There is no better place to work in London than Hackney; we have great pride in our borough, our communities, and our services, and this is a role in which you can make a big impact. With a seat on the Corporate Leadership Team, and working with a new senior team, you will ensure that HR and OD sit at the heart of our organisational strategy. We want to recruit and develop amazing people to deliver the best services for our residents, at a time of increasing challenge, both for our communities and for the Council. We need to ensure that our people have the skills and support they need to meet the challenges we face, and that we can be the modern, creative organisation we need to be for the future.

The Role

This newly created role brings together a range of functions from across the organisation. For the first time in 20 years, our Education HR function has been brought back together with our corporate team. This team provides support to our family of schools in Hackney, as well as to staff working directly in our Education teams. We are committed to being a learning organisation, which is why we have created a new Head of Organisational Development to report into this role. We are looking for someone with the vision, and creativity, to develop this function into one that helps every member of staff reach their full potential, whilst leading and supporting culture change across the organisation.

Hackney has a workforce as diverse as the communities we serve; as a Council we are proudly and actively anti-racist, and have pioneered sector leading work in the field of inclusive leadership. However, we know that there is much more to do; we still have an under-representation of Black and Global Majority staff in senior roles, and our ethnicity pay gap presents an ongoing challenge. Our disabled staff still have lower morale and satisfaction at work than others. We know that many of our staff still face barriers to progression.

Our commitment to this work runs through everything that we do, and we have also invested in a new role to lead on equalities, which will sit under this one. Our new HR/OD Director will need to match that commitment with their own track record and experience in leading equalities programmes within diverse organisations.

Hackney Council has a strong commitment to insourcing where possible; we believe that by working together as one organisation we can provide the best quality and best value services to our residents. We believe that all our staff should be able to access the opportunities and benefits that the Council offers, and that we should take collective ownership of the challenges we face. That means that we have a larger directly employed workforce than many other comparable councils at just over 5,000 staff, and about 850 agency staff.

This brings huge opportunities for this role, but also challenges, which is why we are seeking a candidate with a strong background in public sector HR and OD, a track record in successfully leading change, and experience in working with trades unions.

Hackney is an organisation with strong values; we are proud, open, inclusive, ambitious, proactive, and pioneering. Those values were developed by our staff, and are reflected every day in the work we do. Our new HR/OD Director will share those values and help us to embed them across every aspect of our workforce strategy.