Claire has very strong Employee Relations and Trade Union experience which have supported the resolution of a number of significant challenges including two Trade Disputes, one of which resulted in Industrial Action for a national retailer.   Whilst this was disruptive to the business, Claire ensured there was minimal impact to both the customer and brand through excellent stakeholder management and coaching of the senior leadership team.  She has over 20 years of experience in working with Trade Unions and is well versed in collective bargaining, pay negotiations, and facilities agreements.

In a similar vein, Claire has led numerous change management programmes including TUPE, redundancy, changes to terms & conditions, site closures and relocations, and business divestments.

Claire has led on numerous Talent and Resourcing Programmes to ensuring structures and talent within business is future fit.  She worked on the formulation of a framework for a major retailers’ promotional panels which gave robustness and structure to the promotion process which historically has been somewhat subjective.  In addition, she implemented a process for an international supply chain organisation which saw the sharing of high potential talent between themselves and their retail customers as part of their structured development.  In order to understand the current external thinking on talent and retention, Claire is part of several industry forums to debate and share best practice.

The sectors in which Claire has predominantly operated within are traditionally male dominated which means that throughout her career, she has spent a significant amount of time leading Diversity Strategies, particularly around gender.  This has included introducing female succession planning programmes and networking groups, gender pay gap reporting and equity in reward strategies, and a focus on more female-led policies.  Claire developed and implemented one of the first Workplace Menopause Policies in the UK for a national infrastructure company.

Claire has spent many years devising Health & Wellbeing Strategies which she has developed and implemented from their infancy.  Claire’s approach is one of Total Wellbeing and ensures that the four key pillars of wellbeing; mental & emotional, physical, financial and social, are all addressed in her people plans.

Many of Claire’s reward programmes have become integral in the delivery of People Strategy. She overhauled the benefits provider cost base of a national infrastructure business, putting the pension scheme, life assurance and private healthcare policies out to re-tender to ensure the business is maximising the value of the schemes for their employees.  She introduced pension salary sacrifice to support the business’ financial wellbeing plans and additionally created a holiday buying policy, again via salary sacrifice, which allowed employees to further support their work-life balance and mental and emotional wellbeing.