Business Partner

Arcadis is the world's leading company delivering sustainable design, engineering, and consultancy solutions for natural and built assets.

We are more than 36,000 people, in over 70 countries, dedicated to improving quality of life. Everyone has an important role to play. With the power of many curious minds, together we can solve the world's most complex challenges and deliver more impact together.

Role description:

Lead the cultural and people Strategy within Resilience UK and Ireland (approx. 1500 FTE) as a member of the Resilience Country Management Team. This is done in co-ordination with Country Director of People Services by developing and implementing supportive people programs aligned with GBA strategic objectives, including establishing an environment for growth and capability building

Role accountabilities:

Act as a business partner to support GBA leadership team 

As a member of the Business Partnering team and part of the relevant Global Business Area (GBA), the Strategic People Business Partner will establish trusted and influential relationships with the business area leaders on strategic people priorities and provide front line advisory on people initiatives and programs with a strategic people or business impact. They will also collaborate with other business partners and people services teams to deliver the total employee experience within a geographic area (UK). The role will work with the GBA People Director Resilience to build an inclusive high performing organization, in line with the strategic people and culture direction. 

In more detail, the Strategic People Business Partner will act as:

Workforce solution leader 

• Work strategically with business leaders to identify and select creative and inclusive capability, well-being, culture and talent development focused solutions to key business challenges, co-create the solutions and deploy them in a pragmatic way with the local people services team. This needs to be done in line with global Centre of Excellence (COE) direction. 
• Work with our leaders, COE leads and People Services to define people priorities that align with the experience we want to create for our people and support the design and delivery of related People function policies, processes and programs
• Support and champion standardization of ERP set up in line with the global approach and to implement a global way of working.
• Develop for the future – assist in the execution of strategic workforce planning across the GBA and participate in selection/ promotion decisions to ensure that our people have the necessary skills and understanding to deliver the team's objective.
• Plan, forecast, coordinate and broker customer focused People programs and solutions that are linked to business outcomes and impact realization of the business strategy. 
• Support the implementation in country global approaches to learning culture, learning journeys, competency frameworks and development curriculum to promote individual and team learning. 
• Support the GBA People Director to create the People plan in support of business area strategy ensuring cross-business area consistency through collaboration COEs and enhanced the country employee proposition. 
• Manage strategic relationships locally with internal / external providers to optimize holistic solutions.

Strategic 'Barometer' and proactive advisor

• Consult with the business and challenge them on strategic organizational and capability issues that contribute to the growth and competitiveness of the business and deliver an excellent employee experience on the moments that matter for the GBA workforce that is consistent across Arcadis. 
• Responsible for articulating and advocating business unit needs back to GBA People Director. 

Insights expert

• Use analytics to bring proactive business insights to the People team, and people insight to the business to drive innovations and make data driven people decisions in partnership with People Analytics team.
• Taking a more holistic view of the business to provide feedback on People function policies, processes and programs.
• Ensure regular employee listening is conducted and followed-up with adequate action plans through Arcadis Your Voice.

Organization Effectiveness & Transformation Leader

• Facilitate discussions around change, culture and transformation
• Ensure all annual People processes and programs such as GPS, talent reviews, salary review are delivered within the GBA and in collaboration with People services and COE leads.
• Work to improve the effectiveness of people metrics in their GBA, aiming to increase retention and engagement.
• Give feedback to People Services by suggesting improvements in the efficiency and quality of people services support. 
• Provide direction on high level change programmes, ensuring compliance with legislation and alignment to business sector objectives and strategic direction of the business area. · 
• Work with Employee Relations team (where available) to support management of high risk complex case work providing commercially sound advice whilst minimising impact to the business.

Culture Champion 

• Build and strengthen our culture by advocating the organizational values, our purpose and challenge leaders on their accountability to ensure everyone is demonstrating and living by the right behaviors. 
• Communicate and engage with our people on values and behaviors –develop and implement interventions and people process changes to close gap between our current and target culture from a GBA strategic perspective and in alignment with COE strategies and programs.

Advance positive culture change (e.g., establishing role models, system changes, training, communication) based on a data- driven insights in culture, with support of the GBA Leader

• Create a collaborative culture for resource sharing and capability building, maximising access to our internal Talent Market, through career development and knowledge-sharing programs and training to ensure clients receive best-in-class expertise and support.
• Work with the COE Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging to deliver interventions to raise awareness, encourage open and honest conversations and allow our people to be themselves at work – making the connection that Arcadis strives to be a diverse, inclusive and equitable employer.

General 

• Play a key role in the GBA People BP network and takes an active role on group wide People projects as agreed with the GBA People Director.
• Line management of people business partners. 
• Role Model the Arcadis Way in the GBA.
• Act as a visible steward of health and safety and ensuring familiarity and compliance with Health and Safety regulations and guidelines.

Qualifications & Experience:

The candidate should have an academic degree (preferably in human resources) and extensive  progressive senior (human resources) leadership experience in business partnering roles. They should have broad experience and understand the complexity of leading people issues in an international setting. 

Further the candidate should have thorough knowledge of project business and driving change and transformation (including leading, motivating and developing remote teams).

Other required experience and competencies for this role:

• Having a broad knowledge of all major components of People related functions, employee/labor relations, management of change, diversity and Inclusion, compensation, benefits and Talent development.
• A progressive, non-bureaucratic approach with experience in the latest P&C trends but in practical terms – not just a theory
• Experience in working in a matrixed organization in an international setting. As well as experience in a similar role where you need to balance global/local needs
• Consulting agility, with experience in independently using Microsoft programs (Teams, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Power BI) as well as using data analytics to align HR solutions with business imperatives and ability to work in an agile way. Business Fluency with financial acumen and operations knowledge, with a focus on business outcomes.
• Acts with integrity, impartiality and independence, balancing personal, organization and legal parameters
• Stakeholder management and the maturity to deal with senior business leaders. This includes being confident in hearing strong leadership opinions, ability to influence to better outcomes and at times even challenging decisions made by leadership
• High level communication skills (English proficiency at least C1, strong consulting, coaching and presentation skills, with the ability to move between listening to, guiding and coaching others at all levels
• The ability to make quick, sound decisions based on knowledge and judgment.
• An understanding and appreciation of the marketing, communication and presentation skills required  to facilitate projects and initiatives.

The ability to develop and maintain new and existing networks that support the effective and sustained delivery of the role.

Why Arcadis?

We can only achieve our goals when everyone is empowered to be their best. We believe everyone's contribution matters. It's why we are pioneering a skills-based approach, where you can harness your unique experience and expertise to carve your career path and maximize the impact we can make together.

You'll do meaningful work, and no matter what role, you'll be helping to deliver sustainable solutions for a more prosperous planet. Make your mark, on your career, your colleagues, your clients, your life and the world around you.

Together, we can create a lasting legacy.

Join Arcadis. Create a Legacy.

Our Commitment to Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging

We want you to be able to bring your best self to work every day which is why we take equality and inclusion seriously and hold ourselves to account for our actions. Our ambition is to be an employer of choice and provide a great place to work for all our people. We believe that by working together diverse people with different experiences develop the most innovative ideas. Equality, diversity and inclusion is at the heart of how we improve quality of life and we work closely with our people across six ED&I Workstreams: Age, Disability, Faith, Gender, LGBT+ and Race. A diverse and skilled workforce is essential to our success.