Employee Relations Specialist

Job overview

Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust is looking for a proactive, customer focused Employee Relations Specialist to join our People Directorate. Operating in a flexible hybrid working model based out of Littlemore, Oxford, you will balance working from home with an essential, visible onsite presence across allocated Trust sites to build strong, collaborative relationships with line managers and operational teams.

In this pivotal role, you will work alongside the Head of HR and closely with HR Business Partners to deliver a high quality operational HR service. You will lead and line manage a team of HR Advisors, provide expert guidance on multi faceted employee relations cases, lead on workforce data analysis, and support organisational change programmes aligned with embedding a restorative, just and learning culture.

Main duties of the job

In this role, you will line manage, coach, and allocate work for the HR Advisors, fostering their professional development while ensuring the delivery of high-quality advisory services across the Trust.

You will provide specialist guidance and manage complex informal and formal employee relations cases—including disciplinary, capability, grievance, safeguarding, and sickness absence—ensuring full compliance with Trust policy and employment law.

Building robust working relationships with operational managers and trade union representatives will be essential to resolve contentious issues, promote partnership working, and maintain positive employee relations.

Additionally, you will analyse, interpret, and triangulate complex workforce data sets to monitor ER trends, support KPI achievement, and assist services with action planning based on NHS Staff Survey results.

As the HR lead for transformation, restructuring, and TUPE projects, you will actively contribute to Trust wide HR policy reviews and EDI action plans.

Finally, you will design and deliver both planned and ad-hoc HR training, including the HR Management Toolkit, to continuously build leadership capability across the Trust.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

We hope that the advert has given you a clear understanding of the skills we are seeking and the opportunity at hand. You will need to use the “supporting statement” element of your application form to demonstrate your suitability for this role and you should refer to the job description, person specification and the guidance notes attached to this role to help you tailor your application.

The essential and desirable criteria will be used to shortlist for interview and you should ensure that you refer to these within your application to increase your chances of being selected for interview.

We are aware that some candidates may choose to use AI tools to support their application. We kindly remind applicants that submissions should remain an honest and accurate representation of their experience and must take care to ensure the use of AI tools does not generate an application that does not accurately reflect their knowledge, skills and values.