Episode 28 - Employee Experience: Interview With HR Expert, Caroline Shine

Caroline Shine is a strategic Head of HR & L&D with an amazing track record of leading employee engagement strategy and HR. Caroline has worked with GANT, Rush Hair, A.S. Watson, and Austin Reed. In this interview, we get to dive into her wisdom of upgrading the employee experience.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to Sticky Interviews. I'm Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. We are the provider of leadership development and soft skills training to the grocery and manufacturing industry. The idea of these interviews is to share great ideas, great concepts, and great ways these skills are being used to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do. Welcome to the show.

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to today's Sticky Interview with me, Nathan Simmonds, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, Making Business Matter, the home of Sticky Learning. And today I have the privilege and honor as well to be interviewing Caroline Shine. She's a HR head of with an exemplary career history in a plethora of well known brands, organizations and companies including Austin Reed Group, Rush Hair Limited, AS Watson Group, which you may not know from that name, but from some of their brands on the high street in multiple countries around the world, you definitely would though, and more recently GANT Global as well. With her successes there being numerous and illuminous, by leading a complete culture change, helping them to get more focused on their values and behaviors, she has reduced absence cost by 60K in one year and reduced recruitment cost by a further 70,000 pounds. And at the same time improved employee engagement from plus 11 to plus 59 points in the time that she was there.

Nathan Simmonds:

With this level of experience I wanted to dive into all things employee engagement talking about culture, talking about the ideas and implementations to make this work. And I wanted to dig in and share her experiences in this interview. First and foremost Caroline, thank you very much for your time. Thank you for being here. Really appreciate it.

Caroline Shine:

Thank you for having me.

Nathan Simmonds:

Look, first question with me is always the same. Why do you do what you do?

Caroline Shine:

I think I do what I do because I'm absolutely passionate about all things people. But it's also about seeing results from all my interventions with people. So to see somebody go through a leadership program for example, and to get the feedback from that individual who has been with the business 19 years, never had any training, and to see his leadership score go up and up. But not only that, he tells me that his relationship with his wife has even got better. It's those kind of personal what they do, not just at work but what I see people improve on a personal level. And that's amazing to hear.

Nathan Simmonds:

It is. And I know this feeling because I've been in training rooms and sometimes it's the most difficult person in the training room. And you're having that conversation. You're just, "Really bloody hell. It's like pulling teeth in this conversation." And then for some reason you go back maybe a month later, it's me when I'm in the training room, or two months later or whatever, and it's, "Ah. I remember you," she says. And she says to me, "By the way I'm having less stress at home." And I'm, "That's the best thing in the world ever."

Caroline Shine:

Yep. Yeah.

Caroline Shine - strategic head of HR and Learning and Development

 

Nathan Simmonds:

And the other thing that comes up for me is do you know what? I hear a lot of people that the common [inaudible 00:03:33] response is when people say, "I'm in HR." "Why?" "Because I like people." And actually for me personally I've met a lot of HR people where actually it's not ...