Macmillan Meets… Peter Norgate, Director of People and Corporate Services at Terrence Higgins Trust

In this issue of ‘Macmillan Meets…’ Ant Coen, Principal Consultant at Macmillan Davies speaks to Peter Norgate, Director of People and Corporate Services at Terrence Higgins Trust. Together they talk about his career to date, the culture change programme at Terrence Higgins Trust and the importance of upwards mentoring.

Tell me about your career to date

Originally studying and working as a playwright, I spent most of my twenties writing and co-producing various theatre projects in London, with some successes at the Edinburgh Fringe and other festivals. Writing suited me at that point in my life as I was also having to learn to live with an on-going chronic health condition- chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS also known as ME) that I was diagnosed with at 17. It’s a condition I still live with and manage on a daily basis, and it took me a good 10 years to figure out how to make sure I was in control of it and not the other way around.

Whilst the world of theatre was an amazing experience and writing political satire and social commentary that made audiences laugh and think was a privilege to do, with my health improving I was curious to explore the world of regular working, primarily as a challenge to see if I could do it.

I started working as a junior administrator for Charities Evaluation Services in 2008, a charity that specialised in monitoring and evaluation and found that a whole other part of my brain was engaged and satisfied from helping to run a national programme of work. Two years later I moved into an office manager role where HR first came into my remit and it felt like the puzzle was finally complete writing had always been centered on thinking about people, and HR is the same. By starting out as a standalone people generalist I got to do a bit of everything which has stood me in good stead for the rest of my career.

I decided to qualify in people management at that point, and over the past 10 years have continued to progress my HR career with Mind and now Terrence Higgins Trust, using the same simple tenet as the foundation of my approach - how do I make sure my team supports our people, increases our efficiency and helps our organisation focus on the mission to be delivered.

I’ve been working at a senior level for most of those 10 years - I still have my chronic health condition and while it’s challenging to make sure I manage it every day, it also helps to give me perspective on my life and my career. It also reminds me that not everyone has a career or life journey that runs A to B - and often, with the hundreds of people I’ve interviewed, appointed and worked with, it’s the people who’ve had a bit of time off the usual path that brings something a bit different that can be turn out to be quite valuable.

What made you want to work in the voluntary sector in particular?

I think one of the most heartening things about the voluntary sector is its awareness that people have things to offer that aren’t always immediately obvious. Charities and not for profits that make the most difference are the ones that take the time to understand and engage with their service users and beneficiaries. This inclusive strategy, through approaches like co-production and co-design, delivers amazing outcomes and long-term impact.

The voluntary sector is a sector that has understood the need to put its ‘customer/ - to use commercial language - at the heart of what it is there to do. The result of that is a sector that is more open to placing value, and hiring people, based on lived experience, and potential and recognising that people have multiple careers and lives. The sector has worked hard to understand that people are better employees for being able to have a work/life balance that their employer supports and facilitates. The result is incredible work initiatives and outcomes, often achieved with less resources, including people resources, than you might find in similar sized private or public sector organisations. I think working in the voluntary sector has enabled me to promote and implement a meaningfully humanistic approach to managing our people and we are a better organisation for that.

You have embarked on a big culture transformation programme at THT. What did this involve and what benefits have you seen it bring to THT?

Alongside setting our 2022-25 strategy, we knew that we needed to make some fundamental changes to the overall culture of the organisation as it hadn’t been reviewed in some time. We had already begun work to improve our staffing and representation relating to equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), and it remains important to us to look at this work from both the internal perspective, and also how our approach to EDI can improve our externally-facing work.

The culture project went through several stages- we set out the project framework and approach, opting for the cultural web model. We then trained staff from a cross section of locations and levels in the organisation to carry out peer workshops to assess the experienced culture of the organisation. We pulled out six core themes that were impacting the organisation and worked up an action plan to begin addressing the issues we’d found. One of the themes was about the perceived values of people working in departments and services based in London, versus those across England, Scotland and Wales. We wanted to do something meaningful to address this issue, particularly as our regular five-year pay benchmarking exercise had found that we had more people from marginalised communities working in services outside of those based in London. We had moved to a hybrid model where traditionally London-based staff were beginning to be drawn from the wider UK talent pool, or relocating outside of the London commuter belt.

The approach was to create a mirror of our existing ‘London Allowance’ pay element that went to staff whose office was based in London with something we termed ‘National Allowance’. The idea was to create a pay escalator that overtime could match the London Allowance and create pay equity across all geographies. The ideal would have been to add the equivalent amount to non-London salaries straight away, but that wasn’t affordable. Instead, we agreed a framework with the board whereby we would add a percentage of London Allowance to be National Allowance over a period of four to five years, building in sensible fail-safes, such as overall financial performance and making this an in-principle decision to account for unforeseen future events. We now have a National Allowance that is 50% of London Allowance and are hopeful to increase this to 75% in the next financial year. Ultimately our pay structures will simplify when we hit 100%, as London Allowance and National Allowance will effectively fall away as they become the core salary for our pay grades and spot rates, simplifying bidding for contracts of work, costings for staffing and a greater equity for our people. Taking into account the cost-of-living crisis, this new pay strategy hasn’t taken all the pain away for our people, but we’ve seen it specifically mentioned in staff surveys and from conversations with our staff that this, along with a reasonable cost of living increase of 5% for 2023-24, has helped to manage our turnover and people feel more valued.

Mentoring and supporting your colleagues, including your CEO and the wider leadership team has been a huge part of your role. What are the benefits to providing mentoring, particularly upwards mentoring towards your CEO and SLT? 

It is a privilege to work for an organisation where senior colleagues feel they can come to me to get support beyond technical HR advice or process questions. For me, it represents the type of culture we are trying to create - one that is collegiate and recognises we’re each more than our job title or specialist area of expertise. The benefits of providing the support and mentoring to my peers and the various CEOs I’ve worked with over my career is a really good way to understand an organisation in the round. My people management approach is to take the technical, legal basis- whether that’s a TUPE transfer, consultation on restructuring a service, directorate, or whole organisation for instance, and then apply that to the specific organisational context: how do we practically do this. My mentoring support is about getting those two parts to come together- suitable challenge and feedback to make sure people have thought about the whole set of positives and negatives as well as getting to the heart of why. Why do they want to make that change? Why will that be the best way to solve the problem. There’s a lot of listening, reflecting back, and creating a space that is safe to explore and hypothesize. And that gives me insight into my colleagues and how they think and what they want to achieve, what their parts of the organisation are trying to do and where else my teams and I can help them.

What are the most important skills you have learned during your time at the Terrance Higgins Trust?

In my seven years with THT I have definitely learned more about negotiating with colleagues - finding the middle ground and how to convince people to try different things. That’s helped me to build more robust business cases and do more analysis of the data- we’re looking at our retention strategy at the moment and that’s been very interesting to look at the different approaches being trialled, combined with our people and finance data to build the case for what changes might reap the best results for us.

I’ve also learned to delegate a lot more than I’ve needed to before, the range of my remit covering people management (payroll, HR, L&D and volunteering) plus being responsible for all of our IT systems and Estates and Facilities has meant setting the high-level direction and principles of how each department works and then guiding and supporting the various leads to implement that vision and approach. Being close enough to day-to-day operations to know what is happening, but far enough away to be able to provide objective insights and guidance is a tricky balance, but one that is very rewarding to support staff to improve the mastery of their own roles, try new things and grow.

How do you see the HR function changing in the future?

The pandemic has left a long shadow across the world of work generally and the people function is no different. It seems clear to me that people expect greater flexibility and consideration from their employers now. How people work, and where people work, are two key considerations, with the likes of hybrid working, the 4-day working week and greater employee autonomy all coming to the fore at the moment.

Managers are going to need to develop more skills in not just managing the transactional tasks employees are paid to do, but to empower them to feel enabled to innovate in their own areas to keep pace with the technological advances we’re seeing with AI and machine learning.

Organisations are going to have to continue the journey to recognise the value in difference and that being inclusive of a range of people leads to a better mix of ideas, and experiences that result in better products and services. Diversity is great and important, but it should always be seen as a step on the road to becoming more inclusive. The HR function can help to facilitate this by thinking about where and how it recruits talent and what is really an ‘essential criterion’ for a job, does everyone working in an office environment really have to have a degree, or could an interest in the field and a willingness to engage with continuous on-the-job training find you a better candidate?

What is the best piece of career advice you have received?

If you wouldn’t like to be treated in a certain way, chances are your people, and your customers, probably feel the same way!

Upcoming events

We have a series of roundtables and webinars coming up on hot HR topics, give us a follow-on LinkedIn or contact Ant Coen to be kept updated on the dates for our next event.

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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