People Partner - Argos - UK wide

Job description

Why join us

You will partner with our Argos Retail Team as a trusted, visible advisor and business partner, supporting the execution and delivery of functional plans, set out by the Senior Leadership team. You will be a conduit into our Centres of Excellence, ensuring the correct expertise is engaged to solve business problems.

The role will drive our culture, enable performance, coach managers, and deliver a tangible return on investment by building Argos Retail capability, maximising capacity, and cost efficiency to deliver customer outcomes and shareholder value.

What you'll do

You’ll be a true People Partner to our Argos Retail Stores Director. You’ll spend time with our teams and Retail Leadership team understanding where the opportunities are and how you can drive priorities and outputs through the broader Argos People Partnering team.  

You will work collaboratively with the cross-functional teams and Centres of Excellence, developing and delivering strategic retail people plans that address specific functional people challenges. Your responsibilities will involve mobilising and delivering against these plans, driving a high-performance culture through coaching and influencing leaders, executing and embedding business change initiatives, and fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment. It’s essential to know that there can be a lot of change in our Argos retail space, including closures & openings, which you’ll own & track. 

Additionally, you will analyse people data to inform decision-making, track progress against targets and measures, and actively contribute to driving positive metrics related to engagement, talent, performance, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Your role will be essential in driving business performance and ensuring that the organisation is equipped with the right capabilities to succeed.

You’ll likely be in our Coventry office once a month, and you’ll need to recognise the right times of when to be spending time in our Argos stores, seeing how any changes or initiatives have landed, spending time with your Retail Stores Director, supporting new Area Managers on their development or assisting areas lacking in support. Your remit covers all UK Argos stores (standalone and in Sainsbury’s), and your travel will be in line with business needs. 

Who you are

You are a highly experienced and strategic People/HR Business Partner with a proven track record in partnering with senior leaders and stakeholders working within in fast-paced and complex commercial organisations. With your expertise in creating and delivering people plans in collaboration with Centres of Excellence, you have strong influencing and relationship-building skills. Your talent management experience, coupled with your ability to enable and drive business change and transformation, adds value to the organisation. As a data-driven decision-maker, you excel in analysing and drawing insights from data to inform strategic decision-making. With your deep understanding of organisational design and effectiveness, you contribute to shaping effective business partnerships.

You’ll be curious, proactive and engaging, while not shying away from difficult situations. You’ll understand that the Retail world is fast-paced & what this means to ensure effective delivery. 

Strengths you need to demonstrate

Being a Change Agent is not just around change initiatives like restructures or business change, but cultural or behavioural change amongst leaders. Be curious, adaptable and innovative. Using data and business insight to support your decisions on approach, and measuring the success of changes implemented.

Commercial Acumen is all about knowing the commercial levers of the business and how its people can deliver them.  You'll use savvy commercial decision making to have a direct impact on the businesses outcomes, and ensuring decisions you're making add value to the customer. You'll be close to the market and understand how we can stay ahead in an ever-changing market.

Collaboration & Influence is all around your matrix working, where within all large businesses there are lots of teams focusing on different things and how do you stay connected with what's going on and how you can work with them to use their expertise. Have a very agile mindset, comfortable with ambiguity and happy to fail fast. Utilising all the different leadership styles to change your approach depending on your audience, enabling you to effectively influence.

What you need to know and show

• Proven track record as a People / HR Business Partner in fast-paced, complex, commercial organisations
• Experience of creating and delivering people plans in partnerships with Centres of Excellence, leading delivery through cross functional teams
• Strong influencing, partnering and relationship building skills, working with senior leaders and stakeholders across the business to build trusted relationships
• Talent management experience
• Experience enabling and delivering business significant business change / transformation
• Strong data skills, able to identify / analyse and draw insight from data to help inform decision making
• Organisational design / effectiveness experience in the context of a business partnering role