“No matter what level we’re at, we all need to be aware of the shadow that we cast and how we come across; whether that’s as a leader or just as an HR professional. In HR, we influence both the vision and values of our business, so it’s hugely important that we also represent them.”– Greg Austin, HR & HSE Director at Sodexo Healthcare, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.
As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success.
This week, we had a great conversation with Greg Austin at Sodexo, who started his HR career within the UK Civil Service as an Executive Officer—and later Higher Executive Officer—at the Benefits Agency, before taking on roles within the HR functions of Anchor Housing and Boots. In 2000, Greg joined the team at Telewest Communications (now Virgin Media) as HR Manager, later taking on the HR Manager role at Allied Bakeries.
In February 2006, Greg took on the role of HR Operations Manager at Northumbrian Water, later becoming HR Director for G4S Government & Outsourcing Services in August 2010 ahead of taking on his current role at Sodexo in October 2012.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
My first job in HR was pure coincidence. After finishing my A-Levels, I started to look into career paths, and undertook my Civil Service exams as part of their direct entry Executive Officer recruitment scheme. I was offered a job in Newcastle with the Benefits Agency. When I arrived, I was placed in Personnel and given a desk, a team, the staff codebooks, and two days’ handover time, even though I had no knowledge of what Personnel was.
It was a baptism of fire, but a great opportunity to learn the basics. Going straight into challenges like disciplinaries, grievances, and other employee relations activity proved to be a great grounding for my future HR career. I realised that I really enjoyed not only the influencing side, but the variety of challenges you could be faced with every time you picked up the phone. Over time, I took on more responsibility, setting up a satellite office for the Child Benefit Centre and stepping up to the role of Higher Executive Officer for a year in a secondment. When that came to an end, I realised there was no real scope to move up, so I began to look for my next opportunity.
Shortly after that, I made the move to Anchor Housing—a not-for-profit charity with care and nursing homes across the UK. That was a really interesting role; not only did it feel like I was giving something back, but it continued my education in HR and allowed me to build on my ability to manage change and employee relations and get involved in projects. In that time, I also undertook a postgraduate diploma in HR in the evenings—I knew that I needed to have an HR qualification to back up my practical experience and allow me to progress.
After a couple of years at Anchor, I took on a regional role with Boots, relocating to Carlisle and started a Master’s—again in the evenings—to give me a theoretical understanding to underpin my practical experience and broaden my thought processes. At Boots, I was a Duty Manager as well as in HR, and that gave me my first view of the commercial world, which was a real eye-opener.
Although i enjoyed Boots, I eventually wanted to move back to Newcastle for family reasons, and ended up joining Telewest—as Virgin Media was at that time—as HR Manager. I thoroughly enjoyed working for them; it was vibrant, it was growing, and the job itself was always evolving and providing new challenges. I gained exposure to the various disciplines in HR as well as the business. I started off looking after Scotland and Newcastle, which then progressed into national roles looking after our call centres and Sales teams, and then the Technical division, handling areas such as reward principles, engagement, and growth and acquisition in all those areas.
Growth and integration was where i came into my own—colleagues had joined and were continuing to join us from other organisations and bringing with them a union presence the business hadn’t really experienced before.
Ensuring we struck a balance between keeping things vibrant and dynamic and accounting for the unionised element of our workforce in our engagement and work management systems was a challenge, but also a fascinating insight into the importance of being a trusted advisor to your business and influencing senior leaders in order to move things forward.
Although I enjoyed how dynamic, fast-moving, and varied the work I was doing was, more responsibility meant I was living away from my young family four or five days a week, which wasn’t sustainable.
After briefly taking on a role at Allied Bakeries, I moved to Northumbrian Water, which was another really varied organisation where I was fortunate to experience a whole range of technical and engineering-focused blue- and white-collar environments, all of which had a huge focus on people, excellent employee and customer relations, and a great culture and value system underlying them. I felt i made a difference in my role, and the people and environment were great, but after four years there, I knew that I needed a new challenge. I wanted to test and stretch myself by taking on an HR Director role.
I pursued that at G4S, which was a very different environment, but fantastic for bringing me back to the commercial side of HR as part of the executive management team—influencing, coaching, and making decisions with not only our division’s Chief Executive, but also the regional business leaders and on occasion the Group Chief Executive. I gained some great insight into the leadership of a commercially-focused organisation, in particular in the outsourcing areas of bidding, tender management, client relationships and contract management but after two years, I knew I wanted to move into something more People-focused again and took on my current role at Sodexo.
I’ve spent over eight years here, but because Sodexo changes all the time, it still feels relatively new. I’m in a place where i enjoy doing what I’m doing, but also being given a chance to grow and develop in a role that challenges me and manages to marry what I love about working in employee-focused and commercially-focused environments together. This has involved me adding Health & Safety to my leadership portfolio in the Healthcare division. The outsourcing environment is a very different place to be as an HR professional, because HR strategy is often balanced with elements like contract retention and cost-awareness, but we’re seeing an increasingly stronger approach being taken to things like social value, which I see as essential to how we should behave as a responsible employer.
Sodexo is big on the social value piece, giving me scope to implement things that are important to my personal values as well as organisational ones. We work quite closely with Project SEARCH to get young people with learning disabilities into work alongside driving employment opportunities for ex-offenders and armed service leavers, and we’re heavily involved in charitable initiatives such as Stop Hunger. That type of work not only sets Sodexo apart, but makes me incredibly proud to be part of the organisation.
The social value work we do benefits everyone—whether that’s through giving back to our communities, engaging and inspiring members of our workforce by giving them a Project SEARCH mentee, or attracting the younger generation into the business with our social values work.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
Being in the Healthcare division with a lot of people operating in hospitals day-in, day-out, the COVID crisis has definitely been a key theme and a huge challenge, but some of the things we’ve done as an organisation have really had a positive impact and resonated with me personally.
The company set up an employee relief fund which came from the top tier of global directors taking pay cuts and giving up bonuses, alongside which all UK management gave up their bonuses for a UK relief fund of our own. We made a £500 payment to our front-line Healthcare staff in August to thank them for their work, set up a hardship fund for struggling staff whose family members were out of work, and topped up furlough payments, though the biggest thing we did was introduce face-to-face counselling support. Once we saw how people’s psychological, emotional, and mental health was being affected by the pandemic, we knew we needed to go beyond the telephone support our existing employee assistance line could offer and employed 12 counsellors to be physically present on our larger sites and support our front-line teams face-to-face. That initiative has seen huge engagement, and it’s really helped educate our people on how to handle things they’ve never come across before. We’ve stepped the initiative up to run more frequently, and committed to funding it until next summer.
Given that 98% of our division are front-line workers, the biggest ongoing challenge is ensuring that our people remain safe and well and keeping them from feeling burnt out. How we engage and motivate those individuals and support them to be resilient is a big part of that. Retention has played into it as well, but only a small number of people have actually left because they felt they weren’t able to carry on any longer. We’ve also supported shielding measures and carried out safety checks and risk assessments for our at-risk staff members, ensuring we’re protecting them in the right way by taking advice directly from the NHS.
When it comes to recruiting people to help our front-line colleagues, we’ve found that a lot of people are very keen to give something back. Having a robust attraction strategy and process to bring people into the business and build up our numbers has been key, as has working with the broader organisation to redeploy those in at-risk divisions of the business on initiatives like setting up and running test centres on behalf of the Department of Health & Social Care.
In supporting the DHSC to mobilise Regional, Local and Mobile test Centre capacity, we have more than doubled our workforce in the Healthcare division in the last 12 months. This has been possible through leveraging the expertise and agility of our people across different areas in Sodexo who have done an amazing job to set up sites with infrastructure, people and processes from scratch, often with only a few days notice.
We have been able to redeploy colleagues at all levels, protecting jobs, reducing furlough and demonstrating the value of a collaborative and partnership based approach.
We as an organisation are aware of the toll this is taking on the HR function itself, so we’ve made sure HR professionals have the same access to the employee assistance line, online and video-based support, and the counselling service as front-line members of staff. Our local HR teams are very much an integral part of the management team as a whole, and we’ve encouraged them to work together and share information across divisions, which has created a whole network of people supporting and coaching each other as they support the workforce. This experience has really broken down barriers between divisions and given us a clear vision of the organisation that goes beyond our silos.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
You need to understand how your business works, what your business does, and what its values are. Being in HR isn’t just about employment law and process; it’s about having a commercial understanding of what you do and the impact it has, and about influencing and communicating in order to drive change. Enjoy what you do, and if you don’t, do something about it. Throughout my career, as soon as I’ve stopped learning or being challenged, I’ve done something about it and made my next move. Only you can influence that; don’t sit back and wait for someone else to do it for you.
If you’re an HR Leader, you need to constantly be thinking about developing your team. Push them, encourage them to step up, but also make sure that they all get credit for the work that they’ve done and opportunities to grow and advance in their roles.
The secret to HR is conviction and a good working relationship. For a business to succeed, it’s fundamental that the Holy Trinity of the HRD, CEO, and Finance Director are all behind the organisation’s vision and purpose as a unit.
As an HRD, you become a trusted advisor to your CEO, and the conversations you have can really add value. To do that, you need to be competent and strong enough in your convictions to be able to be honest with your CEO even on difficult topics.
No matter what level we’re at, we all need to be aware of the shadow that we cast and how we come across; whether that’s as a leader or just as an HR professional. In HR, we influence both the vision and values of our business, so it’s hugely important that we also represent them.
Greg has been working as HR and HSE Director in the healthcare division since October 2012, and provides leadership across all aspects of Sodexo’s HR and Health and Safety functions, including learning and development, communications, engagement and employee relations.
If you are interested in having a confidential conversation about your career or would like support growing your team, please get in touch today.