London/Darlington
Core Purpose of the Role
Railpen is evolving and undertaking a period of significant change. Adopting Operational Excellence across all People related processes and touchpoints is fundamental to achieving our strategic objectives, enhancing organisational performance and delivering value across the business.
The Operational Excellence People Process Lead will focus on understanding our current processes and related process gaps, identifying opportunities to simplify operational processes, improve efficiency and drive continuous improvement across the end-to-end colleague lifecycle, ensuring alignment to business priorities and the delivery of a high-quality colleague experience.
Working alongside People Operations, People Partnering, Talent and Reward Teams, you will undertake a review of our current people operations processes and implement stronger working practices, ensuring Workday supports streamlined ways of working. As a member of the People team, you will ensure people design decisions are evidence-based, outcome-focused and support our organisational performance, colleague engagement and culture.
Key Responsibilities
• Lead an end-to-end process improvement initiative to increase process efficiency, reduce complexity, and improve operational performance.
• Analyse current people processes, identify bottlenecks, and design sustainable solutions that deliver measurable results.
• Facilitate workshops and stakeholder sessions to map current and future-state processes.
• Develop and maintain process documentation, standard operating procedures, and governance
frameworks.
• Partner with teams across Finance and IT to ensure Workday workflows and system capabilities
support optimised people processes.
• Design an Operational Effectiveness Dashboard to define, monitor, and report on key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure process effectiveness and identify further improvement opportunities.
• Apply continuous improvement methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, or similar frameworks to drive business outcomes.
• Support change management activities, including stakeholder engagement, training, and adoption of new processes and ways of working.
• Promote a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence across the People function.
• Identify an escalation process, risk based with the appropriate control points.
You will bring:
• Proven experience in Operational Excellence, continuous improvement and Business Process Improvement
• Experience leading process redesign and optimization initiatives across HR, Shared Services, or other business functions.
• Strong understanding of process improvement methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma, DMAIC, PDCA, or Agile.
• Ability to analyse complex processes, identify root causes and implement sustainable solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes.
• Experience with Workday, particularly in HR and/or enterprise process environments.
• A collaborative and pragmatic style, balancing pace, care, and organisational outcomes.
• Exceptional communication, facilitation and interpersonal skills, capable of building relationships across all levels of the organisation.
Skills Required
- Proven experience in Operational Excellence, continuous improvement and Business Process Improvement
- Experience leading process redesign and optimization initiatives across HR or Shared Services
- Strong understanding of process improvement methodologies (Lean, Six Sigma, DMAIC, PDCA, Agile)
- Ability to analyse complex processes, identify root causes and implement sustainable solutions
- Experience with Workday in HR or enterprise process environments
- Exceptional communication, facilitation and interpersonal skills for stakeholder engagement
What We Do
The Railways Pension Scheme is one of the UK’s largest and longest established pension funds. Railpen is responsible for the safekeeping and investment of around £34 billion on behalf of the scheme’s 350,000 members who are connected to the railway industry. Railpen's purpose is to secure our members' future. To achieve this we invest the scheme’s assets to generate strong returns over the long term. Our members and their employers trust us with this very significant responsibility. We are proud of this responsibility, take it very seriously, and are committed to, and passionate about, improving their future lives. Generating the required returns is challenging. To be successful we must constantly strive to be considered a world-class asset owner by our stakeholders, with a proven track record of adding value for our members. This means we have to have excellent people, doing exemplary work, in every part of our business. We use the size of our assets to invest wisely and influentially. Our convictions and a clear set of investment beliefs guide us through complex and changing markets. We’re not afraid to think innovatively or act boldly in the best interests of the members we are proud to serve
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