Colleague Experience & Engagement Partner

🌟 Colleague Experience & Engagement Partner 🌟

Location: Greater London & M25 | Hybrid

Working Pattern: 3 days across multi-site locations | 2 days working from home

Salary: £75,000 base + annual bonus & benefits

Additional Benefit: Octopus EV Electric Vehicle Salary Sacrifice Scheme

Reporting to: Director of People & Service Excellence

Structure: Permanent | Standalone role | No direct reports

The Opportunity

This is a genuinely exciting blank-canvas opportunity for a people, culture and engagement specialist who wants to create something rather than inherit something.

A growing multi-site operational organisation is appointing a brand-new Colleague Experience & Engagement Partner to shape what it truly feels like to work there.

With regulatory, clinical and compliance training now sitting within a dedicated function, this role has a deliberately different mandate.

Your focus is the human experience.

Culture. Leadership. Engagement. Coaching. Listening. Development. And ultimately, creating an environment where colleagues feel connected, supported and able to thrive.

You’ll have direct exposure to senior leadership, significant autonomy and the freedom to build practical solutions that work for people on the ground.

The Role

You’ll become the organisation’s specialist for colleague experience, working closely with leaders and frontline teams across a multi-site estate.

You’ll be expected to get out into the business, listen to colleagues, understand what is really happening and turn those insights into practical action.

Key areas of ownership include:

🌟 Culture & Values

Translate organisational values into tangible behaviours that colleagues can see, understand and experience every day, from onboarding through to leadership and day-to-day management.

🌟 Leadership Development

Build and deliver practical, in-house leadership development programmes and toolkits for supervisors and managers. This is about creating something bespoke to the organisation, not purchasing generic off-the-shelf programmes.

🌟 Coaching & Active Listening

Become a trusted internal coach, providing 1-to-1 and group coaching to leaders while spending meaningful time with frontline teams. Create opportunities for colleagues to be heard and ensure their feedback leads to action.

🌟 Colleague Experience

Review the entire colleague journey, from attraction and onboarding through to development, progression and retention. Identify friction points and design practical improvements.

🌟 Engagement & Insight

Establish the organisation’s engagement baseline and introduce more regular, meaningful pulse feedback. Turn colleague data and feedback into clear insights and actionable priorities.

🌟 Talent & Retention

Develop meaningful career pathways and progression opportunities, particularly for hourly-paid colleagues, helping to improve internal mobility and address retention challenges.

The Profile

We’re looking for someone who is curious, energetic, commercially minded and genuinely passionate about people.

You may come from a traditional HR, Employee Experience, Engagement, Culture, OD or Leadership Development background.

Equally, you could have built your career in a customer or operational environment where culture, leadership and experience are at the heart of performance.

Experience across environments such as care, healthcare, hospitality, retail, leisure or education could be highly relevant.

You’ll bring:

• Proven experience across colleague experience, employee engagement, culture, OD or leadership development

• Strong 1-to-1 and group coaching capability

• Excellent workshop design and facilitation skills

• Experience creating bespoke leadership development programmes

• The ability to use engagement, retention and colleague feedback data to identify opportunities and measure impact

• A hands-on, practical approach. You enjoy being where the people are rather than sitting behind a desk

• The confidence to operate autonomously and take full ownership of your agenda

• Warmth, energy and emotional intelligence, with the ability to build credibility across both frontline and senior audiences.

Why This Role?

This isn't a role where you'll be handed a finished strategy and asked to implement it.

You'll help create the strategy.

You'll have the opportunity to establish the foundations of colleague experience, build leadership capability from the ground up and shape how culture is experienced across a complex, multi-site organisation.

For the right person, this is a chance to build something genuinely meaningful and leave a visible mark on the organisation.

If you're a hands-on culture, engagement or people experience specialist who loves turning ideas into practical change, we'd love to hear from you.