Head of People Services

People Services is where Nokia's transactional people work is delivered, including onboarding execution, payroll, benefits administration, employee data, query management, annual cycles, and exit formalities, for every employee in every country. As the People Services Lead, you will run that service globally and reshape it around simplicity, automation, AI-enabled delivery, and materially greater productivity, so that agents and self-service resolve first and people handle the exceptions. You will challenge whether work needs to exist before determining where or how it should be delivered, creating a service model with fewer handoffs, fewer variations, and substantially less manual intervention. 

Your role will involve holding one standard where the organization is used to local variation and making deliberate choices about what People Services stops, simplifies, standardizes, automates, or consolidates.  The destination is a simpler, digitally led service organization with a structurally lower cost to serve and the capacity to continually improve as technology evolves. 

Core Purpose

To deliver efficient, harmonized transactional services to every Nokia employee, shifting execution from human-led to digital-first self-service, and tiered delivery. You will be accountable for the cost, the service levels, and the employee experience of everything the service touches while continuously reducing the effort and resources required to deliver it. 

For roughly the first 18 months this is a transformation role, building the organization, moving the work, simplifying the service portfolio, eliminating unnecessary activity, and establishing a fundamentally more productive operating model. From there it becomes a visionary role, setting where the service goes next and continuously challenging how emerging technology, AI, and new ways of working can further simplify the delivery.
 

• Service catalogue and service levels: Define the leanest to-be service catalogue and set the service level behind each item, permitting local variation only where the law requires it

• Employee data ownership: Own employee data management, covering personnel files, record retention, and data privacy, and deciding what reporting the service produces, ensuring data is structured and governed to enable automation, AI, self-service, and reliable decision making.

• Onboarding and exits: Run onboarding obligations, the ASR cycle, and exit management formalities to the frame the Global Value Teams set, minimizing manual touchpoints wherever possible.

• Payroll, time, and benefits: Own payroll processing and compliance, time management collection, and benefits administration outside the US with the local vendors that support it, driving standardization, vendor efficiency, and automation while maintaining the controls required for critical employee transactions.

• Tiered query management: Lead the shift to digital-first support, setting what self-service, AI-enabled agents, and service agents resolve and what escalates; tier 2 queries pass to the GVT, region, or function

• Audit and M&A execution: Own audit and compliance for people services and deliver the harmonization work that integrates an acquired workforce onto Nokia's processes, avoiding the replication of legacy processes or unnecessary local complexity. 

• Digital transformation of the service: Lead people services digital transformation project management and approve which processes are standardized before they are automated rather than automating today's mess; Build AI and automation into the operating model rather than treating them as incremental tools, with clear accountability for productivity, adoption, and the reduction of manual work. 

• Operating model productivity: Establish the productivity, capacity, and cost-to-serve disciplines required to run People Services as a high-performing global operation. Translate simplification and technology improvements into sustainable structural efficiencies rather than allowing capacity to be absorbed by new complexity

• Organizational leadership: Build and lead a high-performing global People Services organization, developing the capability, succession, and future skills a digital-first, AI-enabled service requires

• Employee Trust & Confidence: Build and maintain employee trust in People Services by ensuring people interactions are accurate, transparent, compliant, and handled with professionalism and care, particularly during key moments such as onboarding, life events, payroll, leave, and exits.

• Service Reliability & Continuity: Ensure critical people services operate consistently and reliably across all geographies, maintaining business continuity and minimizing service disruption during transformation, technology changes, and organizational restructuring.

• First Time Right Delivery: Drive a relentless focus on eliminating rework, reducing errors, and increasing first-contact resolution through process simplification, automation, knowledge management, and capability building.

• Track Record of Building a Global Organization: Has built a global people services organization from a distributed setup, taking country-specific, fragmented work into a consolidated shared-service operation. Having run an excellent People Services organization without having built one does not meet this requirement

• Shared Service Leadership: Runs a multi-country transactional service to published service levels and unit cost, and understands the machine well enough to keep it delivering while it changes

• Transformation Experience: Has transformed into a service organization and not only operated one; a profile that has never changed a machine gets stuck in the past

• AI and Digital Delivery: Has delivered AI, digital, or technology-enabled change inside a live operational service

• Global Mindset with Local Knowledge: Applies one global operating standard while knowing how things actually work in different geographies, regions, and countries, and distinguishes genuine legal or regulatory requirements from inherited preferences.

• Process Standardization: Applies discipline to standardize a process before automating it, and recognizes what automation will not survive

• Employee Experience Focus: Judges a service change by what it feels like to the employee, not the process owner

• Commercial and Productivity Orientation: Understands the economics of a service organization and can translate changes in demand, process, technology, organization, location, and sourcing into measurable and sustainable improvements in cost and capacity

Nice to have

• Payroll Depth: Understands where a payroll error becomes statutory exposure, country by country

• Vendor Consolidation: Takes a fragmented vendor landscape through procurement to a single provider

• Data Privacy Practice: Knows what retention and privacy obligations require in Nokia's major jurisdictions

• AI-enabled Service Operations: Experience deploying conversational AI, agentic workflows, intelligent case management, or comparable technologies at scale within employee or enterprise services

• Service Technology Landscape: Familiarity with the platforms that run a modern people service, including core HR and payroll systems such as Oracle HCM or Workday, service and case management such as ServiceNow HRSD, digital assistants and copilots, process mining such as Celonis, and workflow automation such as Power Automate

• Commits to automation that removes work from their own organization, and communicates it before the team hears it elsewhere

• Adopts a “Nokia First” mindset, prioritizing the global standard over the local practice their own organization is comfortable with

• Communicates with transparency when the service fails, including directly to the leaders whose transactions were affected

• Empowers agents and self-service to resolve first, and holds the line against putting a person back into the loop

• Mobilizes across Nokia to remove a process altogether rather than absorbing it into the service

•  Makes difficult prioritization and organizational choices when required, balancing service continuity with the need to move decisively toward a simpler and more productive model

• Creates a culture of continuous reinvention in which productivity gains are sustained, new complexity is actively resisted, and the organization expects technology to continually change how work gets done