Meet the speakers

Keynote Speaker – Sandra Campopiano, Chief People Officer at Sage Group plc

Sandra is an HR professional with extensive experience of operating at board level in complex multi-national organisations.

She is currently Chief People Officer at Sage Group plc, where she is responsible for all aspects of Human Resources globally. This includes strategic HR planning, talent acquisition and development, reward, and organisational development. She also has specific responsibility for delivering on Sage’s capability agenda, digital skills ambitions and for accelerating diversity.

Sandra was formerly Chief People Officer at Thomas Cook and Premier Farnell. In these roles she developed people strategies to support business transformation and led global programmes in all areas of organisation effectiveness, people development and colleague engagement. Previously, Sandra worked at Arrow Electronics Inc, Barclays, and Psion (part of Motorola Solutions). She holds an MBA and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Emma Codd, Managing Partner for Talent, Deloitte

Emma Codd is Managing Partner for Talent of the UK firm and a member of the firm’s Executive and Board. Emma is also a Partner in the Forensic practice where she established and manages the Business Intelligence Services team, advising clients on the identification and mitigation of integrity and corruption risks when investing and operating in new geographical markets. Emma’s previous roles include: the UK member of the Global Young Partner Advisory Council and Chair of the UK Executive Advisory Group.

Prior to her appointment as Managing Partner for Talent Emma was heavily involved in Deloitte’s diversity, respect and inclusion agenda, including holding the role of sponsoring partner of the UK firm’s Women’s Network until her appointment to the Executive.

Graeme Goldsmith, Deputy Director, HMCTS Head of Crime North East, Ministry of Justice

Graeme Goldsmith has worked in a variety of roles in the Ministry of Justice in a career that spans over 27 years. He is currently Deputy Director, Head of Crime for the North East region.

Graeme is passionate about diversity and is one of the MoJ Diversity Champions with a focus on Disability and he is also playing a leading role on Mental Health within MoJ. As a Father of 2 he has personal experience of balancing work and caring responsibilities. He has also worked with many carers and parents over the years, who work a variety of working patterns to help them to balance their work with their caring responsibilities outside of work.

MoJ already has a good reputation for having a flexible and inclusive work environment which Graeme hopes we can build and improve by continuing to support carers in their day to day working lives and work with all staff to raise awareness of issues that effect carers and the policy/guidance available to assist them.

Outside of work Graeme is the Manager of an Under 14 Boys football club. In his words his biggest challenge is keeping sixteen 13 year old boys focused.

Rachel Gray, Sales Director & Inclusion & Diversity lead, Cisco

Rachel is a 19 year veteran at Cisco. In March 2014, she joined Cisco’s UK&I senior leadership team to run the Service Provider and Media vertical sales team. Prior to this move, Rachel has held a variety of senior sales management positions in the Services Sales, Strategy & Planning and the Service Provider Partner organisation.
Rachel is passionate about mentoring and sponsorship, and through her role as lead for I&D in Cisco UK & Ireland, is creating a greater awareness of how diversity brings greater value and makes Cisco a great place to work. She is known for challenging herself, her team and her peers to think differently about how we engage to drive incremental growth through innovation and differentiation. Rachel studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University where she achieved a BA Honours degree and a MA. Rachel lives in Godalming, Surrey, with her husband and three children. In her spare time (in between ferrying the kids for various sporting fixtures), Rachel sings with a local choir, and is actively involved with running a local youth football club.

Rebecca Hess, Human Resources Business Adviser, West Midlands Police

Becky Hess has worked as a Human Resources Business Adviser at West Midlands Police since 2008, specialising in conflict management, departmental and force recognition events, employee engagement strategy and flexible working. She has trained colleagues on Handling Difficult Conversations and mediation skills, regularly conducting mediations between colleagues as an ACAS accredited force mediator. Becky runs independent appeal panels to resolve challenging flexible working cases, although this involves only 1% of the total number of flexible working applications being processed at WMP on a weekly basis, where around a third of its 11 000 employees currently work flexibly. She has drafted associated policy and guidance also for agile working. Current projects involve new strategy on flexible working, self rostering, and a force-wide survey to assess potential demand for various proposals to help flexible workers.

Before this great job (she says), she was a professional trade union official for Unison, and before that a Campaign Manager at Amnesty International. She speaks French, German and the language of teenagers. In her spare time she runs a school gardening club, and writes very bad poetry for children, when she is not using the above skills to get them to do their homework.

Xanic Jones, EMEA Senior Diversity & Inclusion Specialist, Citi

Xanic Jones is a Diversity & Inclusion Specialist for EMEA and Vice President in the Citi EMEA Diversity Team, appointed to the role in August 2010. Xanic’s responsibilities cover the development and integration of Citi’s workforce diversity strategy for attracting diverse talent, workforce development, fostering an inclusive work environment, and ensuring management accountability within EMEA. Xanic is the Diversity partner for the ICG businesses, and takes the lead on the parenting agenda at Citi in EMEA.

Prior to joining Citi Xanic has worked in Human Resources within the Financial Services sector for the past 22 years, specialising in Diversity and Inclusion in 2007. Xanic’s previous positions have included Human Resources Business Partner and Head of Diversity & Inclusion.

Xanic studied for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) qualifications and is an Associate member of the CIPD.

Outside of work Xanic enjoys an active lifestyle, has climbed mountains, cycled miles and swam the English Channel, as well as loves to travel after having spent much of her childhood living abroad. Xanic has also recently become a parent and has a very active toddler to keep her on her toes.

Sqn Ldr Victoria Littlechild, SO2 Employment Policy Delivery, Royal Air Force

Vicky has worked as a Personnel Officer in the Royal Air Force for the past 14 years. During this time, she has undertaken a variety of roles both in the UK and overseas, in peacetime and on operations, including: recruitment; event organisation and hosting for international senior Politicians and Military officers visiting UK Defence; Employment Tribunals; and the programme management of major Defence infrastructure projects. As part of her tenure in the infrastructure role, Vicky spent 6 months on operations, overseeing the construction of several major aerodrome projects. In her current role as a Squadron Leader in the headquarters at Air Command, she heads the Royal Air Force team responsible for all terms of service, leave policies, appraisals and flexible working strategy; in doing so, Vicky also represents the Royal Air Force at all related Joint Service meetings and boards.

Outside of work Vicky enjoys running her small, bespoke online handbag company and days out with her husband and their westie, exploring the pubs and eateries of the British countryside. She is also passionate about raising funds for the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund, the Service charity supporting all serving and retired Royal Air Force personnel and their families.

Brian Stanislas, Product Manager, Digital & Design Team, UK Civil Service

Brian has working in the Civil Service for just over 20 years. He is the Product Manager of the Civil Service Job Share Finder website. The site helps civil servants to find other colleagues across government. He is a qualified project manager (PRINCE2 Practitioner and Agile DSDM Practitioner) and also an Associate member of the CIPD.
He is also a member of the Civil Service Job Share and Alternative Working Network steering group. The steering group has representatives of major Civil Service Departments and organises events to help people find job share partners; provides training and guidance for line managers of job sharers; and represents job sharers at cross government events and meetings about flexible working.

Brian has held a variety of HR roles in his time with the Civil Service including Learning and Development Consultant at DWP, Client Manager at Identity and Passport Service and Career Transition Consultant at Civil Service Resourcing.

Brian grew up in the East End of London and now lives in Hertfordshire, where in his time away from work he enjoys cookery, comedy and has a passion for classic cars.

Nikunj Upadhyay, Head of Multigenerational Agenda, Barclays

Nikunj Upadhyay is currently the head of Multigenerational agenda for Barclays. Multigenerational agenda is one of the five agenda in the global Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) strategy. Nikunj is responsible for designing and driving the Multigenerational agenda strategy across Barclays to drive effective results, and aligning business metrics to the goal of becoming the employer of choice across talents in various life stages.

Prior to Barclays, Nikunj has worked for Saint Gobain, Accenture and HSBC in a variety of HR roles contributing to delivery of their human capital strategy towards the achievement of business objectives.

Nikunj holds a Master’s degree in Business Management from the University of Pune, India