Organizational Development Manager

JOB OBJECTIVE:

The Manager – Organizational Development & Workforce Planning is a newly established role within the organization, designed to embed workforce foresight and organizational excellence as core enablers of the company’s strategic agenda. The incumbent will architect and operationalize frameworks that optimize organizational design, enable manpower agility, and integrate talent pipelines with business imperatives.

This role serves as a critical enterprise integrator, balancing near-term workforce requirements with long-term strategic capacity, embedding Emiratization mandates, and ensuring that organizational structures remain adaptive in the face of transformation. By leveraging analytics, governance, and change leadership, the role ensures the organization sustains a future-ready, high-performing, and values-driven workforce.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

Strategic Enterprise Partnering

• Act as a strategic workforce architect, aligning manpower and organizational design with enterprise strategy, regulatory priorities, and business growth trajectories.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to senior leadership, translating business complexity into structured workforce solutions.
• Influence leadership thinking on organizational effectiveness, capability readiness, and future of work paradigms.

Organizational Design & Structural Effectiveness

• Lead enterprise-wide organization design reviews, evaluating spans of control, role architecture, and decision-rights frameworks.
• Drive structural alignment initiatives to reduce complexity, eliminate duplications, and increase organizational agility.
• Introduce governance protocols for structural changes, ensuring alignment with both financial models and HR frameworks.

Workforce Planning & Forecasting

• Design and govern annual and mid-cycle workforce planning processes, integrating with finance, budgetary cycles, and strategic transformation roadmaps.
• Develop predictive workforce models to anticipate capability gaps, attrition risks, and future talent supply-demand dynamics.
• Incorporate Emiratization targets into manpower planning as a structural requirement, not an afterthought.

Performance, Capability & Development Integration

• Partner with HR COEs to embed capability frameworks into performance cycles and workforce plans.
• Translate workforce analytics into capability-building roadmaps, closing skills gaps for future readiness.
• Ensure performance data informs organizational design and workforce supply strategies.

Talent Reviews, Succession & Critical Role Resilience

• Provide workforce and organizational insights to support succession planning and talent pipeline reviews across business units, ensuring alignment with organizational structures and manpower requirements.
• Highlight readiness levels for critical positions and share workforce planning data with L&D and Talent teams to enable development interventions that strengthen leadership resilience.
• Collaborate with L&D and Talent COEs on career architecture and mobility frameworks, ensuring workforce planning integrates with retention strategies for high-potential talent.

Workforce Analytics & Decision Intelligence

• Build and maintain workforce dashboards for Board-level and executive reporting.
• Provide predictive and scenario-based workforce insights to inform strategic decisions (e.g., restructuring, investment, expansion).
• Benchmark organizational effectiveness and manpower utilization against industry standards and global practices.

Change Leadership & Transformation Enablement

• Design and execute change frameworks to support restructures, mergers, leadership transitions, and enterprise transformation programs.
• Conduct readiness assessments, stakeholder mapping, and engagement plans to de-risk organizational change.
• Serve as the change liaison between HR, leadership, and employees to sustain engagement during transition periods.

Governance, Policy & Regulatory Compliance

• Act as gatekeeper for governance protocols related to manpower planning, promotions, transfers, and organizational changes.
• Ensure adherence to UAE labor law, Emiratization mandates, and governance standards.
• Recommend policy refinements to reflect evolving business models, labor regulations, and organizational needs.

Cross-Functional Integration

• Collaborate with TA, Rewards, L&D, Emiratization, and HR Operations to ensure holistic workforce strategies.
• Provide business intelligence and workforce perspectives to shape organization-wide HR frameworks, digital systems, and policy evolution.

Strategic Projects & Organizational Resilience

• Lead or contribute to enterprise projects, including operating model redesign, crisis workforce planning, or post-merger integrations.
• Act as HR lead for business continuity and audit readiness in manpower and organizational areas.
• Serve as transformation custodian for initiatives directed by the CHRO and Board.

QUALIFICATIONS, EXPERIENCE, SKILLS & COMPETENCIES:

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, Business Administration, Organizational Psychology, or related field.
• Master’s degree preferred (e.g., MBA, MSc in HR/OD).
• Professional certifications such as CIPD, SHRM-SCP, HRCI, or equivalent; certifications in Organizational Design, Workforce Planning, or Change Management (e.g., Prosci) are an advantage.

Experience:

• Minimum 8–10 years of progressive HR experience, with at least 3–5 years in Organizational Development, Workforce Planning, or HR Business Partnering roles.
• Demonstrated success in leading manpower planning, organizational design, and/or enterprise transformation initiatives.
• Strong knowledge of UAE labor law, Emiratization frameworks, and GCC HR regulations.
• Experience in supporting mid-to-large scale business units within diversified or complex organizations.

Job-Specific Skills:

• Strategic workforce planning and headcount forecasting.
• Organizational design and operating model restructuring.
• Workforce insights to support talent development and succession planning (in collaboration with L&D and Talent COE).
• Workforce planning alignment with performance management frameworks, ensuring structures and manpower enable accountability.
• Workforce analytics to monitor engagement trends and organizational culture, sharing insights with L&D and HR Operations for targeted interventions.
• Governance support for conflict resolution and policy compliance, ensuring workforce structures are compliant with UAE labor law and governance requirements.
• Change management, stakeholder engagement, and organizational culture building.