Keith Brownlie, group HR and CR director

Citation

Brownlie, K. (2010), "Keith Brownlie, group HR and CR director", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 9 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/shr.2010.37209fab.003

Keith Brownlie, group HR and CR director

Article Type: Practitioner profile From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 9, Issue 6

HR executives share their experience in human resources

A coalface might seem an unlikely place to learn an important HR lesson, but for Keith Brownlie, group HR and CR director for Informa plc, it has put him in good stead for his entire career. As a young man, he spent time with a coal miner-turned psychologist who invited him to see the workings of a coalface.

He says:

I turned up, wet behind the ears, in a white button-up shirt. Beyond learning about the social interfaces and working within tight communities, I also discovered something much more personal that day – you’ve got to relate to the people you’re with. Me, in my sparklingly clean shirt screamed toffee-nosed plank. If I couldn’t relate to the miners, how could I possibly understand them?

Gaining front line experience

After a stint in the army, between 1971 and 1973 Brownlie started his corporate life as a graduate trainee at Marley Tiles working in several different disciplines. He returned to university, hedging his bets and studying for a postgraduate in both marketing and psychology, where he discovered HR.

With his Masters degree, he spent a short spell running his own HR consultancy in the North East of England, before he joined Rank Xerox as manager in training and development. A total of 15 years later and a steady climb up the corporate ladder, he had worked in many regions in the UK as well as the US.

It was during this time that he came to realize just how his first corporate role helped him. He comments:

To me, working as a line manager is fundamental to being good at HR. By working in as many disciplines as possible, HR is able to understand line managers and their individual challenges. It’s crucial to relate to them, just like at my coalface all those years ago.

Redundancy frying pan into a working fire

Following redundancy from Xerox, he joined Lloyds of London Press, a department of Lloyds of London, as its first HR director. At that time, there were 400 employees and six unions and the culture was one where employees assumed a job for life and the company had much to learn about commercialism.

After a new deputy MD started, company needs were assessed and employee numbers were trimmed to 360 – treading a fine line with unions all the way. Brownlie joined the board at a similar time. There were many roller coaster, careers-on-line moments, not least during the Lloyds of London Press management buy-out in 1995 which was, he says, akin to Lloyds of London selling the “family silver”.

Rewarding staff for extraordinary commitment

He says:

The challenge was extraordinary, but I felt more empowered than I ever had before. We believed that staff should be rewarded for their commitment. We knew we needed every employee with us. After the successful buy-out, which we couldn’t have done without the staff, we implemented a final salary pension scheme and created a share package. It was unheard of at the time.

Personally, I’ve learned that HR brings rough and smooth, especially in the M&A process. You have to have an inner belief that you’ll come through. When you’re hit with adversity it’s easy to roll over and far tougher to front it, but it’s the latter you have to do.

A total of 16 years later, the company is now known as Informa, a global publishing, conference and performance improvement company with 8,500 staff working in 150 offices in 34 countries. It is recognized as one of Britain’s Top Employers by the CRF Institute, in conjunction with Daily Telegraph and audited independently by Grant Thornton.

The challenge of corporate responsibility in a global company

In 2005, Brownlie’s role evolved from global HR to include corporate responsibility (CR) duties. From humble “let’s do the right thing” beginnings, Informa’s CR footprint is spreading slowly but well. Within the last CR reporting year, the group strengthened its community strategy, providing every member of staff with a day off each year to volunteer and empowering its individual businesses to create their own strategic community partnerships. In 2009, it also created “Global Green Week,” which provides a platform to build staff engagement and increase coverage on environmental data for reporting.

The most important step it has made has been refocusing CR within the business. Brownlie comments:

We realized that we were too UK centric and not engaging across the Informa globe. CR meant very little to too many staff, so we needed to launch the program with a global remit – coincidentally at a time when the business was facing tough economic conditions.

In a follow up survey, 95.4 percent of staff knew about Green Week and the company was shortlisted for the International Green Awards run by the Green Consultancy. Smartly, the initiative provided segments of much needed environmental data that the company had previously found difficult to obtain in some parts of the business. Building on this success, this year Informa is analyzing its overall “be involved” CR strategy and aims to enable individual divisions to take more ownership of all relevant and appropriate CR activities for their own business, market and customer needs.

About the author

Keith Brownlie Group HR and CR Director at Informa plc. He has a diverse background including time spent in the army, running his own HR consultancy and corporate HR experience in the UK and the USA. Keith Brownlie can be contacted at: keith.brownlie@informa.com