HR Heads | The Big Interview with Dylan Wickenden
The HR Heads Career Profile Series: We speak with HR specialists within our network to find out what ‘a typical day in the office’ looks like, what they consider their greatest career success to be, what advice they’d give their 20 year old self and we also explore some of their favourite things. This edition features Dylan Wickenden, HR Director at EMCOR UK.
What does a typical day in the office look like for you?
There isn’t a ‘typical day’ which makes this a really enjoyable role. My day always starts with an email check to see if there’s anything high priority I need to action quickly – we have both shift and night workers as well as a client base that work long and varied hours so emails can come in all through the night. I’m based out of our Eastleigh office, but I’m on the road about three days a week visiting our managers and employees at our client sites. When I’m office based, I spend the majority of my days working on elements of our strategic HR plan. It’s fairly new, so we’re still in the process of rolling elements of this out and making sure that it links to our Critical Success Factors.
As an HR Director, what do you love about your job?
The variety – I expect you would get that answer from most HR Directors! I get to see and experience behind the scenes on some of our external client sites, the day to day activity that goes hand in hand with that, and the people I deal with every day varies too – I interact with so many people, and I really enjoy that aspect.
Are there any aspects of your role that you find challenging?
We’ve had a fantastic year in terms of new business wins – we certainly don’t stand still! This year, we’ve TUPE transferred close to 800 employees from sixteen different companies into six brand new contracts that we’ve won over a period of just ten months. Our current headcount is just under 4100 employees, and as an HR team we run a very lean operation. As you can imagine, the amount of new business wins over such a short time period and the work required alongside this has presented some real challenges. Despite this, every transfer has gone smoothly and the team has coped fantastically under enormous amounts of pressure. It has been frustrating at times due to the TUPE transfer process – it’s so absorbing that it affects my team’s day to day work which can be challenging, but I’m very proud of the way the team has performed.
What lies ahead for you over the next 12 months?
We have three major projects to focus on over the coming year. The first is to fully embed Wellbeing into our activities, which is a major step forward for us as a business. We can already see the significant changes to how our workforce behaves and feels with a good Wellbeing strategy in place. We’re trying to make sure that our workforce remains happy and content in what they do.
The second is to introduce a flexible benefits platform with a third being a new grading structure. These are two major transformational changes to our business and will span UK wide. One of my direct reports will soon be taking on the role of Head of Employee Relations and Projects and will be overseeing a lot of this work, but I expect that these two changes will probably be our biggest delivery as an entire HR function for certainly the next two or three years.
I attend a number of external forums and conferences each year and I find that lots of businesses are not too dissimilar to us in terms of facing rising costs associated to sick pay or absenteeism. We also see the external pressures on people such as home life, the financial strains of everyday living, and for a lot of our non UK national employees; Brexit is a real concern. It’s really important that we look into these areas and review what we can do to support our workers.
We have found that there is a direct correlation between an employee base that’s happy and a satisfied customer. As a business, we run regular staff and client surveys and the data received through these is incredibly valuable. We are able to recognise trends with high staff engagement and the positive client feedback that runs alongside this. Our aim is to try and identify new areas of engagement to ensure that our HR strategy reflects this when we come to rolling out further elements of this in 2018.
