Senior People Partner - Central Functions

As a senior strategic People Partner to the Central Functions leadership teams, you will collaborate closely with senior leaders to shape and deliver plans that enable excellent business performance, strengthen leadership capability, and create great co-owner experience across Yeo Valley.

You will bring clear insight, curiosity, constructive challenge, and sound professional judgement to senior decision-making, ensuring our purpose to nurture and nourish people and planet is reflected in the way we lead, organise, and develop our people.

This role provides senior-level expertise across culture, organisation design, workforce planning, talent, succession, engagement, wellbeing, and people change, working in partnership with People & Culture specialists to deliver practical, progressive, and commercially grounded solutions.

Key responsibilities:

• Function as the senior strategic People Partner for Central Functions, building deep understanding of operating models, priorities, and people opportunities.
• Coach, challenge, and influence senior leaders on complex, commercially aware people decisions, strengthening performance, co-owner experience, accountability, team climate, engagement, and leadership behaviours.
• Translate functional business plans into strategic people priorities, aligning workforce, capability, culture, engagement, succession, and future skills plans with functional objectives and wider Yeo Valley priorities.
• Partner with People & Culture and Talent specialists to shape integrated solutions that improve leadership capability, team effectiveness, organisational health, co-owner development, and future talent pipelines.
• Lead senior-level talent and succession discussions, identifying capability gaps, critical roles, future skills needs, succession risks, and practical actions with the Talent team.
• Influence organisational frameworks and share best practice across the People Partner network, ensuring approaches are relevant, consistent, and practical across Central Functions.
• Collaborate with senior leaders and People Managers to strengthen belonging, diversity of thought, inclusive leadership, collaborative work, and meaningful co-owner consultation and representation.
• Identify organisational themes from co-owner forums, engagement insight, people data, and leadership conversations, ensuring they are communicated, embedded in plans, and owned by relevant senior leaders.
• Lead people-related projects and support cross-functional business change, applying change management expertise to operating model, structure, capability, and ways-of-working impacts.
• Coach and advise senior managers on complex people matters, ensuring employee relations issues are managed fairly, consistently, and in line with our purpose, and legal obligations.
• Use workforce analytics, organisational insight, and commercial performance data to influence decisions, evaluate people interventions, and identify themes, risks, and opportunities.
• Mentor and support the wider People Partner and ER Specialists, sharing insight and best practice to strengthen business partnering capability, consistency, and impact across Yeo Valley

Essential:

• Deep experience as an HR Business Partner
• Extensive knowledge of employment law and experience in dealing with complex case work.
• Experience of developing people-related organisational frameworks.
• Experience of change management, including building and applying formal frameworks.
• Solid understanding of, and keen interest in, current People topics and trends, as well as purpose-led, values-based organisation and leadership approaches.
• Demonstrable experience of working in a fast-paced commercial environment.
  
  

• CIPD qualified (Level7) or equivalent experience

We’re independent, British and proud to be making the highest quality yogurts, desserts and ice cream under the Yeo Valley brand and for many of the UK’s major retailers. Operating from four dairies and two logistics centres in Somerset and Devon, we employ over 1700 staff and produce more than 25% of the UK’s packaged yogurt.

We’re sure you don’t need convincing, but there’s a whole host of benefits that we offer including:

• 25 days + bank holidays 
• non-contributory pension scheme
• annual bonus (as part of the Employee Benefit Trust, based on company performance for the year)
• life cover
• healthcare cash back plan
• cycle to work scheme
• subsidised Yeo Valley products and services
• preferential rates with our partners
• learning and development opportunities; we’re committed to ensuring all of our employees have the chance to grow

Our closing dates are a guide for when the application window should close, although we may close the advert sooner if we can. So, we recommend you get your application in straight away – and don’t miss the opportunity to join us!

Unfortunately, we’re not able to provide employment sponsorship to candidates at this moment in time.

Please note that Yeo Valley do not accept speculative agency applications; we will only accept applications from preferred suppliers that have been submitted to us via our recruitment portal at the point of instruction.