03 / 10
Building a Transformation Function Then a Crisis Response
Headline result
Continuity for 1,300+ staff through Covid
The challenge
A complex, largely frontline operational workforce of around 3,000 people had no dedicated transformation capability – HR operations, payroll governance, workforce planning, and employee relations all ran, but reactively, with little headroom to improve. Then, partway through the assignment, Covid-19 hit an organisation whose workforce couldn't simply move to remote working.
My approach
I was appointed Head of People to build the transformation capability the business needed. That meant taking direct ownership of HR operations, payroll governance, workforce planning, organisational change, and employee relations across a genuinely complex operational workforce – not designing from the outside in or managing on a risk-based focus. When the pandemic disrupted the business, the same team and operating rhythm became the vehicle for crisis response: a major restructuring and furlough programme covering continuity arrangements for over 1,300 employees, followed by a redundancy programme affecting around 1,000 roles, all while keeping statutory and operational services running.
The impact
Service continuity was maintained for a 3,000-strong frontline workforce through one of the most disruptive periods most organisations will ever face. In the earlier, pre-Covid phase of the assignment, the programme had already delivered $1m in realised recruitment savings. What might have been read purely as a crisis response left something more durable – a transformation function and operating discipline that the organisation carried into its next two phases of change.