Senior HR Consultant – Employee Relations

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us achieve our mission.

We are looking for a Senior HR Consultant who is passionate about influencing and impacting high growth and dynamic businesses through effective management (both proactive and reactive) of employee relations and related activities. This person will be a member of the team accountable for managing employee relations cases across organizations at Microsoft while analyzing trends and building linkages to management development, retention efforts, and HR business intelligence activity.

This role will cover cases across all Countries in Microsoft Middle East & Africa.

The work

The work of the successful candidate will include:

• Partnering with managers and business leaders on issues including policy violations, and investigations; managing cases from beginning to conclusion
• Improving manager capability by providing coaching to managers and employees
• Leveraging your insights to influence all levels of the organization and effectively handling complex employee situations that could have high organizational impact
• Partnering across line HR to organize trainings for managers on preventing employee relations issues, effective management of performance cases, giving performance feedback, employee engagement and retention, compensation analytics, and other topics related to manager effectiveness
• Utilizing consulting skills to effectively contract work with clients and line HR

Key Responsibilities:

• Employee Relations Case Management – You will be responsible for effectively resolving a caseload of varying complexity in a professional and timely manner while ensuring that you are adhering to Microsoft’s policies and guidelines and mitigating potential risks to the company. You will employ a variety of tactics and adapt to the various situations in each part of the organization.
• Analysis and Recommendations – By tracking cases and crossing this with other organizational data, you will be well positioned to analyze trends and identify issues in and across teams. You will work with line HR to address these issues and also use proactive measures to prevent future ones from occurring.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Consulting – The skill to influence others, develop and maintain working relationships, and deliver results and/or expertise for a client in a professional manner
• Employee Relations – Knowledge of Employee Relations that can deal with a wide variety of employee needs and concerns, such as employee communications, benefits, policies and procedures, morale, employee participation in management decisions, conflict and grievance resolution, trade unions, etc.
• Employee Investigations – Knowledge of Investigations, the conduct of a review, exploration, examination, and/or evaluation of records, events, activities, claims, products, behaviors and other actions in order to discover information relevant to the objectives of the investigation. This includes the ability to address the result of the investigation according to policy and in the interest of the organization.
• Performance Management – Knowledge of and the ability to carry out performance management procedures. This includes the ability to clearly set and communicate performance expectations and goals, monitor performance, conduct performance evaluations, provide ongoing performance feedback, create developmental plans, and correct performance problems.
• Negotiations – The ability to achieve mutually satisfying agreements in negotiations with others by listening to their objectives, acting as the company’s representative to effectively communicate the company’s objective, and seeking common ground and collaborative solutions.
• Data Analysis – The ability to systematically gather information from a variety of sources, analyze information, identify implications of data, draw conclusions, generate alternatives and solutions, and evaluate the consequences of choosing each alternative using quality metrics and data. This includes the ability to convert general data and findings into applied, specific information and suggestions that add value to business planning and strategies.
• Human Resources Business Processes – Knowledge of Human Resources activities and business operations from beginning to end, including interactions with other business processes and functions.
• Legal And Regulatory Requirements – Knowledge of the rules, regulations, sanctions and other statutory requirements, guidelines, and instructions relating to governing bodies and organizations, both internally and externally.
• EEO Regulations – Knowledge of the rules, regulations, codes, sanctions and other statutory requirements, guidelines and instructions related to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and workplace discrimination.
• Corporate Culture Enhancement – The ability to correlate the organizational culture to new initiatives in order to keep the culture continually evolving with modern concepts. This includes the ability to communicate corporate culture broadly to educate and engage associates, and understand the culture to complement business strategy. This also includes the ability to use culture to guide decision-making and to ensure the company values and culture are visible and recognizable to internal and external stakeholders.

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• A minimum of 10+ years of experience in HR, with a specific focus on employee relations is essential
• BS/BA degree is required. MBA or MA in HR-related field
• Ability to partner with HR and legal teams to effectively manage and all types of employee relations cases
• Excellent coaching, facilitation, and conflict resolution skills, including stellar communication, collaboration, case handling and project management
• Analytical skills with ability to use data to form hypothesizes, draw insights, form narratives, prioritize, and influence decisions
• Strong working knowledge of employment laws and regulations and the ability to appropriately spot employment risk issues
• Knowledge and experience with Performance & Development processes
• Ability to recognize trends and identify systemic approaches to solving problems
• Business and people acumen, knowledge of consulting frameworks and models, and ability to influence employees and managers at all levels
• Ability to use experience and judgment to make decisions that may be based on partial information
• Ability to be highly empathetic and comfort and experience dealing with ambiguity, change, and challenging problems
• Strong diversity and inclusion acumen
• Multinational company experience and experience having working across the Middle East & Africa region is preferred

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.