“HR shouldn’t be a rules, regulations, policies and procedures function. There is a cultural change needed to shift it to an enabling, agile function.” – Ajun Budda, Senior Interim HRBP at Nelipak Healthcare Packaging, 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 Ajun Budda who began his HR career after university working for a local council. In 1989, He joined Yorkshire Bank Retail Services as Head of Human Resources, a role he held for nine years before becoming General Manager in 1998.
In 2002, Ajun joined Armstrong World Industries as General Manager HR EMEA and led the restructuring of their European Operations. In 2005, he moved to Lloyd’s Register EMEA where he spent five years as Head of HR EMEA. Ajun then joined a U.S. family owned manufacturing business called Fellowes Brands as European HR Director and worked there for nine years before leaving in 2019 for a career break. Ajun began his current position as Senior HRBP at Nelipak Healthcare Packaging in July 2021.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
In my final year at university, one of the results I received from a careers quiz was ‘personnel’. I remember very clearly discussing it with my university careers advisor who essentially said, don’t go into that because they always fill HR roles internally. He implied that HR was an area where people who couldn’t make it in the main business would end up. I thought, I’m not sure that’s quite right, I’m going to look into this further.
After graduating, I got an opportunity with the West Midlands County Council, an organisation that was actually being abolished by the government. They sold it to me as a fantastic training ground since all kinds of HR issues would be coming up including redundancies, selective retention, recruitment and compensation issues. They sponsored me to do my CIPD part time and I jumped at the chance.
I knew very little about the HR profession before I joined so this role was formative for me. Some early advice I received was, “you won’t go far wrong if you treat people how you’d like to be treated yourself”. It stuck with me and my focus became how to keep a human touch, develop closer connections with our working population, and develop a progressive, not bureaucratic HR.
In my early career in the public sector, they sent us on any imaginable training course, so after a few years I was highly trained and felt ready to run things on my own. At age 25 I joined Yorkshire Bank Retail Services as their Head of Human Resources. The role involved a lot of restructuring, we reshaped the whole organisation and that was where my career in HR really took off.
I’ve followed a partnership approach my entire career. It’s not about replacing managers or taking over, it’s helping the business to do things better, it’s partnership not policing. HR has a struggle for its own identity sometimes, in terms of how it’s going to add value for the business. Sometimes it’s difficult to get the HR function to connect with the business’ main goal of, for example in manufacturing, getting product out of the door. There can be a danger that HR sits in the corner nursing behavioural sciences and things that seem irrelevant while the rest of the business gets on with it. So the first challenge in any role is establishing that connection and relevance between HR and the business.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
I see three strategic priorities for our HR at the moment. Firstly, is talent management, acquisition, development and retention. The whole talent management team has become the business’ biggest strategic priority in a volatile & changing market. We recently had two excellent candidates interview for a product engineer position and while we were getting back to them, both accepted other roles. It’s a real candidate market which is great for them, but means that companies have to work so much harder to attract, recruit, develop and retrain their employees. I think that has major implications for how we do talent management. Some of the conventional wisdom needs to change, we need to be prepared to adjust existing remuneration structures and all sorts of things, but then, what does that do to the people you’ve already got retained?
The second priority is improving the employee experience and trying to connect with them in a different way. We’ve recently changed what was a very harsh absence management policy into something that is much more balanced and employee centric. Within HR, my crusade is trying to reduce the low-value activities that keep us away from strategic work. That means trying to be as unbureaucratic as possible so we’re not placing obstacles in people’s way. For example, there used to be a policy where HR would attend every interview to “police” the managers in case they got it wrong. We don’t do that anymore. HR shouldn’t be a rules, regulations, policies and procedures function. There is a cultural change needed to shift it to an enabling, agile function.
My third strategic priority is trying to make the HR function more agile, more of a partnership with the business. We need to understand their needs so we can drive some of the agenda ourselves. Until recently, we had a real problem recruiting shift staff and were considering partnering with more recruitment agencies. Instead, we began working more closely with our sole agency, ensuring they had a very good understanding of what we were looking for. The result was great. We recruited 30 people at the end of 2021, in a market where other companies and locations are struggling to do that. Being more agile, being prepared to compromise a little on requirements and adapting our approach to the market realities really paid dividends for us. We stopped seeing the recruiter as a supplier and shifted to a partnership, asking them, how can we help you to help us?
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
Firstly, for someone thinking about this as a career, understand yourself and what makes you want to be in HR. Understand the skills and personality traits that will enable you to pursue this career successfully, as well as those that might inhibit you. For example, I’ve heard people talk about wanting to be in HR because of the “power” but actually we don’t have much power; we might whisper to the king or queen but we are not them. Be clear about your reasons for wanting to join HR.
Secondly, be prepared to continually develop. Don’t assume you know it all or have all the tools. Be prepared to connect tactically with the business in a partnership approach. Build relationships with the organisation’s management and leadership team and check in with them about what they’re actually working towards.
Thirdly, be prepared for business agendas to change quite quickly. If you want to work from a plan and know what’s going to happen for the next 12 months, you’re probably not going to be happy in most HR functions.
Finally, for anyone working in HR already, be authentic and set good examples. Make sure the ethics of how the business should do things carries forward into how you manage your own HR department. You don’t want a situation where the children of the shoemakers have the worst shoes. Try to retain a sense of strategic mission and purpose, don’t get sucked into the day-to-day issues, the firefighting. If you lose sight of the purpose, it’s easy to get demoralised and lose focus on how the HR function can contribute and work towards where the business is going as an organisation.
Ajun has over thirty years’ experience in senior HR positions. He has been the Interim HRBP at Nelipak Healthcare Packaging since July 2021.