Macmillan Meets… Daniel Rolph, HR Business Partner at Marie Curie

In this issue of ‘Macmillan Meets…’ Ant Coen spoke with Daniel Rolph, HR Business Partner at Marie Curie. Daniel started his career in the commercial sector before finding his passion lies in Not-for-Profit. Together they discuss some of the people challenges they are facing at Marie Curie and the transformation they undertaking, before Daniel shares his thoughts on the future of the HR function.

Tell me about your career to date

I started my HR career during college, we were the first students in the county to set up our own business as part of a pilot Young Enterprise Scheme. I arrived at the kick-off meeting 5 mins late, and by that time everyone had chosen their director roles and the only one left was HR. We had a sale or return jewellery business selling at local craft fairs and we won the regional championships. I then went on study HR at university.

Since that time, I’ve held various junior and advisory positions in the commercial sector which is where I was able to develop my core generalist skills. I then held my first senior role working for the start-up of a major entertainment company in the UK, supporting the opening of a world class venue and entertainment space in Greenwich, London.

This is really where my exposure for transformation and change kicked in, organisations were already establishing the Business Partner model, so this was the perfect opportunity to pivot my skills and work more closely with leadership teams, shaping and implementing effective HR strategies and transformation programmes. I have held various Business Partner roles mainly in the Not-for-Profit sector ever since.

What inspired you to work in the Not-for-Profit sector and for Marie Curie in particular?

The work charities do is amazing, and it’s easy to forget that Charities were innovated at the time of conception and continue to be.

Marie Curie is phenomenal, we are the UK’s leading end of life charity, supporting people through all aspects of dying, death, and bereavement – and fight for a society where everyone gets to have the best experience possible at the end of their lives.

Marie Curie’s researchers push to discover more about what makes a good end of life, and our policy experts and campaigners fight for a society where everyone gets to have the best experience possible at the end of their lives.

Everyone at Marie Curie is so passionate and dedicated, we go that extra mile (even more so during the pandemic) not because of a performance bonus, but because that small step allows us to provide even more care to our patients and their families and that’s what inspires me.

How are you working to recruit into Marie Curie, and what challenges are you currently facing?

Unemployment is at its lowest in 50 years, so demand for skills is at record high across all sectors and roles, this coupled with a continued shortage of nurses and health care professionals in the UK means competition is high. Gen Z have recently entered the workforce meaning four generations of workers now make up the workforce, all of which have their own set of workplace expectations, values, and preferences. The challenge is to continuously understand what motivates our current and future workforce and as an organisation, be able to respond.

As part of a major transformation programme, we have improved our recruitment efficiency to provide the best possible candidate experience, coordinating our full end to end process from one single platform by automating and simplifying the recruitment process and candidate journey.

Talent Acquisition is as the forefront of our people agenda, ensuring there is a different set of solutions available and finding the best combination - advertising media, agency relationship, events, talent pool, referrals, all driven by data. This will ensure we attract the right people with the right skills and right fit, whilst providing a positive candidate experience.

We have also recently launched a comprehensive benefits package, offering a range of working hours and flexible working arrangements to suite everyone’s needs combined with extensive training and development opportunities, competitive salaries (clinical aligned to NHS). But most of all, we offer a meaningful purpose, with a culture of people at out heart.

Longer term we will start to take a more strategic workforce planning approach led by data and incites (both internally / externally) exploring scenarios that impact our demands and evaluate these against supply. We can then use this to plan for the workforce and skills needed to support our ongoing and future strategy.

Can you tell us more about the transformation Marie Curie is currently going through?

We have committed significant investment in our service design, reviewing the operations, values, and structure of our organisation from an employee experience, but also the business experience.

To take our employee experience from good to great, we have needed to tackle some big ticket items. The first is the valuable time used by employees in searching for and processing basic HR transactions. To help us realise this, we have integrated a world class People system, where daily tasks are digitalised and managed through self-service, allowing both employees and HR to focus on more value added activities.

The workplace has shifted since the pandemic, and employees are now in the driver’s seat. People have thought about what really matters to them, and they’re prioritising mental health and well-being, growth, and work-life balance as priorities. As part of our total reward package, we have also increased our offer of enhanced holiday, family friendly and bereavement leave, flexible working and hybrid working, a new office location in London offering active based working and a comprehensive wellness package to respond to this.

Other benefits realised will be better configuration and data to enable data driven insights and decisions to be made. Resolution of inefficient and ineffective ways of working within HR. Removal of competitive disadvantages in the labour market and ability for Marie Curie to compete in the international market whilst allowing efficiency, agility, and innovation.

From a HR lens but also a business lens, this will allow us to attract and retain the right workforce and deliver a service that enables our employees to support more people, deliver more structural change, raise more funding, and attract more volunteers and supporters.

And what do you believe the most exciting part to be, of what’s to come?

Realising our vision, seeing those tangible results and how these impact our workforce allowing us to be more agile as an organisation, attracting and retaining engaged people, resulting in more nursing hours, increasing our support, and continuing to advocate for a better end of life care for everyone.

Where do you see the HR function of the future? What skills or behaviours do you feel will endure?

Technology has the biggest impact now and is continuously evolving. As this digital time continues to grow, every HR function will have access to more data than ever before.

This data has previously been put into charts and tables but now with analytics, we need to turn our data into insights throughout the candidate journey and employee lifecycle.

Artificial intelligence is also continuously evolving, and these changes will ultimately lead to HR being more of a proactive profit centre rather than a reactive cost centre. Therefore, HR will need to start to understand how to use new technology and interpret analytics.

I think the non-technical additional skills needed for the future, for HR professionals is business acumen and agility.

What is the best piece of career advice you can give?

My Mantra is very much:

Professional development is key – if you’re not learning, you’re not growing.

Take risks in promoting within.

Fake it until you make it, but don’t get left behind. and

Always ask your team how their mental health is.

And finally, what can the public do to support Marie Curie?

Every minute one person dies in the UK, one in five dies without getting the support they need at the end of their live. Over 3 million people in the UK have experience of family or friends with a terminal illness being kept longer than they needed in hospital due to care not being available elsewhere. Post pandemic we helped more than 60,000 people with end-of-life care in just one year.

People who received Marie Curie Nursing Service care are much more likely to die at home. We want to increase that care, whilst continuing to campaign to help change public attitudes to dying, death and bereavement so, as a nation, we can be better prepared.

Like all Charities we are reliant heavily on public support, it costs £160 million to do what we do of which 60% comes from our supporters fundraised by volunteers, supporters, corporate partnerships and our wonderful fundraising and retail teams. If you would like to get involved, you can do this in a number of ways, either by volunteering or participating in one of our national events such as the London marathon, day of reflection or pop into one of our high street stores, provide a gift in your will or simply make a one off donation as part of our great daffodil appeal.

Nobody should die in poverty (mariecurie.org.uk) is our latest campaign and we are asking people to sign our petition – currently at 136k signatures and counting.

Get in touch

Should you wish to have a confidential chat with Ant Coen to discuss the current HR market and where we can help with inclusive recruitment or your search for work/recruiting into your team, please contact him directly at acoen@mdhr.co.uk

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