Americas Regional Employee Relations (ER) Manager
Location: San José, Costa Rica
Join Lonza as the Americas Regional Employee Relations Manager and play a key leadership role in shaping a high-performing, centralized Employee Relations function across the Americas. This is an exciting opportunity to lead a team of ER specialists, influence employee experience outcomes, and drive consistent, fair, and legally defensible employee relations practices in a global organization.
What you will get:
- An agile career and dynamic working culture.
- An inclusive and ethical workplace.
- Compensation programs that recognize high performance.
- A variety of benefits dependent on role and location.
What you will do:
- Lead and develop a regional Employee Relations team, providing coaching, guidance, and operational leadership while fostering capability growth and high-performance standards. Leading by example through hands-on involvement in employee relations activities, personally conducting investigations, managing high-risk cases, and supporting case delivery alongside the team while providing overall functional leadership.
- Serve as the escalation point for complex and sensitive employee relations matters, ensuring fair, complaint, and consistent outcomes.
- Oversee case management operations, monitoring workload distribution, case aging, service levels, and resource planning across the region.
- Partner closely with HR Business Partners, Legal, Ethics & Compliance, and other key stakeholders to resolve employee relations issues and mitigate risk.
- Review investigations and recommendations, ensuring thorough fact-finding, sound judgment, procedural integrity, and legally defensible outcomes.
- Drive continuous improvement through analytics, reporting insights, process enhancements, operational standardization, and adoption of AI-enabled ER tools.
- Support onboarding, training, and development of team members while reinforcing a culture of professionalism, empathy, confidentiality, and accountability.
What we are looking for:
- Bachelor's degree in Human Resources, Psychology, Business Administration, Law, or a related field, or equivalent transferable experience.
- Significant experience in Employee Relations, HR advisory, workplace investigations, or a related HR discipline within large, multi-site, or multinational organizations.
- Demonstrated expertise managing complex employee relations investigations involving misconduct, harassment, discrimination, retaliation, or similar workplace concerns.
- Strong knowledge of U.S. employment law required, with additional exposure to broader Americas employment environments considered an advantage.
- Proven ability to lead teams, prioritize competing demands, make sound decisions in ambiguous situations, and manage high-risk cases.
- Strong stakeholder management, influencing, communication, and conflict-resolution skills, with the ability to build trusted partnerships across functions.
- Business-fluent English required; Spanish language skills and professional HR or investigation certifications are advantageous.
About Lonza
At Lonza, our people are our greatest strength. With 30+ sites across five continents, our globally connected teams work together every day to manufacture the medicines of tomorrow. Our core values of Collaboration, Accountability, Excellence, Passion and Integrity reflect who we are and how we work together. Everyone’s ideas, big or small, have the potential to improve millions of lives, and that’s the kind of work we want you to be part of.
Innovation thrives when people from all backgrounds bring their unique perspectives to the table. At Lonza, we offer equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. If you’re ready to help turn our customers’ breakthrough ideas into viable therapies, we look forward to welcoming you on board.
Ready to shape the future of life sciences? Apply now.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Human Resources, Psychology, Business Administration, Law, or a related field, or equivalent transferable experience
- Significant experience in Employee Relations, HR advisory, workplace investigations, or a related HR discipline
- Experience within large, multi-site, or multinational organizations
- Expertise managing complex investigations involving misconduct, harassment, discrimination, retaliation, or similar workplace concerns
- Strong knowledge of U.S. employment law
- Ability to lead teams, prioritize competing demands, make decisions in ambiguous situations, and manage high-risk cases
- Strong stakeholder management, influencing, communication, and conflict-resolution skills
- Business-fluent English
- Exposure to broader Americas employment environments
- Spanish language skills
- Professional HR or investigation certifications
What We Do
At Lonza, we enable A Healthier World by supporting our healthcare customers on the path to commercialization. Our community of 16,000 talented employees work across a global network of more than 30 sites to deliver for our customers across the pharma, biotech and nutrition markets.
