HR Headliners – Kelly Singleton – CPO at Aryza Group

In the latest edition of our HR Headliners series, Kerry White, Executive Search lead at Macmillan Davies talks to Kelly Singleton, CPO at Aryza Group, a global FinTech organisation, about her career to date, using data to drive the people and business agenda forwards and how they plan to use more sophisticated data in their decision making going forward.

Tell us about your career to date.

I started out working in retail for Iceland as a Graduate, before deciding I wanted a career in HR. That was a pivotal moment in my career when I met the CHRO and mentioned my interest in the profession. Within weeks I found myself working in a generalist HR role at HQ, learning a lot, and really enjoying myself. From there, I have moved around industries to diversify and learn as much as possible, and I have also completed small stints in specialisms to help deepen my knowledge. For the most part, I gradually moved into more senior positions, taking on global remits, and exploring how to hone and apply my expertise to meet the challenges of the companies I worked for.

Having worked in retail, healthcare, automotive, aviation, finance and tech, I can safely say I have found my niche and I love working in the tech industry, even some 10 years down the line. I love the nuanced challenges you face and fintech is yet another new challenge.

How have your first six months as CPO at Aryza been?

Extraordinary! I have been blown away by the culture here and how welcoming and collegiate my colleagues have been. It has been a whirlwind getting up to speed with the Group, its various locations, products and ways of working. It is a company that has grown rapidly in recent years through organic growth as well as through acquisition, and that usually brings additional opportunity and challenge in roles such as this. Understanding the current landscape is important when determining where you want to go, and so the first 2-3 months I spent undertaking a fishbowl exercise where I sought to learn more about the culture, ways of working and where we could potentially seek to streamline and improve the EVP. This was ultimately a 360 exercise that enabled me to draft a well-informed People Plan and one that will hopefully take us to where we need to be.

I drafted the plan back in April, and once I received the green light from my Executive colleagues, I moved to implement a new operating model for the People Team. Now having hired into the key roles, and having the team playing in the right space, I am seeing traction on delivery against the plan. We have an ambitious agenda for the next 18 months or so, and in addition to that we need to have the agility to respond at pace to ever-emerging business priorities. This is where a clear roadmap comes in, along with laser focus and a skilled and motivated team. It is a lot of hard work and is incredibly fast-paced, but it is also very rewarding.

You’re a huge fan of using data to drive the people and business agenda forwards. What does data mean to you?

The first thing I asked for was an analyst role. Due to our varying systems, processes and data management across the Group, I saw this as a critical hire. We are midway through rolling out a new people system, Personio, and I wanted somebody who could not only support the delivery of this project, but also own our systems, digital processes and data for the whole Group. We need one source of data, and it should be managed/owned by a specialist in my view. This role is helping us to streamline our data landscape, ensuring its accuracy and security, and providing real insights to help us to make forward looking decisions. Of course, it can be useful to analyse data at a point in time, however, the focus should not be on retrospective reporting. The focus should be on the future and how we use our data to make meaningful decisions that will be great for our people but also for the company and its commercial success. This spans everything we do in our profession and is how we help companies make the right decisions.

How have you embedded people data into your board meetings and what difference have you seen in feedback?

I used quantitative and qualitative data right from the off, and this had an internal and external lens. I spend the first hour of every day reading about what is happening in the world, not just in the world of HR but also in business, the economy, demographics etc. I share this with my team and with my peers where I think it can add value. I like to use the external in approach to ensure we are always evolving, and we are considering new ways of doing things where we believe it can add real value.

I believe this is how I achieved such a supportive response to the People Plan and the new operating model. Using data always helps to bring understanding, but also to weigh up the pros and cons of taking one direction or another.

We have of course developed a dashboard for the Board which we use to track key people metrics. However, next year things get more interesting as we overlay much more sophisticated data concerning culture, DE&I, talent, etc. This can actually help us to predict outcomes by mapping, for example, how engaged a top-performing, high-potential female colleague is, versus her likelihood to want to move internally or externally in the next 12 months. When doing this at scale, great stuff happens, as you start to enable leaders to focus on key actions proactively, rather than taking reactive steps. You can apply this to pretty much anything if you have the right tools and skillset. I am a bit of a workforce /skills planning geek too, but I won’t bore you with that.

How did you overcome any challenges or objections from the business?

I have found my colleagues to be incredibly supportive, but I genuinely believe it is because I did the groundwork and went in with a well-founded plan. The challenge has not been to obtain support for the change and improvements my team and I want to drive, but trying to prioritise what should happen and when. In such a dynamic environment and with multiple senior stakeholders it can be a challenge to keep focused on the priorities. This does mean referring back to the plan sometimes and sidelining new activity, and on other occasions, it means reprioritising because there is an emerging business priority that takes precedence. However, the good news is how much passion and energy there is around the People & Culture agenda. It is a good problem to have.

We can all see that using HR MI/data is here to stay and if anything, it is becoming a pre-requisite for all HR professionals wanting to have a voice at the top table. What advice would you give to those who have maybe shied away from data or think they don’t have an analytic mindset?

I could take a hard or a soft line on this one. I feel personally, that we need to have this in our toolkit and so I took 18 months of my early career to specialise and develop more in this area. I think it is a skill that can and should be learned, and to varying degrees. I don’t think we all need to be data scientists. You don’t have to be an Excel guru or a mathematical genius to be able to analyse and draw insights from data. Like learning anything new it requires application and a willingness to learn.

Having said that, if it really is not your thing, then you need somebody on your team who does have this skillset. I am pretty strong in this space, but I do not get complacent, and I like to have somebody in the team whose focus and specialism this is.

And finally, what was the best piece of career advice you’ve ever been given?

If you are too comfortable in your role you are probably ready for something new or something bigger.

Get in touch

Should you wish to have a confidential chat with Kerry White to discuss the current HR market or your search for work/recruiting into your team, please contact her directly at kwhite@mdhr.co.uk

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