Senior Internal Communications Business Partner - Operations

Location: We're flexible with where the successful candidate is based, but you'll need to be comfortable commuting to either our London or Bristol office when required.

We launched in 2009 with a mission to change energy for the better. Since then, we’ve welcomed more than a million members, planted a million trees, and set our sights on helping save the planet.

As a Group, we’re working to become a net zero carbon business by 2030, while helping our OVO Energy members halve their carbon footprints at the same time.
Green energy and technology are great tools to fight the climate crisis with. But it’s people power that will rewrite history.

So we’re building a zero carbon team inside and out. Of people who share our values, feel inspired by our mission, and want to make change happen. When you work for OVO, it’s not just a job. It’s the work of a lifetime. And we want the sharpest minds to help.

Up for the challenge?

Where in the world of OVO will I be working? 

You’ll be working in the People Engagement team, part of the wider People function. We’re responsible for designing and delivering a proactive, dynamic engagement strategy to help us become the leading place to work for people who want to change the world.

We help people to connect to and be inspired by our purpose, share in our values and become advocates of our mission to drive progress towards zero carbon living.

What will I be doing?

As Senior Operations Engagement Business Partner, you’ll help our people connect to our purpose, live our values and become advocates for OVO.

You’ll help drive engagement and alignment behind OVO’s strategic business priorities, helping create clarity for people on their contribution to these. You’ll lead a newly formed team of business partners who will help make sure that we deliver our People Engagement Strategy by partnering with the leaders and teams across the business to help people connect to our mission and purpose, and do their best work. 

You’ll report to the Director of People Engagement, and work closely with our Chief Operating Officer helping them deliver effective communications that facilitate two-way engagement with our people. You’ll also provide comms consultancy and develop and deliver critical communications programmes across the business.

You’ll be key in making sure that the work the People Engagement team does makes sense for our people  and is tailored as necessary for hard to reach audiences. That’s everything from content and campaigns, through to recognition, engagement and leadership strategy.

You’ll partner widely across a range of teams, who are key to the success of our employee engagement strategy, and build relationships across an extensive network of leaders and colleagues. Key to all of this is bringing in the voice of our frontline teams to all we do, and own the heavy lifting we need to do to make sure we’re engaging these colleagues.

In this role you’ll be responsible for:

• Proactively supporting the Chief Operating Officer to deliver their vision for Operations with best in class engagement and internal communications support. You’ll be their first point of contact and quickly become a trusted adviser, building rapport, taking briefs, and understanding complex issues. You’ll know how to ask the right questions, gather intel from the business to craft engagement strategies and narratives that inform and inspire our people, and measure outputs to capture campaign success.
• Working closely with the People team to deliver the Ops people strategy. We’re going through a period of intense change following the integration of OVO and SSE, and we’ll need your creative brilliance and pragmatism to make sure everything in this space lands well with our 5,000 people.
• Working with the rest of the People Engagement team to make sure our engagement campaigns, content, channels and events drive maximum employee engagement with our people - especially those in hard to reach roles (customer services and field teams). This will often involve extensive partner management and rolling your sleeves up to make things work (you’ll have a team of two to help you).
• Leading on any people engagement projects or announcements that originate in Operations. This will range from devising and delivering engaging campaigns, to advising on any organisational development, to writing comms to go in weekly channels across the teams of all the leaders you support (again with help from your team).
• Always-on horizon scanning for the latest trends and standard methodology –  with a particular focus on enabling two-way conversation and driving employee engagement in a scheduled environment (call centres and field ops teams).
• Leading and supporting on ad-hoc engagement projects as directed by the Director of People Engagement.
• Leading a team of two - coaching, supporting and helping them do their best work.

Is this the job for me? 

This is a very fast-paced environment, and we need a serious self-starter who can spin a lot of plates at once. You're a level-headed specialist in your field, respected by all who you work with, and you're  enthusiastic in the face of challenge. You will;

• Have extensive experience in Internal Communications or People Engagement
• Have experience and a proven track record of dealing with significant periods of change and shaping the internal narrative around this
• Have experience delivering successful engagement campaigns, leading all aspects of a best-in class channel mix, including digital channels
• Be comfortable leading and rolling up your sleeves to get stuck in with delivery
• Have direct experience of, and comfort working into senior leadership. Highly skilled in providing advice to senior business leaders and adept at building trust quickly and retaining it through time
• Be a people person and a great teammate with low ego and high EQ - upbeat, positive and a welcome addition to every room
• Be highly organised, adept at managing multiple partners within complex and changing mosaic businesses with multiple Internal Comms processes and expectations
• Be an outstanding colleague, at your best when working within a collective to deliver a shared vision. Capable of building relationships fast and inspiring confidence in all around you
• Be a powerful and inspiring manager of people; able to lead by example and to encourage all of those who report into you to step up and improve their own professional output.

From us you’ll get*

• An annual discretionary bonus
• 4% of your salary to spend on flexible lifestyle benefits
• 5% matched employer contribution to your pension
• 25 days holiday + 1 for your birthday
• And many more... 

(*) Please note that certain benefits kick-in once you have passed probation which can be up to 6 months after your start date.

We want the best people 

At OVO, we empower our people to have choice around where and when they work - flexible working arrangements can be discussed for all of our roles. Please speak to the Talent Acquisition team for more info.

We’re keen to meet people with varied backgrounds - our view is the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. We want to build teams which represent a variety of experiences, perspectives and skills, and we recognise talent on the basis of merit and potential.

We understand some people may not apply for jobs unless they tick every box. If you're excited about joining us and think you have much of what we're looking for, even if you're not 100% sure… we'd love to hear from you.

Learn more about working in the OVO family of companies on our careers page and Glassdoor. We’re also delighted to have received a Top Employers certificate in 2018, 2019 and 2020!