Top Employer Awards

Caroline Waters OBE FRSA CiPD(Hons)

Currently Deputy Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Vice President of Carers UK and Founder and CEO of CW Consulting Box, Caroline Waters was also Director of People and Policy at BT and has a distinguished record on equality, inclusion, and human resources.

She has been the driving force of many diversity-focused groups where she has routinely set the agenda and demonstrated real thought leadership.

Seen as one of the most influential Senior leaders and practitioners in the original movement to create new ways of working and a leader of the nascent flexible working agenda in the 1990s Caroline works with a wide range of stakeholders and clients to build new ever more inclusive approaches to people, space and productivity.

Caroline routinely works with and advises policy makers and contributed to the Department of Work and Pensions publication of ‘The Disability and Health Employment Strategy: the Discussion so Far’ Chairing the Task and Finish Group on Young Disabled people and Employment. Caroline also Co-Chaired the Department of Health’s Task and Finish Group which launched the ground breaking report ‘Supporting Working Carers: The Benefits to Families, Business and the Economy’ in autumn 2013. As a key opinion former in the business community she also chaired Employers for Carers from 2001 to 2013, was founder and inaugural Chair of the Employers’ Forum on Belief, and Chair of the Lone Parents working group.

Caroline has also acted as the independent panel member on a broad range of senior appointments including chair of the Judicial Pensions Committee and Commissioner of Law.

She was awarded HR Director of the Year in the 2009 HR Excellence Awards and has also judged a number of prestigious diversity awards including the CRE Race in the Media Awards and Help the Aged’s Living Legends.

She was awarded the OBE for services to progressive HR practice, diversity and equal opportunities in the New Year’s list in 2010. Caroline’s work at BT was recognized by several diversity awards including best ethnic minority recruitment programme awarded by Race for Opportunity. BT is the only company ever to top seven

leading diversity benchmarks at the same time. An accomplishment achieved for three consecutive years.

An experienced NED she is a Director of Roffey Park, Project Fortis and Wilson James and a member of the Whole Education Board. Caroline was recently listed in the top 100 Disability Power List 2018 and voted one of the most influential HR practitioners of the last decade by HR Magazine Excellence Awards 2015 and the HR Movers and Shapers of 2018.

As Founder of CW Consulting Box Ltd. Caroline provides high-level support and guidance across the private, public and charitable sector. Recent activity has included Board Effectiveness reviews, board coaching, Business and strategic HR guidance, OD design, flexible working strategy, behavioural action planning, capacity building and strategic communications.

Previous years’ Keynote speakers include:

• 2018  – Gavin Shuker MP
• 2017 – Anne Francke – CEO at CMI
• 2016 – Flick Drummond (MP for Portsmouth South) & Jess Phillips (MP for Birmingham Yardley) co-chairs of the all-party parliamentary group on women and work
• 2015 – Eva Tutchell & John Redmond, Authors of ‘Man-Made: why so few women are in positions of power’
• 2014 – Wendy Hallett, MBE, founder and managing director of Hallett Retail and a member of the Women’s Business Council
• 2013 – Jo Swinson, former Minister for Employment Relations and Consumer Affairs and former Minister for Women and Equalities.

Gillian Nissim

Founder, workingmums.co.uk

A former Senior Communications Executive, Gillian has worked at a number of different organisations with very different cultures and attitudes towards family friendly working policies. After the birth of her second child she decided to set up her own company to cater for the businesses who did appreciate the vast experience and high calibre of professionals who had become mums, and wanted to find challenging and interesting jobs that offered more flexibility than traditional office-based, Monday – Friday, 9:00 – 5:00 jobs.

A graduate of Birmingham University, Gillian launched workingmums.co.uk in 2006, which is now the number one job and community site for professional working mothers.

Andy Lake

Editor, Flexibility.co.uk

Andy Lake is a specialist in Smart and Flexible Working.

He is the author of Smart Flexibility (Gower Publishing) and several other publications.

Andy is currently the advisor to the Cabinet Office in this field and has written the guidelines for the Civil Service – The Way We Work: A Guide to Smart Working in Government.

Jennifer Liston-Smith

Director, Head of Coaching & Consultancy at My Family Care 

Jennifer is a sought-after consultant on employer family-friendly strategies, speaker, writer, leadership coach and coaching supervisor. As an innovator in the field of maternity and paternity coaching, she built and leads Work+Family Coaching, My Family Care’s Coaching and Consultancy business, supporting leading global clients to develop manager capability, coaching and mentoring schemes and family-friendly strategies. MFC provides a wide range of services to employers from consultancy and coaching, online portals and programmes including the Work+Family Space and Parental Leave Toolkit / Parental Leave Toolkit for Managers through to award-winning Backup Dependant Care / Emergency Childcare Service.

David Dunbar

Head of Digital Workspace at the Department of Work and Pensions 

David former roles include heading BT’s Flexible Working Services division, which offered a range of managed services around agile working, as well as owning BT’s own internal flexible working programme across 22 countries. He was also Head of Digital Workplace at Nationwide Building Society,  responsible for introducing innovative environments and culture change, by bringing together HR, Property and IT to drive change across the organisation. In addition he has delivered consultancy around Digital Workplace, Dynamic Working and Workplace Transformation to public and private sector organisations of all shapes and size.
He is currently the Head of Digital Workspace at the Department of Work and Pensions, the UK’s largest public sector department, where he is responsible for the infrastructure to support new ways of working, for modernising the tools, desktop, and mobile solutions used by around 90,000 employees, and for delivering new office and hub space to support collaborative and agile working.

Dr Clare Kelliher

Professor of Work & Organisation, Cranfield University

Clare Kelliher, BSc, MA, PhD is Professor of Work and Organisation at Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University. Clare holds a PhD in Organisational Behaviour from London Business School, an MA in Industrial Relations from the University of Warwick and a first degree in management from the University of Surrey.

Her research interests centre around the organisation of work and the management of the employment relationship. She has a long-standing interest in flexible working and recently directed a major project concerned with examining the impact of flexible working on performance, sponsored by seven companies. She has also recently completed a project looking at employee engagement in multi-national organisations, funded by the US Society for HRM Foundation.

Clare is the author of many published papers and book chapters and regularly speaks at national and international conferences. Her recent book, New Ways of Organising Work: developments, perspectives and experiences, co-edited with Julia Richardson was published by Routledge. In 2012 she also published a text book on Strategic HRM together with Katie Truss and David Mankin. She has considerable experience running management programmes and advising organisations both in the UK and overseas. She frequently acts as an external examiner for doctoral and Masters degrees at universities in the UK and overseas.