Salary: Competitive per annum
Hours: 37.5 per week, Monday to Friday
Location: Hybrid, 3 days a week in our VHQ, Crawley
Contract: Permanent
Closing Date: 7th May 2025
At Virgin Atlantic, we are committed to aligning our People strategy with business outcomes through data-driven insights and critical thinking. We are looking for a strategic and analytical leader to join our Partnering and Performance team as the Senior Manager – People Partner. This role is crucial in partnering with leaders and leveraging analytics to identify trends, assess people needs, and drive decisions that optimise talent and performance.
As the Senior Manager – People Partner, you will play a critical role in ensuring leadership understands the value of People team initiatives, helping adapt them to the directorate’s needs, and securing buy-in for their execution. You will have end to end accountability to account manage people related queries, working across centre of excellence to resolve. You will also provide feedback from leadership to the People team, ensuring that People team efforts are responsive to the company's evolving needs and strategic priorities to deliver business outcomes.
Where You Fit In: This role reports to the Vice President – Partnering & Performance and sits within the Partnering and Performance directorate. You will work closely with business leaders, the People team, and other key stakeholders to ensure alignment and effective execution of strategic initiatives.
- Key liaison between leadership and the People team, ensuring clear communication, alignment, and impact around people-related initiatives and opportunities.
- Collaborate closely with leadership and People team colleagues to ensure that the needs of each directorate are considered in People decisions and priorities, ensuring alignment with company goals.
- Foster a culture of continuous improvement within the People team by identifying, measuring, and acting on areas for development in our service delivery, enhancing process efficiency, optimising the 'customer' experience, and maximising the positive impact we have as a function.
- Continually refine and improve workflows and people processes to eliminate inefficiencies, removing unnecessary complexity. Leverage technology to ensure that people are used most effectively to deliver value.
- Evaluate information in an objective, systematic way, questioning assumptions, identifying biases, considering multiple perspectives, and using logic and evidence to form well-reasoned conclusions, establishing the root cause before implementing effective strategies to resolve.
- Empower leaders to make informed decisions that drive business growth and provide high-level coaching to senior leaders to improve team performance/leadership effectiveness, as well as acting as a trusted advisor in planning and executing change initiatives, helping overcome resistance and barriers to change, that are focused on achieving measurable outcomes.
- Oversee the resolution, in partnership with the ER and Legal team, of sensitive and/or complex ER cases, including misconduct, grievances, discrimination, and whistleblowing, ensuring a fair and legally compliant approach that minimises risk exposure.
- Collaborate with leaders and the OD team to define future state structures and/or workforce plans, create the people impact plan, and manage the transition in a way that minimises disruption, ensures strong stakeholder buy-in, and a positive people experience.
- Provide 'in the moment' coaching and upskilling leaders in best practices in areas such as leading high-performing teams and managing difficult conversations, encouraging leaders to foster a positive workplace culture that reduces conflict and drives performance.
- Partner with leaders to develop and deliver specific plans that foster a motivated workforce committed to achieving our company goals.
- Work to enhance the colleague experience by ensuring the work environment is supportive, inclusive, and aligned with company values.
- Implement talent pipelines and succession planning strategies that create a strong leadership bench for the future.
- Oversee workforce planning to ensure the organisation has the right people with the right skills at the right time to meet business demands and drive growth.
- Ensure the design of and delivery against an effective performance management framework that aligns with company goals, setting clear expectations for colleague performance and development.
- Experience in similar Senior HR Business Partner role with large enterprise programme transformation delivery in complex matrixed environment with experience in developing and implementing HR strategies aligned to people strategy and business goals.
- CIPD qualified (Level 5 minimum) or relevant experience in leading and coaching teams, as well as influencing and collaborating with business leaders to drive organisational performance.
- Evidence of being a critical partner with c-suite, translating data and complex information to create people plans, being the connection between people strategy and business success.
- Proven strategic and critical thinking skills with demonstrable business acumen and analytical skills.
- Demonstrable evidence of strong analytical, strategic, and critical thinking skills, with successful demonstration of large-scale business benefits.
- Evidence of excellent communication, influencing, and interpersonal skills. Working confidently and credibly with senior managers/leaders, forming strong personal relationships.
- Evidence of leveraging data and insights to shape strategy and measure impact utilising PowerBI, Microsoft Excel, and PowerPoint.
- Experience in aviation is highly desirable.
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Our customers come from all walks of life and so do our colleagues. That’s why we’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and actively encourage applications from all backgrounds. At Virgin Atlantic, we believe everyone can take on the world - no matter your age, gender, gender identity, gender expression, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabilities, religion, or beliefs. We celebrate difference and everything that makes our colleagues unique by upholding an inclusive environment in which we can all thrive. So that everyone at Virgin Atlantic can be themselves and know they belong.
To make your journey with us accessible and individual to you, we encourage you to let us know if you’d like a little extra help with your application, or if you have any individual requirements at any stage along your recruitment journey. We are here to support you, so please reach out to our team, ([email protected]) feeling confident that we’ve got your individual considerations covered.