Penny Robinson (She/Her)

I am the leader of HR team for the Together Trust responsible for ensuring we look after the people who look after our service users. We do all the resourcing and HR partnership activities for the Trust from developing the HR strategy to deliver the people section of the Stronger Together plan to leading change initiatives and supporting our leaders' and colleagues' needs.

I have delivered some key business critical pieces of work over the last 9 years, Most recently this has been running 2 ‘whole organisation’ consultations on terms and condition changes to support delivering equality across the Trust. I have also developed and begun to implement a wellbeing plan working with learning and development and communication colleagues. I am also taking my HR team of 12 through transformation to move them to an HR Shared service way or working to support our implementation of a new HR and payroll system. Role and Responsibilities: • Leading the HR team to deliver an operations HR service focusing on Recruitment, employee relations and policy, wellbeing and Inclusion and diversity: o Produced the operational HR strategy and plan and reviewed this annually o Restructured my team to achieve this following agreement to my budget proposals for HR o Lead and line managed key roles in my team o Supported the leadership team with HR advice o Reviewed, instigated and instructed suppliers o Delivered the equality and diversity training for the Trust o Supported the staff council to ensure we listened to the colleague voice o Delivered organisation wide consultations, involving union meetings and involvement with ACAS o Developed a new attraction plan for the Trust to ensure we have candidates for our vacancies and agreed and implemented a new temporary staffing protocol o Worked alongside other Operational Leadership team colleagues to deliver the Trust strategy o Ensured OSTED and CQC and other legal compliance regarding staff requirements through my team o Implemented the production of HR management information through my team o Developed a wellbeing plan for the Trust and lead on its implementation o Was a subject matter expert in the development of our new HR/Payroll system and I am supporting the delivery of this through my team

• Leading Gender Pay for Boots and the other UK businesses • Recognition - Recognition has been a significant part of my roles in Boots for some time. Most recently I have led the work to review how Boots recognizes its 65,000 colleagues. In September I personally received the HR team’s Partnership and collaboration award for this work. (I have in the past also led the team that has delivered the annual Shine awards for Boots Opticians, which involved planning the nominations process and communication of this and leading the team that planned the event to ensure to ensure it delivered beyond everyone’s expectations.) • Annual salary review - This particular salary review was made more difficult as to come in line with the wider business, we had changed the timeframe, which made it the second happening in the year and that it had to be delivered in a much shorter timescale. • Leading or working on specific pieces of project work with a reward scope, during this time period I have had responsibility for: o Contributing to reward strategy o Designing and implementing bonus o Being the reward lead for business projects o Leading a team of reward assistants and analysts o Delivering the annual salary review o Honorariums o Setting up reward governance processes o Implementing government led initiatives, for example, National living wage/gender pay o Design and implementation of recognition tools and processes o Provide expertise when required from field, support office, logistics HR or leaders o Job Evaluation o Presenting in report form and in person to Senior leaders, forum and HR colleagues

• Creating one reward solution for the merged Boots Opticians and D&A business - I took a secondment in the support office to find the solution and implement this for a merged pay, bonus and benefits offer for the Boots Opticians and D&A colleagues. • Worked as a reward consultant for our partner hearing care business - The previous 12 months I had implemented a new reward strategy for Boots Opticians. The Retail Director moved to the Boots Hearing care business and wanted to do some similar work with his new business so he asked Boots Opticians if I could help their HR team with this • Worked as a resourcing manager – The HR team was reorganized under a new leadership team and I agreed to take on the role in resourcing as I had some previous experience in this area and I know the opticians business well and that this would be a challenging area. • My first 18 months in the support office were spent designing and delivering the one solution for reward for the merged business, This included a new bonus scheme, a new pay structure for all Practice colleague groups and a change for 12 different benefits. • When I returned from maternity my role was to deliver shared service solutions for Boots Opticians working with the Boots providers. I was responsible for:- o Agreeing the shared service contracts o Agreeing the reward and resourcing strategies and ensuring these were communicated to the shared service providers o Enabling their implementation of these for the Boots Opticians business o Reviewing their service delivery and giving feedback so ensure ongoing improvements o Keeping Boots Opticians senior leaders informed of Boots reward and resourcing strategies

• Regional Opticians Manager for merged business – March 2009 to August 2009 Context Boots Opticians and Dolland and Atchison had recently merged. My team was half stores from Boots Opticians that I had previously worked with and half D&A stores. What I did o I first wanted to understand how everyone was feeling so we could move forward as one team for customers in the new business. It was clear whilst there was excitement and opportunities, people were also nervous and had uncertainties. o I focused on spending time with the team listening, creating sessions for them to share who they were and ask questions. o I also ran a session to explore who we wanted to be for the future and agree our next steps. Result I retained the whole team and we delivered the planned business requirements within the first month on the new financial year. Responsibilities: • I was the Regional Manager for 14 to 18 Boots Opticians practices. Throughout this period the role was at times a peripatetic role working with Boots store leaders to run the opticians practices. At other times I was the leader for the Practice Managers and their teams. I was responsible for:- o The delivery of sales and profit for the Region o The delivery of excellent customer care and colleague care o Leadership of the team and line management of the Practice Managers o The recruitment, retention, development and use of the clinical resource for the region o Contributing to the Divisional strategy and implementing this in my Region o Resolving all escalated customer concerns and exceptional disciplinarians or grievances o At time leading 6 franchise stores alongside core chain stores and working in a different way with these business owners to deliver their business but also protect the Boots brand