Market View

Adaptive HR in a Dynamic World: Navigating Diversity, Jurisdiction, and the Modern Workforce

Interview with

Claire Vaughan

People & Culture Director, St John Ambulance

About Claire Vaughan

Claire Vaughan serves as the Director of People and Culture for St John Ambulance, responsible for steering the HR strategy and culture journey. She aims to support and empower employees and volunteers alike to feel engaged and build a sense of belonging at St John. Specifically, Mrs. Vaughan sets direction for the people services team, ensures alignment with strategic ambitions and delivery priorities, and drives the organisation's culture to becoming more compassionate, inclusive, safe and connected. As head of people operations, she plays a key leadership role on culture, strategic priorities, and empowering organisational success.

How has the evolving nature of work impacted your HR strategies, technology and processes?

The innovations and shifts driving the future of work are leading us to revisit how we are structured as a team and as a people and culture operation. It's more important than ever to have an understanding and increased awareness around the importance and connection between recognition, how people feel about work (which is changing), generational differences and other factors impacting wellbeing, happiness and engagement across the organisation.

Consequently, we advocate for a forward-thinking relationship between our employees and leadership - one that honours the independence of employees in determining when, where, and how they accomplish their work. We measure achievement by goals and outcomes, not merely presence at a desk. Successfully establishing hybrid work policies requires that we recognise the shift in expectations around purpose and meaning at work.

With our significant volunteer base of c20,000 people, it’s imperative that we continuously engage to understand the changing nature of volunteer availability, expectations and motivations in a post-pandemic world. We strive to lead by example - adapting our strategies to mirror the human-centred, compassionate approaches we wish to see represented across our organisation.

How does your organisation navigate the complexities of operating under multiple jurisdictions with varying localisation requirements and business processes?

For St John, this is about the challenges of navigating the intricacies of operating on a national and regional basis, with diverse localised needs; where it's crucial to find the right balance between centralised oversight and control, and local autonomy and decision making, while also ensuring consistency and connection across the charity.

Accordingly, we are developing a new operating model strategy to reduce bureaucracy and actively shift the balance of ownership to empower frontline volunteering units to deliver first aid to their communities. Concurrently, we are committed to maintaining a centralised steer and focus on some of our non-negotiables such as organisational values and culture.

In doing so, we hope this rebalancing will support ground-level decision making agility, through decentralised mobilisation of regional insights and resources. By shifting autonomy to where competencies and knowledge are strongest, we are renewing our commitment to operate both as a conscientious organisation and as steadfast community collaborators.

In what ways does your organisation address the challenges posed by such a diverse, decentralised workforce?

Our dispersed and decentralised workforce – encompasses a diverse range of employees and volunteers - which presents us with cultural complexity alongside richness. Hailing from myriad cultures and backgrounds, our volunteers infuse a dynamic range of expectations and outlooks into our organisational culture.

We have established people networks, where passionate advocates drive advancement and engagement on a range of subjects with staff and volunteers across the organisation. They aid vital communication across our dispersed geography utilising technology, however we are mindful that not all parts of our community engage in the same way, to the same level, nor are all parts of St John as visibly diverse as we would like, yet. While disseminating information to such dispersed teams can be challenging, our focus on inclusion moves us towards solutions - strengthening bonds through representation.

What are the top 2 or 3 priorities when considering an HR solution?

I think the most important considerations for an HR solution are user-friendliness, flexible integration capability, and that it can be adapted and customised to the unique needs of the organisation.

Having a user interface that is intuitive is important as people are accustomed to the user-friendliness of consumer grade applications. If the HR system is clunky and hard to navigate, it will impact user adoption. Our goal is to encourage broad utilisation of the technology and to remove barriers to productivity.

Equally vital is the HR system’s ability to integrate with the business systems that we have in place, so that we may consolidate disjointed datasets to support holistic, contextualised analysis. It’s important that HR can create compelling data-driven narratives for our strategic decision makers. Ideally, I want to be able to triangulate data rather than looking at things like people metrics in isolation.

Above all, we will prioritise responsive and adaptive HR technologies that empower and evolve alongside our unique organisational requirements. Rigid systems that cannot adapt, or that require us to conform to a prescribed process, are incompatible with a culture valuing autonomy, innovation and growth. The solutions we implement today must prepare future generations for human-centred collaboration on their terms.

I’ve seen digital transformation work well where people & culture have a pivotal role in the design and implementation. It’s essential to listen to our user community and to design and co-create the system to meet their needs. Because it's the people that will make it work, along with leadership buy-in. Embarking on a technology roadmap with HR and people & culture at the centre is critical to success.

How important is it for an HCM solution to be adaptive in current business conditions?

Adaptability remains the most important consideration for HR technology solutions. Utilising a flexible HR platform is crucial for enabling connectivity, responsiveness and continuous improvement, and ultimately driving business insights and development needs.

Internally coaching growth mindsets, supporting managed risk, trying new things and swiftly course correcting when necessary, I believe this fuels our organisational agility. As does leading with empathy, and building connectivity with people.

When we think about HCM, we think about understanding how best to cultivate performance, embedding care for people in systems and processes, championing potential plus purpose, and removing friction - and so, having agile technology that supports this is foundational.

In today’s world of work, we need systems that can stretch and adapt to accommodate all the nuances, custom processes and bespoke policies that each organisation develops to support their unique needs.

About St John Ambulance

St John Ambulance is a leading first aid training and volunteering charity dedicated to providing medical support and ambulance services across the UK. Founded in 1877, it has a long history of teaching first aid skills and providing volunteers to support communities at public events and during crisis situations. With over 30,000 volunteers, 1,500 employees, and 15,000 young people learning first aid skills each year, St John Ambulance makes a real difference through its training programs and community service. As the nation’s leading first aid charity, it plays a vital role in equipping the public to save lives through first aid education and frontline medical provision during challenging times.