Jasvier Boyal
Director of HR
Big Lottery Fund
How did you get to your current role?
My career started off in local government, where I spent seven years working in a mixture of policy and operational roles. Then I moved to Barnardo's where I was a Regional HR Manager five years and National HR Operations Manager for two years, responsible for 8 managers covering approximately 5,000 employees across the UK. I then became HR Director of Operations at the Learning and Skills Council overseeing a harmonisation and business reshaping programme. Finally, I have been at the Big Lottery Fund for the past three years. I have an MBA, an MSC in Strategic HRM, I am a Fellow of the CIPD and Level A and B qualified with the British Psychological Institution.
What does your job involve?
As HR Director, I lead the HR function, to ensure it is aligned with the business, to raise capability and improve organisational effectiveness. This raised significant challenges over the past three years, including developing and implementing a HR Strategy, restructuring a significant part of the business, based on a new business model and reshaping HR based on the Ulrich model, including implementing self service, establishing a shared service and organisational development function to support the business.
What do you enjoy most about your job?
Variety. I have a strong focus on strategy, which is followed through the implementation and evaluation stage. Our business managers are demanding customers and therefore, HR has had to demonstrate not only it's strategic creditability, but that it can deliver on the basic, without which, HR creditability can be undermined.
What has been your greatest achievement within your career?
Too many to mention, but in no particular order, managing a significant change programme at the Learning Skills Council; securing Investors in People at BIG within a year; being short listed for a Personnel Today Award; and being listed as a Best Companies "One to Watch" and reshaping and re-engineering the HR function within BIG, at a time when business as usual had to be maintained and new processes and ways of working introduced.
What are your aspirations for the future?
To ensure People issues remain on top of organisational agenda and support the development of talent and distributive leadership, to create organisational capacity to respond to business change. This requires a HR function that is agile and responsive to change, whilst getting the basic rights and supporting managers to develop their people management capabilities.
What advice would you give to those interested in a management or executive career within the public sector?
Remain open and receptive to change, seek out new opportunities that takes you out of your comfort zone and understand your business, so as to plan and respond to it's ever changing needs.
www.biglotteryfund.co.uk