Back in the People Game

I am delighted to inform all my followers that I recently decided to take up a permanent HR leadership role again I’ve just been appointed Chief People Officer at First Bus which is the ￡700m division of First Group PLC. It’s a FTSE 250 company going though a significant period of Reinvention.

Why I hear a few of you ask, well I’ve enjoyed the plural life helping lots of fast growing companies, as well as speaking and writing about People, transformation and Business. However when I started helping First Bus with some IR challenges at the start of the year and then becoming their interim HRD, I didn’t expect to hang around I was a hired gun a short term problem solver. But In all honesty I’ve loved it, sometimes you don’t know what your missing till your doing it.

First Bus is a business that’s been massively hit by Covid we’ve only got 65% of our passengers back. We receiving government funding but we’re also a critical player in helping the U.K. achieve its climate goals. How do we get people using the bus instead of the car ? How do we become a platform player so we make planning and buying tickets for everyday journeys that much easier.?But your the people person I hear you say well we’ve got 14,000 hard working dedicated people who do an?important job. We lost 15 people to Covid in the last 18 months while they were doing their jobs serving their communities. That’s families without mums and dads, that’s what got me hooked helping real people do important jobs as well as they can.

We’ve got a lot to do our culture needs reinventing, we need to develop our drivers and engineers so we can provide a great customer experience and we need to improve how are people are lead. Its similar territory to the role I did helping Royal Mail transform itself, I said you only do these type of turnaround jobs once but I just could not help myself.

I will continue to help a few other companies as a non executive director @Brookson and @FRS , I will also continue to talk and evangelise about the value and benefit of great people management and write about what great HR looks like in the age of disruption. I hope you can see why I am back in the game rolling up my sleeves and doing it for real, this people leadership thing is a contact sport and I’ve missed leading, belonging and making a difference everyday.

Onwards and upwards

Kevin

25/9/21