The next decade is crucial for the future of HR teams. Legal Unicorn Lynn Roux

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In this episode of the Unicorns pod, we interview HR guru, Lynn Roux, we cover her upbringing, her life and her thoughts on the challenges facing HR in the coming years.

Follow her via https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnroux/ 
Email at lynn.roux@landerson.co.za  

Lynn's passion for people and process improvement is unrivalled.

Lynn was born and raised in Johannesburg. Her father was an artisan, and her mother was a schoolteacher. She has a sister who is 18 months older. She has two boys and they all live with her dad. She used to ride a motorbike and has now replaced this with a 4X4 so that she can do the trails with her boys.

She started working part-time after completing secondary school and whilst she was studying, she worked as a teller at one of the big banks. She was permanently employed when she started her honours part-time and was fortunate enough to be transferred to the employee relations team to gain work experience in her field of study. 

She moved from the bank to one of the Big 4 accounting and audit firms and stayed there for 15 years. During her tenure, they kept her interested by creating opportunities and giving me exposure to different aspects of HR. She started out with responsibility for policies and procedures and employee relations. This morphed into being a functional owner of HR systems, setting up an HR centre of expertise and shared service centre. 

By popular vote of the team, she was appointed to lead the HR generalist team, the HR shared service centre and centres of expertise for reward, employee relations, HR systems and HR projects.

In September 2015 she joined the first law firm as the Head of HR. She spent seven years in the legal industry with two of the big law firms in South Africa. Coming from a professional services environment she expected this to be an easy transition – how different can it be? Both charge for their time. She was in for a BIG surprise. 

Partners leaving with teams, egos and arrogance, entrenched hierarchy, fear at junior levels, credibility and relevance determined by how successful you are as a lawyer and the divide between lawyers and business services staff were an eye opener. Could law firms really be 8–10 years behind professional services in terms of culture and soft skills development?

Towards the end of 2022, she decided to leave corporate and started her own HR consulting business. This was the birth of LAnderson Management Consulting (Pty) Ltd. 

Her focus areas include creating a culture of belonging and inclusion; employee wellness, considering the ISO standard that has been published for wellness and optimising HR systems and business processes.

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