Global Head Of People Operations & Experience, Hx

This is a 1 year Fixed Term Contract

Hurtigruten Expeditions is the world’s leading adventure travel group, offering unique small-ship and land-based adventures from pole to pole – and anywhere in between. We take our guests to the most spectacular areas on the planet, offering a mix of pristine wilderness and visits to genuine local communities.

This is a very exciting time to join the Hurtigruten People Experience team. The Global people team are embarking on the journey to 'Provide a People Experience that's as good as our products’.

Reporting to the SVP, HX People & Culture, you will be joining a fantastic, fun, and energetic team of People Experience Partners and Operational Excellence Specialists. Together we are working on some very exciting projects that will really help us to transform the way that we work today.

As the Global Headof People Operations & Experience, you play a critical role to establish and advance people services by centralising all employee transactional processing and employee relations, and implement solutions to drive compliance, performance, and quality, as well as enable and empower managers to own delivery of their employee experience. You will partner with your peers on the People & Culture Leadership Team (P&CLT) and Management to understand strategic priorities and business requirements, ensuring service delivery is continuously improved. You are a proven People Operations leader with international experience, with the ability to solve programmatically while having the scrappiness to be hands-on.

As a Global Headof People Operations & Experience, HX, you’ll be responsible for:

• Lead a High Performing Team: You will lead, hire, engage and coach a globally dispersed team of generalists to deliver a seamless and high performing global People service; drive and inspire continuous innovation and process improvements by creating a safe space and pride in the value we add to the employee experience and to the business operations. Help the team connect to each other and the wider organisation, its objectives, while clearly prioritising for results, and driving a process excellence mindset.

• Define Excellence: Review the current state of People Services working practices, processes, and technology, and propose pragmatic solutions to ensure full compliance with global requirements, including defining the scope of service and defined service level agreements (SLAs). Ensure a complete process mapping of all our key processes to ensure optimised, efficient, consistent, and compliant experiences, balancing scalability with local compliance. Identify cost efficiencies through continuous improvement and workflow digitisation. Manage relevant vendor relationships, ensuring service performance and cost effectiveness.

• Deliver BAU on People Admin, Payroll and Benefits: Manage the administration and optimisation of day-to-day people processes, including payroll (with separate payroll teams) and benefits to ensure they are administered in a smooth and seamless manner, while fully compliant, optimising costs and employee experience. Be the point of contact for escalations ensuring service levels are met and/or exceeded and all operation metrics are trending in a positive direction.

• Establish a Global Compliance Baseline : Complete a full Compliance and Operational gap analysis that ensures HR guidance documents, policies, and procedures are complete, updated and aligned with our values and culture, accompanied by an educational communication program that empowers Management to make good, compliant decisions.

• Manage Employee Relations: Ensure strong governance on all People Operations and ER cases, including resolution / re-assignment of to appropriate expert resources based on priority level, and the ER tracker is governed. Monitor re-work, case re-openings, and emerging patterns to continuously coach the team and improve processes for high performance & service. Lead or support in more complex employee relation activities including disciplinary, grievance and capability hearings including appeals and litigation.

• Collaborate effectively with P&CLT colleagues, other departments (including Finance and IT), and the wider business to integrate prioritisation changes, and gather & present key management information to the P&CLT and ELT (Executive Leadership Team). Regularly consult with the People function and business leaders to ensure service scope, levels and overall contribution of the teams are meeting or exceeding expectations. Support the development of a high-performance culture, ensuring performance and development practices are embedded across the organisation.

Academic and Professional Qualifications:

• A degree in relevant area of business and 8+ years of experience in HR

Essential Knowledge & Skills:

• You are an experienced people leader with hands-on experience in People Operations and/or Shared Services, within a complex, international, matrixed organisation and geographically dispersed team. You are entrepreneurial and don’t hesitate to roll up your sleeves, but you also drive accountability and continuously coach your team to deliver excellence.
• You take great pride in delivering an excellent employee-experience-centric service, and continuously seek to innovate and improve processes, using your process-mindset; you have demonstrable experience delivering process excellence on an operational and program-basis
• You have strong change management experience to drive change and innovation within the People Operations & Experience team, encouraging the team to “have a go” while still delivering on accuracy, and take pride in their work, and the value they deliver. You also leverage change management to effectively deliver continuously improved services to the business and employees.
• You have experience in implementing new HR Systems (MS Dynamics preferred but not required), and ideally with People Case Management tools. You are passionate about the value of People Analytics and bringing insights to the business and employees to aid in the prioritisation and impact of change delivery.
• Strong experience with Employee Relations in an international environment, ideally including experience with Works Councils and Unions, with the ability to coach and build capability in the People Team and Managers.
• You are humble enough to admit what you don’t know but are curious and have the learning agility to proactively research what is possible, and leverage data to make viable, balanced recommendations.
• You are agile and proactively seek feedback to continuously improve processes and experiences, including proactively involving employees and managers in designing and improving processes, procedures, and policies.
• You pay strong attention to detail & accuracy, demonstrate initiative & strong customer service mindset to the business.
• You have excellent people-centric Communication skills, written and verbal, to all levels of the organisation.

Desirable Knowledge & Skills:

• Additional European languages strongly advantageous
• Experience in a maritime or manufacturing industry also preferred.

Play your part

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