Global Head of HR Operations Excellence and Performance

Role purpose 

HR Operations’ mission, in service of Syngenta Group’s business strategy, is to enable reliable and scalable employee solutions and services creating a positive interaction and experience for our people. Focused on delivering outcomes that elevate our employees’ service experience and deliver tangible productivity benefits through the sustainable leverage of digital innovation. 

Following a refresh of our strategic priorities, we have a bold ambition to re-focus, re-skill and get ready to evolve and strengthen our delivery of human centric services enabled by a modernized end to end automation and employee digital experience strategy.  

The Global Head of HR Operations Excellence & Performance plays a key leadership role in shaping and leading the execution of our HR Services and Continuous Improvement strategic ambition. A critical success factor will be to build strong collaborative partnerships within HR, across the business and with external partners to progress our transformation with shared vision and valued outcomes. 

Key Accountabilities  

Service Delivery Evolution:

• Accountable for the global HR Services strategic agenda in partnership with HR Operations Leadership Team and HR/business stakeholders, including service delivery strategy, translating vision into a multi-year actionable roadmap, project business case development and execution to achieve our goals and evaluating performance through a metric driven approach. 

• Partner with Digital HR/IT to actively sponsor and participate in the design and stand up of new HR Services including the build out of digital employee services through a combination of design initiatives, MVPs and projects. Providing the leadership on re-modelling services with the introduction of employee digital services infrastructure, tools, and capabilities for sustained performance.  

• Support the HR Operations LT productivity goals by owning the alignment, organization and prioritization of HR Services productivity goals quick wins, co-ordinated portfolio submissions, measurement of outcomes and translating this into operational budget HR Services forecasts.  

• Responsible for shaping and sponsoring strategic transformation projects in HR Services, overseeing strong business case development, project scope and delivery outcomes and strong leadership and change management capabilities.    

• Accountable for the execution of the HR Operations strategic metrics dashboard including sourcing metrics and delivering reporting requirements through the team. 

• Accountable for building strong partnerships to enable HR Services agenda and valued outcomes. 

Business Process Excellence: 

• Uses data driven approaches, such as Lean Six Sigma and Agile methodologies, to identify strategic and value-based continuous improvement opportunities in HR Services, with our Regional HR Operations Heads, with a focus on moving HR Services from 60 to 80% global standardization.  

• Shape and embed within business process excellence a laser focus on customer needs and feedback to improve our HR Services employee experience offering.  

• Accountable for the leadership of the HR Operations Continuous Improvement community including talent pool including sponsorship, promotion and increasing our functional capabilities in Lean Six Sigma to foster a culture of results based continuous improvement. 

• Accountable for the functions business process capability with a focus on strengthening our process excellence practices underpinning our strategic ambition and continuous improvement agenda. 

• Lead an expert team to deliver business process excellence in change projects and continuous improvement initiatives to drive end to end process simplification, standardization, and automation, as well as delivering well managed change management to educate on service and process changes. 

• Understand the unique opportunities and challenges of our Business Units and regions and the implications of doing business globally. 

Service Owner for defined group of global HR Services:

• Lead a team of expert Service Delivery Managers to execute services for a defined group of service domains with a focus on sustainable performance, rigorous compliance and cost control, strong supplier management and service excellence. 

• Lead the team to use empathy and design thinking to embed continuous feedback loops to evolve and refine service delivery performance. 

• Lead the team to manage and continually monitor the service budget seeking to optimize service levels, resources, and cost.  

• Lead the team to manage audits for the global services and ensuring execution of improvement actions. 

Leadership and Oversight: 

• Lead the HR Operations Excellence and Performance team with focus on stakeholder engagement, performance outcomes, customer centricity and continuous improvement

• Encourage and role model effective collaboration, interconnectivity, and process alignment with all areas of HR (i.e., between regional HR teams, in-country and global HR teams and external service providers).  

• Be an active member of the regional HR and global HR Operations community to develop our capabilities, celebrate achievements and tell our stories. 

• Role model desired behaviors including service mindset, customer centricity, project and operational discipline to create a high performing organization. 

Syngenta Group is one of the world’s leading sustainable agriculture innovation companies, with roots going back more than 250 years. Our 60,000 people across more than 100 countries strive every day to transform agriculture through tailor-made solutions for the benefit of farmers, society and our planet – making us the world’s most local agricultural technology and innovation partner. 

Syngenta Group is committed to operating at the highest standards of ethics and integrity. This is a commitment that we are making to investors, customers, society and employees. Syngenta Group is also committed to maintaining a workplace environment free from discrimination and harassment. 

Education:  

• Demonstration of rich on the job experience in the relevant skill areas needed to be successful in the role. 

• Strong verbal and written English communication skills is a must. 

• Strong collaboration and communication skills to build strong and positive relationships with regional and with global teams.  

Industry Acumen:  

• Significant HR service delivery experience, including leadership of a position at multi-country, regional or global level including virtual teams. 

• Experience in implementing HR projects and managing change in an international environment and matrix organization. 

• Experience and proven expertise in leading process design and implementation. 

Strategic Alignment:  

• Understands and aligns to the vision and direction of the organization.  

• Co-creates with stakeholders to develop successful strategies to deliver on our ambition.  

Execution & Results: 

• Manages performance by holding people accountable to effectively and efficiently complete work responsibilities.  

• Makes timely and sound decisions via data driven insights and applying accurate logic, appropriate knowledge, expertise, and common sense. 

Leadership:  

• Demonstrates understanding of personal strengths and opportunities for development with a focus on personal growth and continuous learning. 

• Attracts, develops, manages, and retains team members. 

• Influences and motivates others to contribute to the goals of the organization and articulates a compelling position.  

Critical success factors & key challenges: 

• Ability to leverage data driven insights to formulate strategic productivity projects and initiatives that enable sustained service excellence and performance. 

• Collaborating with multiple stakeholders and aligning to a shared goal. 

• Leading with an enterprise mindset to balance regional and global agendas. 

• Program transformation leadership and change management.