Job Description
Employee Relations Manager
Location: North East or Bedfordshire
Working pattern: Hybrid following an initial onboarding period
Hours: Full-time, 37.5 hours per week – flexible to meet the needs of the role
The Opportunity
We’re working with a large, growing UK organisation looking to appoint a number of experienced Employee Relations Managers as they continue to strengthen and develop their ER function.
This is a busy, fast-paced role where resilience, strong people management and excellent organisation skills and time management will be key. You’ll lead a team of ER professionals working across multiple areas of the business, providing direction, coaching and support while also maintaining oversight of more complex and higher-risk employee relations matters.
The priority is strong supportive leadership, coaching and stability and helping a mix of established and new team members, to become more confident, consistent, proactive and high performing.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Leading and managing a team of approximately 4 ER Advisors and ER Assistants .
- Providing regular coaching, support and development to the team without becoming the person they rely on for every decision.
- Helping Advisors develop the confidence and technical skills to self-manage cases and make appropriate decisions.
- Managing workloads and priorities across a high-volume, fast-moving ER environment.
- Overseeing complex and higher-risk employee relations cases where escalation is required.
- Supporting with disciplinary, grievance, absence, performance, redundancy and organisational change matters.
- Managing and advising on TUPE transfers both in and out of the organisation.
- Supporting restructuring and workforce change following acquisitions or changes in business requirements.
- Providing advice around consultation processes and wider organisational change.
- Supporting more complex industrial and employee relations matters involving trade union activity.
- Reviewing casework and introducing a stronger quality and audit approach across the ER function.
- Identifying trends, recurring issues and areas of risk rather than operating purely reactively.
- Using ER data and management information to help identify themes and improve decision making.
- Supporting Employment Tribunal preparation, ACAS matters and complex employee data requests where required.
- Helping ensure the ER function provides commercially sensible advice while remaining legally compliant.
- Supporting the business as it continues to develop its HR technology and move away from heavily spreadsheet-based processes.
- Working closely with senior HR colleagues across the wider People & Culture specialisms and operational leaders across different business areas to collaborate and leverage appropriate solutions to people related opportunities
- Contributing to wider HR projects and continuous improvement activity.
About You
We’re looking for someone who is comfortable operating at pace and who can bring calm, credibility and structure to a busy ER environment.
You’ll ideally have:
- Previous experience managing an Employee Relations, HR Advisory or HR team.
- Strong knowledge of UK employment law and the confidence to advise on complex ER matters, particularly in this period of significant employment law change, and being “alive” to the potential impacts on our business.
- Significant experience managing high-volume employee relations activity.
- Strong experience of TUPE, including both incoming and outgoing transfers.
- Experience supporting restructures, organisational change and redundancy programmes.
- Experience working within a large, multi-site or operational organisation.
- The ability to successfully manage and develop a geographically dispersed team.
- Strong coaching skills and the ability to develop Advisors rather than simply giving them the answers.
