People profile: Nicola Duffell

Nicola's story

As an HR business partner, you never quite know who you’re going to meet. My career has involved working with and gaining knowledge in many areas of HR, including setting HR strategy, learning and development, reward, HR processes, performance management, organisational design/effectiveness, HR systems, project management, recruitment, communications and employee relations.

I made the decision to pursue a career in HR after completing my degree in business studies.

In the right company, you can gain a huge breadth of experience of the business through your role in HR, while at the same time getting exposure to a wide variety of HR functional elements.

When I first came out of university I thought HR was a 'people' function, but I quickly realised that you need to be commercially minded, understand the business and be able to deliver solutions that enable the business to meet its objectives. HR is a truly fundamental part to any organisation and the role of the HR Business Partner is diverse and exciting.

HR challenges

You must be prepared to stand up for what you believe in and get used to delivering difficult messages to a wide range of people - at times you need to remind business leaders that their decisions impact people’s lives and the lives of their families, hence no people decision should be taken lightly. You will get bombarded with many challenges and sometimes conflicting demands so the ability to prioritise, juggle and work at a pace is crucial.

Career advice and tips for success

Communication, relationship management and influencing skills are key to this role, the ability to manage and utilise formal and informal channels is a key path to success. You must understand the business, its culture, history, market and local context to be able to produce effective solutions. Keen analytical skills and a relentless focus on delivery of business outputs is critical. Look for role models, seek out managers and sponsors (both HR and operational) who will challenge your thinking, give you stretch opportunities and support you to succeed.

Career highlights

Working through a demerger and the creation of a new business’ people policies, the subsequent implementation of these and the resulting people implications during the BT Cellnet demerger and emergence of O2.

Working in a regulated, mature and potentially declining business with BT Payphones and seeing how the right people practices can foster genuine motivation and innovation within the workforce.

Working on a massive cultural transformation programme to drive improvements in both individual and business performance in Sales Call Centres with BT Retail and, most importantly, seeing how my efforts helped the business achieve a 10 per cent performance uplift in the first year.