Market View
Adaptive HR in a Dynamic World: Navigating Diversity, Jurisdiction, and the Modern Workforce
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Interview with
Angela Buxton
Executive Director for People
Citizens Advice
About Angela Buxton
Angela Buxton serves as the Executive Director for People at Citizens Advice, overseeing human resources functions for the national office and supporting a network of approximately 240 independent local offices. Her role encompasses managing HR of about 1000 colleagues, providing learning content, enhancing Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion capabilities, transforming volunteering experiences, and overseeing communications and engagement across the organisation. Through her leadership, Buxton plays a pivotal role in ensuring Citizens Advice is an exemplary place to work and volunteer, while also supporting the broader network of federated charities.
How has the evolving nature of work impacted your HR strategies, technology, and processes?
The pandemic has fundamentally changed our work, and it's unlikely we'll return to the previous state. At Citizens Advice, we've embraced positive developments in technology and virtual work capabilities while facing significant challenges in maintaining a unified culture and ensuring colleague resilience and health.
We've observed a shift towards individuals prioritising their own needs, making leadership through change more challenging. In response, we've focused on understanding the workplace from our colleagues' perspective, creating tailored experiences to their needs. Our HR team emphasises employee experience frameworks, co-creating solutions with colleagues, and engaging in deeper, more frequent, and meaningful conversations beyond occasional engagement surveys.
Our priority is creating meaningful employee experiences rather than just delivering services and policies, ensuring our work effectively meets the needs of our colleagues. We aim to address significant aspects of our colleagues' work life, creating the right conditions for their success and our work's impact.
How do you navigate the challenges of a decentralised workforce, including remote work and varied office locations?
Our main challenge is supporting our network of approximately 240 independent charities. While they all agree to a membership to join the Citizens Advice movement, we don't have direct control over these organisations. To address this, we've focused on fostering collaboration and generating insights organically.
For Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), we facilitate communities of interest and practice rather than issuing guidelines. This approach encourages skill exchanges, idea generation, and the sharing of best practices, adopting a more viral strategy for change rather than top-down enforcement.
Our strategy leans towards winning hearts and minds, sharing effective practices in practical ways. This approach has been relatively successful, but we're always exploring how our small national team can further influence practices across the network.
Regarding remote work, we've chosen not to mandate office returns. Instead, we've focused on understanding what we've lost and encouraged leaders to rebuild community and connection with considerable freedom. Trusting our people is fundamental.
However, the shift towards a more atomised culture challenges fostering organisational belonging. It's harder to gauge success with predominantly virtual interactions. Engaging people behind a vision without physical presence is more difficult, with tendencies for 'quiet quitting' and 'camera off' effects.
This shift towards higher work expectations and more self-preservation complicates creating a cohesive, resilient organisation. Leadership resilience has been particularly tested, with burnout from the pandemic and other global events.
In the charity sector, our mission-driven nature heightens expectations for the organisation to provide belonging and purpose. This places significant pressure on meeting everyone's needs, a considerable challenge.
How do you see the future of HR management evolving?
HR teams are continuously adapting to the rapidly changing work landscape. It's crucial not to assume old methods will suffice, yet getting the basics right in HR remains unchanged. This includes developing policies that reflect and reinforce organisational culture, rather than acting as a policing force.
Ensuring compliance is another non-negotiable aspect, with tightening regulations around GDPR, employment law, and information security raising non-compliance stakes. Despite this, many HR teams still use outdated one-size-fits-all solutions based on minimal user analysis.
A shift towards agile methodologies and adaptive HR technology is evident, focusing on enhancing specific aspects of the employee experience and advocating for continuous improvement. Yet, HR often underestimates the importance of deeply understanding the organisation from employees' and volunteers' perspectives.
The future of HR likely involves roles not traditionally associated with the field, such as user research, design, and systemic change management. These roles emphasise a holistic approach to workplace improvement, moving beyond traditional HR confines.
These considerations will shape HR's future, focusing on agility, compliance, and a deeper connection with workforce needs and experiences.
How significant is the role of technology in keeping your HR strategies up-to-date and effective?
Technology should play a larger role in people operations, facilitating a seamless organisational experience by streamlining recruitment, internal movement, and overall employee experience through efficient automation.
Flexibility and adaptability in our HR platform are paramount. The ability to evolve based on feedback and continuous improvement is essential, treating the platform as a product needing regular updates. Establishing a solid vendor relationship is crucial, as is the system's flexibility and evolution capacity. It is crucial to select the solution that can adapt to your evolving needs, and to choose a vendor who will partner with you and with whom you can manage the relationship effectively.
Enhancing employee experience with technology involves constant listening, adapting, and feedback gathering. It's crucial to discern when the human touch is necessary—understanding when and where personal interaction makes a difference, such as during onboarding or induction, to bring a process to life. I favour a "target interaction model," shifting focus from mere operation to interaction, automating routine tasks while identifying moments benefiting from personal touch throughout the employee lifecycle.
We've begun exploring how we might redesign our services and processes in my team to not only be efficient but also genuinely human-centred. However, achieving this goal is an ongoing journey, and we're still working towards it.
About Citizens Advice
Citizens Advice is a renowned UK-based network of independent charities offering free, confidential advice to individuals on their rights and responsibilities. Established in 1939, it has grown to include a federation of around 240 local offices, staffed by volunteers and professionals dedicated to providing support on legal, debt, consumer, housing, and employment matters. Through its commitment to equality and justice, Citizens Advice plays a critical role in empowering individuals to navigate complex problems, fostering a more informed and resilient society.
