Laura Sherwood

Chief People Officer @Ogilvy UK

London, GB

Ogilvy is one of the world\'s leading Marketing Agencies. Within my role of Chief People officer, I sit as part of the exec team and oversee the People function for over employees, split across Advertising Brand & content, Health, Consulting, Ogilvy One, PR & Influence. Key focus areas:Managing People team of 30 - have significantly restructured the People team split across Generalist, L&D, TA, Operations & Data, with a heavy focus on rebuilding & developing expertise & culture within team. Restructuring the agency across Business units & crafts, to set up for Growth, and helping to reset leadership team to deliver against Growth targets.Our L&D focus has been around developing the agencies A.I capabilities, and training on WPP\'s A.I system. In 2024 we ran a Learning Day in April followed by an extended Learning week in December, with focus on upskilling around A.I.Leading the DE & I function, working in partnership with Director of DE & I to drive activity across the agency. 2024\'s plan saw us continue our journey to drive inclusivity and equity. Highlights of the year included launch of two new equity programmes: Brotherhood - our flagship career acceleration & coaching programme for Black male talent at Ogilvy & our Borderless Mentoring scheme launched to retain and grow underrepresented talent. Our extensive cultural programme, saw us run a mixture of seminars, panels and workshops across the year to support our strategic ambition to educating all colleagues and foster belonging for colleagues from marginalised communities. We created new partnerships to drive our inclusive hiring ambitions & reviewed our junior talent programmes.People Data & Systems - we implemented workday as our core People System in 2024, as well as Culture Amp, as our new review software. We have also been focussing on where we can automate & improve People ops processes to make more efficient.Employee engagement working in partnership with CEO to drive cultural change.