Philippa Barnes

Background

About Philippa Barnes

After starting out cutting my teeth in HR in a City firm, to working as an HR Consultant, via two children and two of my own businesses, I have a whole range of experience which I bring to my role with ReThink HR. Having the opportunity to join Zoe to establish and grow ReThink HR is a real privilege as we work together, and with our fantastic team, to continue to develop the business. It’s been a really exciting move to fully specialise in HR technology and focus all of our attention onto this exciting and ever evolving area of work. In a dynamic environment such as technology, it’s important that we focus our attention on the strategic commercial development of the business, and it is my pleasure to be able to prioritise developing products for our team to deliver and working with new vendor partners and their HR systems. I really enjoy building and sustaining high quality relationships with prospects, clients and vendor partners – this means that I really do (as my children put it) “get to talk to my friends all day”! Whether I am learning about a new product or pitching to a potential client, I get excited for the potential I can see to make transformational changes to ways of working. Alongside this I also lead on marketing and finance, ensuring that we are moving in the right direction at all times, delivering client work and spending time coaching the team to build their skills and knowledge. We are proud of the amount of continuous professional development we can offer the team with the opportunities to work with new systems and new clients, alongside more formal training qualifications. You’ll also find us all heading out to events where we can meet vendors known and new to keep our product knowledge up to date. It’s also incredibly important that our “predominantly remote” team feel that they are part of something bigger, so we purposely plan regular “coffee and catch up” sessions during the week, monthly team meetings and quarterly socials so that we get quality time, away from the day-to-day, as a group. When I am working with clients, I am reviewing to make sure that all we are doing is moving the team towards understanding their HRIS strategy, confidently navigating the range of HRIS vendors and/or configuring their system to be the best that it can be for their organisation. Even though we are working with “technology” our work is still all about people and supporting them through a transition to achieve better, more efficient and more rewarding working practices.