Charlotte manages people at Audacia, chairs our working groups and plays a key role in shaping culture, wellbeing and community initiatives across the business. Before joining Audacia, Charlotte spent several years in HR at the NHS, including a solo strategic role on a major mental health transformation project, and holds a CIPD Level 7 and a Masters in HR Management from Leeds University.
What was your background before joining Audacia?
Before joining Audacia, I was at the NHS working in HR. I started out managing the in-house recruitment team, looking after everything from job postings to recruitment fairs, and the day-to-day management of a team. I didn't have recruitment experience going in, but I did have team management experience, which helped me get started.
From there I moved into the wider HR team, supporting managers across the business with things like disciplinaries, sickness absence and general people advice - we had a helpline that people could call, and with thousands of employees you genuinely never knew what you were going to get on the other end of the phone.
My last role before Audacia was a solo HR strategic position on a major transformation project, helping the city of Leeds change the way people accessed mental health support in the community. Doing that job on my own gave me the confidence to know I could do the same here at Audacia, where the role is also a solo one.
Alongside all of this, I studied for my CIPD Level 5 in 2019 and later a Masters in HR Management from the University of Leeds, which came with my Level 7 CIPD accreditation.
What's your role, and what do your day-to-day responsibilities look like?
My job title is People Manager, and my day-to-day is genuinely varied. A lot of it involves conversations with people - someone might come to talk to me about something going on outside of work, or a manager might want advice on how to word something for an appraisal or approach a conversation with someone on their team.
There's usually some recruitment activity too, whether that's engaging with recruiters, deciding where to position a role we're hiring for, or getting ID checks and contracts sorted for people we've offered jobs to. Depending on the time of year, I'll also be running the employee survey or the appraisal round, chasing people to complete them and following up on anything that needs a conversation.
Some of it is admin-heavy - keeping on top of employment law changes, for example, and updating our policies and procedures accordingly. At the moment, I've also got five Academy participants reporting to me, so there's a lot of checking in and making sure people are properly onboarded – I'm also currently acting as a ‘client’ on their final project.
What is the culture like at Audacia?
Audacia really values its culture; the people leading the business genuinely care about nurturing it, improving it where it needs improving, and maintaining it where it's already working. But ultimately it comes back to the people.
People here are friendly, helpful and nice, but they're also very good at their jobs, they hold each other to account, and they have high standards. Everyone works hard, and that creates a mutual respect that means people can be both colleagues and friends.
If I had to put it in one word, it's about being a single team - whether that's the whole Audacia business as one group, or a team within your team. People care about each other, about the standard of the work they do, and about making sure people are happy and healthy. It's not something you have to force; people want to look after it.
Is there a people or culture initiative you've driven that you're most proud of?
As chair of our working groups, I'm proud of helping keep them organised, prioritised and communicated well. A lot of the ideas that come out of these groups are from the people within them - it's usually what the team wants to do and are excited to do, and my role is about facilitating that, whether it's chairing meetings or helping take an idea and get it over the line.
The people in these groups are the voice of the wider business, so if I can help make something happen for them, I'm doing that for everyone. It's less about driving something myself and more about having the capacity to champion what others want to see happen.
What do you enjoy most about your role at Audacia?
I really enjoy being helpful - whether that's taking a job off somebody or doing something that takes the weight off their shoulders. On a bigger scale, that translates into steering the people side of the business strategically, so that things become more self-sufficient as we grow.
I also enjoy the shaping side of things - getting involved in policy and procedure and thinking about how things work behind the scenes. Putting together our maternity and paternity policy is a good example; I enjoyed that because it was helpful, and because it meant shaping something that Audacia wanted to get right. The aim is always to make things scalable, so that eventually other people can run with a policy or process without it needing to be me.
As chair of our working groups, how do you feel Audacia is working to improve diversity and inclusivity, wellbeing and community connection?
A lot of what I do is signposting existing support rather than reinventing the wheel. It's more about making sure the way Audacia operates day to day is inclusive and wellbeing-minded, through lots of small decisions rather than occasional big ones.
For community connection, that might mean picking local caterers in Leeds so we're feeding back into the local economy. For wellbeing, it might mean removing a barrier to entry - making a walk family-friendly, for example, so more people can take part. None of it is about shouting about what we do; it's about making people feel comfortable and making it easier to be yourself here.
Even when I'm writing policies and procedures, I try to take an extra minute to think about how something might make somebody feel. It's lots of small decisions, over and over - reducing the barrier to entry and making it easier for people to get involved and feel involved.
What type of advice might you offer for someone joining Audacia?
Get involved in something. That might mean being a buddy for someone, getting involved in technical steering, or joining a working group if that's what you're passionate about. Come to work, enjoy it, hold yourself to a high standard and be a good person - chances are you're already doing that, since you'll have gone through our interview process.
But beyond that, just find something else that makes it fun to come to work - something you're passionate about outside of your specific job role. Our culture is built on the full Audacia life, not just the coding and testing.
Audacia is a leading technology consultancy specialising in engineering, data and AI based in the UK, with headquarters in Leeds. Find out more about what it's like to work here and our current open vacancies on our careers site.
