VP, Employee Relations

Overview

Since 1972, Covenant House has served and advocated for youth and young families experiencing homelessness, human trafficking, and exploitation. Our overarching goal is to end homelessness among youth and young families by helping them achieve housing stability, heal from trauma, tap into their innate resilience, and hone their interests and skills to forge new pathways to independence. This work is carried out across Covenant House sites in 34 cities in the US, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.

About The Role

The Vice President of Employee Relations (VP, ER) is a strategic leader responsible for fostering a fair, inclusive, and legally compliant workplace culture at Covenant House International (CHI) and across our federation. This position provides expert guidance on complex employee relations issues, leads investigations, and partners with site leadership to ensure consistent application of policies, practices, and values. Reporting to the Chief Officer of People and Culture, this critical member of our team will serve as a trusted advisor to leaders at all levels, helping to build organizational capability in conflict resolution, performance management, and workplace culture, while mitigating risk and upholding CHI’s mission to end youth homelessness.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Lead and oversee investigations into workplace concerns, including harassment, discrimination, retaliation, misconduct, and policy violations
• Partner with HR Site Leads, Legal and CPCO as necessary to keep all informed with progress of employee relations activities
• Interpret, communicate and maintain ER policies, processes and educational programs for HR partners, employees and managers as appropriate
• Provide hands-on ER support and guidance to HR Site Leaders to proactively address the root causes of people management issues and offer resolution strategies for effective outcomes
• Support HR Leads, Managers/Supervisors and other stakeholders with conflict resolution, providing constructive feedback, and the interpretation of people management policies
• Apply ER metrics to gather insights, determine trends and develop proactive strategies to remediate risk within the federation
• Interface with other Center of Excellence (COE) teams such as Talent Management, Total Rewards, Talent Acquisition and Analytics and Reporting, as appropriate
• Assist in the design and delivery of training to managers, employees and HR professionals on relevant ER topics and recent employment law updates
• Conduct on-site or virtual support visits to strengthen engagement and trust between staff and leadership as well as assist with workplace culture challenges and resolution of ongoing conflicts
• Build constructive relationships with critical stakeholders to share information and influence change
• Identify, build-out and own a new system to track Employee Relations metrics at our sites to organize your work, surface actionable insights and provide line of sight to P&C and executive stakeholders

Required Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Demonstrated expertise building consensus on a cross-functional basis
• Experience working collaboratively with and influencing a diverse range of decision-makers
• Able to independently juggle multiple projects and stakeholders simultaneously
• Sound knowledge of local, state and federal employment law and regulation and its pragmatic application including FMLA in multiple states, ADA, COBRA and Workers’ Compensation
• Familiarity and understanding of leaves of absence, short and long term disability
• Excellent consultative, coaching, counseling and conflict resolution skills; ability to influence and articulate a variety of issues to different audiences, tailoring messages accordingly
• Analytical and creative; capable of flexing solutions to changing demands
• Strong facilitation, mediation, and conflict resolution skills
• Ability to handle sensitive matters with discretion, professionalism, and empathy
• Commitment to the highest standards of excellence and personal integrity

Required Qualifications

• Minimum of 10 years strategic human resource experience including Employee Relations and/or HR Business Partner roles

Preferred Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Qualifications

• HR certification such as PHR, SPHR, SHRM-SCP or SHRM-CP
• Bachelor's or master's degree in human resources or related field
• Knowledge of HRIS and ability to learn new technical systems, when necessary
• Prior experience working with our tools; Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Office Suite, Asana, Culture Amp
• Bilingual in Spanish with strong written and verbal communication

Travel Requirements

• Ability to travel to various site locations up to 40% of the time
• Ability to travel once per year to New York City in January for our annual in-person traditions

Our Community

Our critical mission demands that we have all voices at the table. A team of diverse people, perspectives, and experiences is smarter, stronger, and more effective for our young people. At Covenant House, every team member is valued, respected, heard, and supported, and we welcome honest and courageous self-reflection on any aspects of our work that are based on biased or outdated viewpoints. We deliberately create opportunities for our staff to grow and thrive.

Covenant House International is an Equal Opportunity Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind: CHI is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at CHI are based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion, belief, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, family or parental status, disability status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. CHI will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics and encourages all qualified applicants to apply.

If you have a disability or medical condition and need a reasonable accommodation, such as an ASL interpreter or a different interview format, or if you have physical accessibility needs, let us know. Contact us at 1-800-388-3888, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Eastern Time or email us at chipeopleandculture@covenanthouse.org.