People Systems Manager

Leeds – Hybrid (2-3days in office)

Salary: Competitive - depending on experience

Permanent

 

Summary

This role is pivotal role at the heart of our HR and Payroll transformation journey. As the driving force behind the governance, performance and evolution of our Dayforce platform, you'll play a key role in delivering the HR and Payroll Strategic Plan and shaping how technology supports our people.

You'll lead the resolution of complex system challenges, champion innovation, and continuously enhance the employee and manager experience. By challenging traditional ways of working and identifying opportunities to streamline, automate, and optimise processes, you'll help unlock greater efficiency, improve data driven decision making, and ensure our system evolve in line with the needs of our growing and changing organisation.

You'll lead a team of system analysts, providing strategic and technical oversight to ensure the integrity, performance, and future-readiness of the HR and Payroll system.

You'll take ownership for managing all people system developments and changes, implementing a structured change control process, and ensuring high standards of testing, documentation, and user adoption.

Beyond systems and processes, you'll champion for user capability and engagement. Through targeted training, coaching, and support, you'll help colleagues maximise the value of our people systems, fostering a culture of self service, continuous improvement, and digital innovation.

This is a highly strategic and technically demanding role, requiring strong leadership, a deep understanding of HRIS and payroll systems, and the ability to translate complex requirements into practical, high-impact system solutions.

Some of the key deliverables for this role will include:

• Serve as the senior functional across the HR and Payroll systems function, providing strategic direction and expert guidance to stakeholders across all business areas, ensuring optimal utilisation of the HRIS platform to support organisational goals.
• Align systems development and service enhancements with the broader strategic direction of the organisation, ensuring that technological investments are future-ready and contribute measurable value.
• Ensure that the HRIS remains fit-for-purpose and responsive to business strategy, through structured roadmap planning and collaboration with executive leadership.
• Lead a strategic review of existing business processes and system functionality, identifying opportunities for process reengineering and digital transformation.
• Govern the delivery of system enhancements and process optimisation initiatives, ensuring they are aligned to business objectives and delivered to high standards of quality, consistency, and customer satisfaction
• Oversee the resolution of escalated technical and service issues from the Helpdesk, ensuring consistent alignment with departmental SLAs and maintaining high standards of service continuity.
• Provide high-level escalation management for complex technical or service issues, continuously evaluating service performance and identifying risks to data quality or delivery.
• Assume full ownership of all system patches, upgrades, and scheduled maintenance, orchestrating cross-functional communication and alignment to mitigate disruption and ensure successful deployment maximising business value
• Act as the Data Steward for HR and Payroll, ensuring that all management information and personal data are handled in accordance with GDPR and broader information governance frameworks
• Champion system training, capability building, and data governance practices across the organisation.
• Develop a continuous improvement culture by identifying and implementing enhancements to optimise user efficiency and uphold data integrity.
• Lead the definition and prioritisation of user requirements, acting as a trusted advisor to senior HR and Payroll stakeholders in designing scalable solutions.
• Build and sustain strong, collaborative relationships with key stakeholders and specialist functions, serving as the primary interface between business needs and systems capability
• Serve as the key relationship owner with the HRIS vendor (Dayforce), representing the organisation in product forums, release previews, and enhancement workshops.
• Identify gaps and opportunities within the system, providing detailed feedback to the vendor and actively promoting internal initiatives to secure community support for high-impact development requests.
• Provide strategic leadership to the People Systems Team, ensuring high performance, strong engagement, and a culture of accountability.
• Direct workforce planning, recruitment, team structuring, and long-term performance strategies to ensure consistent delivery and business value.

What we're looking for:

• Expert knowledge of HR/Payroll systems (ideally Dayforce or similar)
• Significant experience of HR and Payroll systems, within a large and complex organisation
• Proven experience of managing a team
• Solid knowledge of SAP HCM or equivalent employee systems
• Knowledge of SQL, XML Writing, Excel skills
• Ability to see the ‘whole’ picture understand the dependencies and deliver practical solutions
• Problem solving skills.
• Experience of providing administrative support to projects
• Good communication
• Practical experience of supporting/leading on CI projects
• Testing experience

Benefits:

We're always evolving our benefits to ensure we're attracting and retaining great people.  Some of what you can expect includes:

• Pension with a leading provider and up to 8% employer contribution
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
• Personal Wellbeing and Volunteer Days
• Private Medical Insurance
• Salary sacrifice car scheme (Hybrid/Electric Vehicle)
• Free 24/7 365 Employee Assistance Program to support mental health and well-being (including counselling sessions and legal advice)
• Flexible benefits to suit from Dental Insurance, Gym Memberships, Give As You Earn, Travel Insurance, Tax Free Bikes.
• Personal development programme

 

 

Next Steps:

As a business, we’re on a journey to build on our culture where everyone is included, treated fairly and with respect. This starts with recruitment and how we bring people into the organisation.

We’ll do our best to outline the recruitment process to you ahead of time with plenty of notice. If you require any accommodations to participate in the application or interview process, please let us know and we will work with you to ensure your needs are met. 

We are a Disability Confident Employer and awarded Gold Standard in the Armed Forces Covenant.

About Us:

We are one of the leading independent engineering and services businesses in the UK. Founded in 1921, with a turnover of £500m and 3000 employees, we are proud of our history of developing great people through our investment in training.

Working across a variety of sectors within the building and infrastructure industry, our innovative, responsible and forward-thinking approach allows us to work on fantastic ground-breaking projects, providing solutions using the latest tools and technologies.

Progression is something we value, and we will make sure that when you join us you have a clearly defined development path, supported by regular reviews, training and ongoing support to enable you to be the best you can be.

 

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