Leadership spotlight: Director of People Propositions & Engagement

In this series we will hear from the Senior Leadership Team at Three about the latest activity across the company and a little about the people behind the projects.

Vital stats

• Name: Jess Tilley
• Job title: Director of People Propositions & Engagement (UK & ROI)
• Function: People
• Tenure:           At Three since February 2018

Tell us a bit about your background

I started my career in HR age 16 when I was fortunate enough to be supported in completing an apprenticeship and then a part-time degree in Human Resource Management, alongside gaining valuable work experience. I went on to work across different sectors, both in house and as an external consultant, predominantly as an HR generalist within the People Business Partner space but also specialising in Talent, OD, Change and even B2B Sales along the way. What’s been a constant throughout my career is my fascination in psychology and how you can help individuals, teams and organisations fulfil their potential, whether in my own team or the wider business through the work my team does. That’s what gets me out of bed every day.

In a nutshell, describe your role and how you support our business objectives

I lead a fantastic team who are here to help our employees live happier, healthier and more fulfilled lives. The team has accountability for:

• Employee Engagement (culture, values, employee surveys, employee forum)
• People Propositions (recognition, wellbeing, time out, flexible working, diversity, inclusion & belonging); and
• Reward (pay, benefits, bonus, job evaluations and grading).

Together with the rest of the People team, we support our business objectives by ensuring everything we do helps us to create a Better Me, a Better Us and a Better Three by:

1. Attracting, retaining and developing the best talent
2. Fostering an engaging, inclusive high-performance culture; and
3. Championing a future ready organisation.

None of our business objectives are achieved without our brilliant people.

What is the main ambition of your team for 2021?

We have lots of exciting plans this year but our main ambition for 2021 is to support the business in keeping our employees engaged through the challenges of the pandemic, while creating our Future of Work propositions, where hybrid working and flexibility are core to our ways of working. Wellbeing, recognition, diversity, inclusion and belonging all play a key role in that ambition too.

March has been a busy month for the People team. One key area of focus was our gender pay gap and International Women’s Day. Can you explain why this is so important to Three, and to you?

Publishing our gender pay report gives us the chance to focus specifically on ensuring that we have taken positive steps forward in closing the gap as part of our wider commitment to creating an inclusive and diverse culture. Within the report we share the figures themselves, as well as a reflection on the year gone by and make commitments to what we will focus on for the year ahead. We hosted a number of insightful and inspiring internal activities and talks, focused on this year’s #ChooseToChallenge theme. Creating an inclusive culture, where we all feel a strong sense of belonging, is core to my personal value set and to those of the organisation, so International Women’s Day and our gender pay gap is one of the ways we can demonstrate our commitment to building a diverse organisation. It’s great to see the progress we’ve made in society but there’s more to do, particularly to encourage more women into STEM careers.