Head of People and Employee Experience

Head of People & Employee Experience

London | 3 days per week | Hybrid

Time+Tide Watches is entering a new strategic horizon.

Founded in Australia in 2014, we’ve grown into a global media and retail platform with Watch Discovery Studios in London, New York and Melbourne. Our people have been central to that story - shaping our culture, building our community and creating the experiences that make Time+Tide what it is today.

As we prepare to move into our 2027–29 strategy, our focus is on consolidating what we’ve built, sharpening how we operate and making sure our organisation, leadership and culture are fit for what comes next.

That’s where you come in.

This is not a keep-the-lights-on HR role. You’ll work closely with our Founder & CEO and SLT during an important period in Time+Tide’s evolution, helping translate our 2027–29 strategy into the organisation capable of delivering it.

That means working backwards from strategy to capability, structure, roles and leadership: understanding what the future organisation needs, assessing where those capabilities exist today, identifying gaps and helping us make thoughtful decisions about development, recruitment, role design and organisational change.

You’ll also help strengthen the way our leadership team operates - bringing greater clarity to accountability, decision‑making and expectations, coaching leaders through difficult situations and constructively challenging the Founder and SLT when the organisation needs a steer. That challenge is genuinely part of the role and already an established part of how our People function works.

At the same time, we’ve spent the last few years building strong People foundations. Your role will be to make sure they really land: embedding our performance and development rhythm, employee engagement, recognition, leadership practices, culture and ways of working so they become part of how Time+Tide operates, rather than simply ‘HR programs’.

You’ll be the go-to People partner across the business - helping employees grow and thrive, while giving managers and leaders the coaching, confidence and practical support to lead really well. You’ll build trust at every level, bring perspective when things get tricky and help people keep moving forward.

• translating our 2027–29 strategy into capability, structure, roles and future workforce needs
• organisation design, role clarity and capability planning
• strengthening leadership accountability, decision‑making and ways of working
• coaching and developing managers and senior leaders, especially those newer to people leadership
• performance, feedback, employee development and Individual Development Plans
• embedding our existing People programs and ensuring they genuinely stick
• engagement, recognition, culture and internal communication
• employee relations and practical HR
• helping organisational change land clearly and thoughtfully across the team

One minute you might be mapping future organisation design with the Founder; the next, coaching a GM through a difficult conversation, helping someone turn an IDP into meaningful development action or supporting a leader to get the best from their team.

You won’t be starting from scratch. We have established People programs and systems, a small HR working group and a structured handover from our current Head of Employee Experience. The opportunity is less about building everything new and more about taking what we have, making it stronger, embedding it properly and helping us evolve the organisation around our next strategy.

Who are we looking for?

You could come from either an HR or Organisational Psychology background with strong in-house experience across HR practice, organisational design and employee experience - ideally in a founder-led, entrepreneurial, startup or scale-up environment.

You’re commercially minded, pragmatic and low-ego. You can build trust at every level, challenge people when it matters, coach rather than rescue, and comfortably move between strategic organisation work and the practical realities of supporting a 40-person global team.

The details:

• 3 days per week
• London based, with at least one day a week in our Oxford Circus office
• Open to either a 12-month fixed-term employment contract or an experienced fractional/consultancy arrangement
• Employee salary: £42,000–£45,000 for 3 days (£70,000–£75,000 FTE)/Consultancy terms agreed separately

Knowledge of watches is absolutely not required. Curiosity, good judgement and a genuine interest in people definitely are.

Sound like you - or someone brilliant you know? We’d love to hear from you.

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