People Partner

This is an extremely exciting time to join NPL as the organisation embraces the mission and opportunity to provide the measurement capability that underpins the UK’s prosperity and quality of life.

NPL’s vision is to deliver extraordinary impact from their excellent science and engineering as an exemplary national laboratory. This mission reaffirms the pivotal role the organisation plays in supporting the UK’s national challenges as well as the needs of industry. For example, NPL has recently been given the task of leading the new UK Telecoms Lab which is a world leading, national facility. Under NPL’s leadership it will boost the security, resilience, and performance of the UK telecoms networks. NPL is reimagining what the national and global challenges might be and expects industrial, digital and government insights to shape their future direction.

Joining as a pivotal member of the People Team promises a unique and stretching experience with the opportunity to positively impact the NPL journey and boost the engagement of a diverse and talented workforce.

This is a newly created role and opportunity to join as a senior member of the People leadership team. Working together with the Head of People Operations, this role will identify and prioritise existing high impact/risk areas across the people operations in order to design and deliver accessible and empowering guidance to support policy and procedure.

Focus of this role:
This is an exciting new role in the People Team, sitting with People Operations. As the People Team embed new ways of working across all people activities, this role is critical in providing both the technical expertise and ‘keep is simple’ mind-set, to enable the embedding of a best-in-class people operation. You'll be working closely with the People and Development Manager to optimise the performance of the people and development team
- Provide specialist support to the Internal people team, technical experts, and line managers, bringing best practise and external insights.
- Ensure the team are equipped to support their business activities effectively.
- Lead, shape and embed a programme of continuous improvement across people policy and procedures.
- ER specialist areas
- As the highest escalation point internally, manage complex cases.
- Review and manage risk across ER profile
- Work with the people and development team to ensure they are supported from a technical perspective
- Identify and implement best practice updates to policy/procedure
- Work with the business to upskill line managers on management of ER cases, to reduce the ER case load
- Identify and deliver early intervention options to reduce ER case load
- Define and deliver clear SLA’s surrounding ER
- Work with analytics to capture and report ER trends, enabling proactive management of common themes

**ESSENTIAL CRITERIA**
- Demonstrate the relevant knowledge and experience built up in a complex, environments. Able to set out and advise on the risk management landscape.
- Successfully manage the litigation strategy for all complex ER cases.
- Able to partner and develop positive and effective stakeholder relationships that support and enable business outcomes.
- Leading upskilling and education both within the People team and across the business.
- Able to set the performance standards and to hold others to account. Underpinning this with providing the necessary coaching, mentoring and development opportunities across the team.
- Work with Head of People Operations on all union related matters, including projects, quarterly meetings and escalations on procedural points.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is a world-leading centre of excellence that provides cutting-edge measurement science, engineering and technology to underpin prosperity and quality of life in the UK.

At NPL, we believe our success is a result of the diversity and talent of our people. We strive to nurture and respect individuals to ensure everyone feels valued by treating everyone on the basis of their own individual merits and abilities regardless of their own or perceived identity, as part of our commitment to diversity & inclusion, we hold memberships and accreditations to ensure we’re creating an environment where all our colleagues feel supported and welcome, please see our Diversity & Inclusion page.

We are committed to the health and well-being of our employees. Flexible working and social activities are embedded in our culture to create a positive work-life balance, along with a broad range of benefits. Our values are at the heart of what we do, and they shape the way we interact, develop our people and celebrate success.

To ensure everyone has an equal chance, we’re always willing to make reasonable adjustments to the recruitment process. If you would like to discuss, please contact us.