Sally Slater

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT SALLY SLATER

I’ve spent my career in the rooms where difficult decisions get made.Restructuring businesses under financial pressure. Rebuilding cultures that have drifted. Designing people infrastructure from scratch in organisations that have outgrown what they had. It’s the hard, complex, genuinely consequential work that I find most interesting — and where I tend to make the most difference.My background spans tech, aviation, hospitality and social enterprise, but the thread running through all of it is the same: partnering closely with CEOs and leadership teams to turn people challenges into commercial outcomes. That means being the person who can hold the strategic view and write the policy, run the board report and have the difficult conversation with the individual — often in the same week.Most recently I’ve been People & Facilities Director at Ghyston, a Bristol software company, where I’ve led a significant workforce restructuring, implemented HiBob as the company’s first integrated HRIS, redesigned performance management, and helped shape how the business thinks about AI and its implications for our people. We won Best Place to Work at the SPARKies Awards in 2025 — which I’m proud of, because it happened during one of the harder periods we’d been through as a business.Before that, eight years as Head of People & Performance at Bristol Airport gave me a deep grounding in complex, regulated, unionised environments — board reporting, multi-year pay negotiations, pension trusteeship, and building an HR function that genuinely moved the needle on culture and engagement.I bring a data-informed, pragmatic approach to people work — using analytics, AI tools, and direct feedback mechanisms to make better decisions faster. I’m equally comfortable working remotely or embedded in a leadership team, and I’m at my best in businesses that are ambitious, honest about their challenges, and want a People Director who’ll push back when it matters.