Senior People and Culture Lead (12-month Maternity Cover)
At HCRG Care Group, we believe our people are at the heart of delivering excellent care and driving sustainable change. We’re proud to deliver vital health and care services across the country.
This opportunity is offered as a 12‑month maternity cover, ideal for an experienced People & Culture professional who enjoys stepping into complex environments, making an immediate impact, and delivering meaningful change. You will work closely with our Regional Directors, building trusted partnerships, embedding recent transformation programmes, and helping managers develop the skills and confidence they need to deliver consistently high‑performing services.
No two days will look the same. You may be in Surrey supporting leaders in our prison healthcare services one week, then in Essex helping managers make the link between absence management, agency use, and service performance the next. You’ll also play a key role in shaping the people strategy for our sexual health services, including the integration of SH24. Although the role is remote‑based, it will require regular travel and visibility across the regions.
This is not about policy writing or transactional HR. It’s about influence, coaching, and impact. You’ll create people plans tailored to each region, use data and insights to shape decision‑making, and most importantly, ensure that change sticks long after the project team has moved on.
Responsibilities
* Act as a strategic partner to Regional Directors, building trusted relationships and ensuring people strategies directly support operational and service delivery goals.
* Develop and deliver tailored people plans for each region, aligned with organisational strategy, KPIs, and local priorities.
* Embed organisational change – ensuring that recent transformation programmes are sustained, capability is built, and managers feel confident in leading new ways of working.
* Coach and support managers to strengthen leadership capability, particularly in areas such as absence management, performance management, and employee engagement.
* Create clear links between people data and business outcomes, helping leaders understand how areas such as absence, agency usage, and retention impact both cost and service quality.
* Champion a positive and inclusive culture, using colleague voice, surveys, and engagement tools to identify issues and co‑create solutions with managers and teams.
* Provide visible presence across services, regularly travelling to sites and attending leadership and team meetings to offer hands‑on support and guidance.
* Use data and insights to inform decision‑making, identify people risks, and recommend pragmatic solutions that balance commercial and colleague needs.
* Work collaboratively with centres of excellence within the wider People team, ensuring policies, practices, and initiatives are consistently applied and adapted for local needs.
* Promote equality, diversity, inclusion, and wellbeing across all people practices, creating environments where colleagues feel supported, engaged, and able to thrive.
* Contribute to organisational performance by tracking ROI on people initiatives, ensuring people practices add value to both colleagues and service delivery.
Ideal Candidate
* An experienced Senior HR Business Partner / OD leader with a proven track record of partnering senior stakeholders to deliver people strategies that drive performance and culture.
* CIPD Level 7 qualified (or equivalent experience), with strong knowledge of employment legislation, organisational development, and workforce planning.
* Skilled in embedding change – not just delivering transformation projects, but ensuring changes are sustained through capability building, coaching, and cultural alignment.
* Highly confident in building manager and leadership capability, particularly around absence management, performance, engagement, and succession planning.
* Adept at using people data and insights to influence decision‑making, spot risks, and link people practices to service KPIs (e.g. absence rates, agency spend, staff survey outcomes).
* A strong communicator and influencer, able to build trust quickly with Regional Directors and senior managers with very different leadership styles.
* Comfortable with regular national travel and maintaining a visible presence across services – you’ll know that sometimes the most meaningful impact happens in team meetings, on‑site with leaders, and in the moments where you can challenge and support face‑to‑face.
* Commercially astute, with the ability to balance organisational goals, colleague wellbeing, and service user needs.
* A values‑driven leader who champions inclusion, wellbeing, and engagement, creating the conditions where people can thrive.
* Resilient and adaptable, thriving in a complex and changing environment, and able to “connect the dots” across multiple services and priorities.
Package Description
As a Senior People and Culture Lead, you’ll be part of our valued team at HCRG Care Group and receive access to the following rewards and benefits:
* £55,000 – £60,000 salary plus group pension.
* Private medical insurance with fast access to the most used specialists, including musculoskeletal problems and mental health support, available at locations across the country.
* Membership of My Reward Hub, giving you access to discounts on everyday purchases such as grocery shopping, as well as cashback and voucher offers for treats for you and your loved ones.
* Access to your wages as you earn them to help cover life’s emergencies and avoid overdraft fees or high interest rates.
* Online and face‑to‑face help with your mental and physical wellbeing – from healthy recipes and activity challenges to post‑trauma support, legal, debt and life management help, as well as career coaching and counselling.
* Access to e‑Learning, bespoke career pathways and opportunities for continuing professional development through our outstanding learning and development team, The Learning Enterprise.
* An open, just culture where you’re encouraged to have and implement ideas that help us deliver our purpose: changing lives through transforming health and care – backed up by at least £100,000 of ring‑fenced innovation funding each year.
* The pride of working for an organisation committed to the highest clinical and quality standards, with the majority of our rated services holding “good” or “outstanding” ratings from the Care Quality Commission.
About the Company
We change lives by transforming health and care. Established in 2006, we are one of the UK’s leading independent providers of community health and care services, working with health and care commissioners and communities to transform services with a focus on experience, efficiency, and improved outcomes. We deliver and transform adult and children community health services, primary care services including urgent care, sexual health, dermatology and MSK services as well as adult social care and wellbeing services. Across England, we support communities of many millions and directly help more than half a million people each year – guided by our simple values: we care, we think, we do.
Equal Opportunities
We’re committed to equal opportunities and welcome applications from a broad, diverse range of people who want to join our team. We’re a Disability Confident Committed company, so we work to provide facilities, work environment adjustments and technical solutions to be as inclusive of everyone.
Finally, we need to let you know that the company you’ll work for is part of HCRG Care Group Holdings Limited and by applying for this job we’ll need to process and hold information about you. If you would like to know a little more about how we use your information, please see our website’s privacy policy.
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