Helen Reid
Helen offers unrivalled HR and Organisational Effectiveness expertise following a highly successful 17 year career with Shell. That career gave her experience in all parts of the oil and gas business (exploration & production; gas & power, and manufacturing and marketing), in roles across all HR functional areas, in locations across Australia and overseas, and in HR roles from the highly strategic in the national and global Head Office to the more tactical in manufacturing plants.
Underpinned by undergraduate qualifications in Economics (Curtin University) and post-graduate qualifications in Organisational Behaviour and Industrial Relations (University of NSW), Helen’s experience sees her equally comfortable at the senior leadership table as at the negotiating table. While her style is naturally collaborative, her focus is on achieving outcomes which is both right for the business and right for the people.
She brings particular expertise in the international HR arena, having worked for 6 years in Shell’s Dutch Head Office in a succession of roles with HR accountability in Western Europe, North America, the ex-Soviet states, and the Middle East. In a company that employs more expatriates than any other organisation globally (save the US Army and the Catholic Church), those roles gave her unparalleled experience with the development and application of expatriate remuneration and benefits policies. At the same time, operating in a global Head Office environment provided a unique opportunity to be deeply involved in cutting edge leadership development, talent management, performance management, organisational culture, and new business development projects
In her latter years with Shell, Helen was accountable for HR strategy and organisational effectiveness in the Asia-Pacific region, a region stretching from China in the north to New Zealand in the South-East. In that role, Helen drove the region-wide cultural change agenda necessitated by the implementation of a regional operating model across all areas of the business. At the same time, she got to role model that cultural change with her own ‘virtual’ HR team - multi-locational, ethnically diverse, and multi-lingual. It is perhaps not surprising therefore, that Helen is passionate about supporting and guiding real and meaningful engagement with people in organisations. After all, it’s people that make the difference.