People & Culture Manager

Job SummaryThe People & Culture Manager is responsible for designing, driving, and enabling people practices that support the company’s growth, performance, and culture across retail stores, factory, and head office.This is a hands-on role in a fast-growing, multi-site environment, requiring a pragmatic, execution-first approach rather than a large HR team. The role focuses on strengthening leadership capability, improving people processes, and ensuring a consistent, high-quality employee experience as the business scales.The role acts as a trusted partner to department heads, supporting organizational design, people capability, performance management, and talent decisions, while ensuring that brand values and standards of excellence are translated into daily employee behaviors.Key ResponsibilitiesStrategic Partnership, Organizational Design & Culture· Partner closely with department heads to align people priorities with business growth, retail expansion, and operational needs.· Support leadership in organizational design, role clarity, team structure, and workforce planning as the company scales.· Act as a trusted advisor and people coach to managers, strengthening their ability to manage performance, engagement, and team dynamics.· Embed brand values, performance expectations, and a customer-centric mindset into people practices.· Champion a consistent company culture across stores, factory, and head office.Talent Acquisition & Workforce Planning· Define and continuously improve the talent acquisition approach, hiring standards, and selection processes to improve quality of hire and speed of recruitment.· Lead end-to-end recruitment for corporate, leadership, and key operational roles, partnering closely with hiring managers.· Oversee and continuously improve high-volume retail hiring processes in collaboration with the HR team.· Ensure recruitment practices reflect organizational needs, role clarity, competency requirements, and long-term capability building.· Develop sustainable talent pipelines to support ongoing store expansion and future workforce needs.Onboarding, Performance & Capability Building· Design and implement practical, effective onboarding experiences for retail, factory, and corporate employees.· Own and continuously improve performance management practices, ensuring they are simple, consistent, and used effectively by managers.· Coach managers on setting expectations, giving feedback, and addressing underperformance early.· Identify capability gaps and translate them into practical development priorities.· Design and drive the overall learning and development framework and learning journeys across retail, factory, and corporate teams, working with internal teams and external training providers as appropriate.· Build manager capability through practical people-management training, coaching, and tools.Compensation & Benefits· Drive compensation and benefits projects in close collaboration with internal and external teams.· Coordinate the development and implementation of job grading, salary structures, and benefits frameworks, ensuring alignment with business needs and market practices.· Support the review of reward and benefits practices to strengthen the attraction and retention of key talent.· Ensure agreed frameworks are effectively implemented, communicated, and embedded across the organization.Employee Experience, Engagement & Internal Communication· Develop and drive a structured employee engagement and retention approach across the organization.· Design and deliver engagement initiatives, internal campaigns, and activities that strengthen motivation, loyalty, and connection to the company.· Own internal people communications, ensuring tone, messaging, and content reflect the company’s standards, culture, and ambition.· Use employee feedback, engagement data, exit insights, and retention trends to identify root causes and drive practical improvements.· Promote an inclusive, positive, respectful, and performance-driven work environment.Employee Relations & Performance Support· Set clear employee relations standards and provide guidance on complex, sensitive or senior-level matters across the organization.· Support and coach managers in handling disciplinary issues, grievances, probation management, and performance concerns.· Ensure employee relations practices comply with local labor laws while maintaining a pragmatic, business-oriented approach.· Ensure exit interviews are consistently conducted and insights are used to address root causes and improve retention.People Operations Oversight & Governance· Oversee people operations across payroll, contracts, visas/PRO, insurance, leave and employee lifecycle processes, ensuring accuracy, compliance and consistency.· Establish clear HR processes, controls and ways of working, providing guidance and oversight to the HR team responsible for day-to-day execution.· Continuously improve and simplify HR policies, processes and systems to support efficiency, employee experience and business scalability.· Partner with Finance and relevant functions to ensure effective governance and smooth delivery of people operations.Reporting, Insights & Continuous Improvement· Track and analyze key people metrics including hiring volumes, time-to-fill, turnover, onboarding effectiveness, performance cycles, engagement indicators, and other relevant people measures.· Translate insights into practical recommendations for leadership and managers.· Continuously refine people processes to support scalability, efficiency, accountability, and culture consistency.Qualifications· Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, Business Administration, or a related field.· 8–12 years of experience across People & Culture / HR roles, preferably in retail, consumer, beauty or other operationally complex environments.· Demonstrated experience working in fast-growing or scale-up organizations.· Strong working knowledge of labor law, employee relations, and people governance in the GCC.· Arabic language capability is strongly preferred.Skills & Competencies·High emotional intelligence and strong people judgment, with the ability to navigate sensitive situations, build trust and balance empathy with accountability and business needs.·Strong culture-building capability, translating company values into leadership behaviors, team practices and employee experience.·Strong understanding of corporate people dynamics, leadership teams and cross-functional organizational environments.·Credibility with senior leaders and HODs as a trusted people advisor and coach, with the confidence to challenge constructively when needed.· Strong manager coaching capability across performance, feedback, engagement and team leadership.· Hands-on, pragmatic and solution-oriented, comfortable balancing strategy with execution and operating without a large team.· Ability to build clear, scalable HR structures, policies and processes without over-complicating the organization.·Strong analytical mindset, using people data and insights to improve performance, retention and decision-making.Strong change-management capability, with high professional standards, discretion, resilience and personal accountability.