People Planning Lead

Our People Planning ambition is to:

• Unlock GroupM's broad spectrum of Talent to establish innovation teams and optimize Talent, matching people and casting teams to generate ideas and great work across North America
• Maximize our employee experience by putting people first, balancing career desires with business needs.
• Deliver on the "promise" of working for a network of career opportunities.
• Maintain a pulse on the talent supply chain by improving scoping, unlocking trapped capacity and shifting Talent across teams and brands.
• Partner with Global technology and data leadership to automate staff planning; leverage advanced technologies that predict upcoming opportunities for talent development, mitigation and assignments.
• Identify opportunities to bridge connectivity across the GroupM and WPP network.
• Establish OKR's that hold leaders and managers accountable for their people's optimal performance

We are looking for an individual to lead People Planning for Wavemaker.

More About the Role:

How we assign teams, how we grow our people, and how we match the skills of our teams with the needs of our clients is critical to our organizational success.  As a People Planning Agency Lead, you will be responsible for leading a strategic, business-critical resource management discipline at the market agency level.  Utilizing our workforce strategy for North America, you will identify opportunities to optimize our people’s work assignments, drive diverse casting and support long term growth for the company. You will partner with the North America People Planning Lead to ensure our regional People Planning platform is delivered through a tech-enabled, data-driven process.

This role will report into the North America People Planning Lead.

Your Key Responsibilities in the Role:

You will engage with agency leaders in your local market, establishing yourself as an integral part of the leadership team.

You will be responsible for:

• Overseeing assignment of the best agency teams to each client based on a real understanding of the requirements, the client agreement and the strengths of each member of the agency
• Partnering with business and capability leads, ensure the agency workforce is fully utilized against work that is both suitable for individual skills and supports individual professional development desires
• Ensuring transparency around staffing metrics (e.g., forecasted capacity reporting; utilization vs. realization; billability; future staffing trends)
• Mapping agency People Planning efforts to the North America People Planning workflow, process & best practices
• Ensures the implementation, compliance and governance of People Planning technology, partners with IT to ensure that tools are fit for purpose
• Aligning agency workforce metrics with regional reporting with People, Finance and Executive leadership
• Syncing People Planning with Talent Acquisition, ensuring all internal staffing options are exhausted before external searches begin
• Managing a team of People Planners in your agency
• Participating actively in building a community of People Planners across North America
• Maintaining a pulse on the talent supply by continually identifying and capacity and shifting Talent across client work
• Identifying opportunities to connect across all GroupM North America agencies and the WPP network.
• Establishing a culture for team collaboration, inspiration, improvement and active listening
• In addition to leading the agency team, this role may also be responsible for manage staffing needs across a portfolio of accounts and groups at times, particularly for new clients or where commercial structures are complicated.

Here are other aspects to the role:

Employee Partnership

• Support the employee experience by linking employee desires with client needs
• Advocate for employees, ensuring all levels of the organization prioritise employee growth and experience
• Contribute to increased employee satisfaction and retention by facilitating career fulling moves across GroupM

Executive Leadership

• Operate as a strategic partner to market agency Executive Leadership meetings and update key Operational metrics (Utilization, Realization, Talent Gaps etc.) through dashboard reporting
• Act as the first point of escalation for all local People Planning issues; partner with agency Leadership to achieve resolution.
• Provide guidance and thought leadership in People Planning subjects
• Provides confidential counsel to Executive leadership and Practice Leaders as to any Talent issues i.e. Overwork, mobility needs, underutilization

People Team Partnership

• Identify new opportunities for the staff, including a change of client for short- and long-term assignments
• Partnership with Talent Acquisition and People Teams to identify talent and skill gaps, prioritize open positions and gain internal financial approvals needed to begin the external hiring process
• Support long-term planning of hiring Talent by providing staffing trends, analyzing current and future utilization and future skills needs
• Participate in a regular cadence of meeting with your local People teams to identify growth opportunities for staff and provide input on promotion metrics
• Provides business context and input for Learning and Development teams to develop training programs
• Drive diversity of Talent into client and project teams – ensure casted Talent represents a diverse set of backgrounds, skillsets and expertise
• Maintain strict confidentiality in sensitive talent issues, taking action where needed to deliver against established action plans.

Business & Client Leadership Partnership

• Establish trust and ways of working with agency/division, client and discipline leadership to create proactive strategies to align the best talent to the work
• Partners with Business and Client Leaders in validating future skills against long term business objectives
• Provides context and input on suitability of available talent to work on client business
• Provides confidential context to Business Leaders on talent mobility issues
• Will act as escalation with talent conflicts across multiple business areas
• Monitor bandwidth and maximize utilization across clients and teams.

Finance & Commercial Partnership

• Partner with Finance to ensure accurate workforce management of sold work plans
• Ensures timely escalation with Finance in scenarios of over-servicing against sold plans
• Partners with Commercial leadership to ensure that New Business opportunities have accurate staffing plans and is pipelined in a structured way
• Proactively provides the Finance and Commercial leadership with key workforce metrics to help drive overall business profitability

Experience You bring to this role:

• Minimum 7  years previous experience in Talent Management/Resource Management/HR. Commercial, Project Management or Operations experience a plus
• Passion for critical and systems thinking
• Experience working in complex matrix organizational structures
• Demonstrable experience of managing a range of employment-related matters
• Confidence and ability to challenge and influence senior stakeholders
• A strong work ethic; able to work under pressure and juggle multiple responsibilities to meet deadlines and deliver results.
• Exceptional diligence and attention to detail as well as resourcefulness and quick, practical thinking in a demanding environment
• Affinity for numbers, leveraging a data-driven, analytical approach to decision making
• Ability to lead and inspire your team and peers
• Partnership and collaboration mindset
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Proactivity and enthusiasm
• Keen problem solver
• Ability to diffuse and resolve difficult situations
• Demonstrable passion for all aspects of the agency’s business
• Strong skills in data reporting and analysis of people utilization
• Willingness to take on new challenges
• Natural & effective collaborator
• Good listener
• Detailed-oriented and reliable
• Empathy to our culture

GroupM is the world's leading media investment company responsible for more than $60B in annual media investment through agencies Mindshare, MediaCom, Wavemaker, Essence and m/SIX, as well as the outcomes-driven programmatic audience company, Xaxis.  GroupM's portfolio includes Data & Technology, Investment and Services, all united in vision to shape the next era of media where advertising works better for people. By leveraging all the benefits of scale, the company innovates, differentiates and generates sustained value for our clients wherever they do business. Within our business, the People Planning function is critical to achieving that vision.