Abi Ashford.
Join Abi Ashford, lead HR consultant at human resources specialist HR Solutions on a typical day. She never knows what each day will bring... but it always begins with porridge.
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I WAKE up at 6am. First I help my autistic teenage daughter to go through her routine. She is my first focus each morning and everything works fine as long as we stick to her exact routine. It is all very much about getting her set and ready and then I drive her to the train station.
By 7.30am, all of that is done and then I come home, and I eat my breakfast, which is always porridge.
Once I have had my porridge, I make a massive coffee and then I sit at my desk at home. My morning routine is to go through my emails and see if anything has come in overnight from my team or my clients and then I prioritise what I am going to do first.
My role is a 50-50 role. 50% of my time I manage my team and the other 50% of the time I have got half a portfolio of clients. I have 25 clients for whom I am their dedicated consultant.
I have to put my face on because in my role, you have to put on different personas or hats.
If I have a challenging meeting with, say, a difficult employee, I have to make sure I am game-ready. For me, that means putting on my make-up, putting on clothes that make me feel confident and professional, even if that is just the top half if I am on Teams. That is the kind of ritual I will go through for sure. I could not do it without my game face.
Around 75% of the time I am sat at my desk in my house. I have a separate office at home, which is very important to me because I can then shut the door at the end of the day.
If I am travelling to a client, perhaps to do a disciplinary or redundancy or similar, I will usually drive unless the meeting is in London, in which case I will take the train.
During my commute in the car, I am a podcast kind of girl. I will either listen to something work-related such as Daniel Barnett, who is an employment law barrister, or – if I want to escape – I will listen to something like Desert Island Discs or My Cultural Life.
If I have a meeting, I tend to set it so I go out in the middle part of the day so that I have time to travel there and come back again.
My husband also works from home so we try to have lunch at the same time, which is really nice. If it is a nice day, in my lunch break we might go and sit in the garden or walk around the block.
In the afternoons, I tend to do my client meetings. This afternoon, it is a TUPE meeting to transfer people from one employer to another.
Or I might be chairing a grievance appeal or applying some selection criteria to people at risk of losing their jobs in a redundancy process.
It is a lot of employee relations in my line of work and there is a lot of deep, tense cases that I get involved with. To the outsider, that might appear negative but this is what I love about the job because I like to make sure that people are being treated in the most respectful way while also ensuring that my client receives the service with which they have asked me to support them.
I pride myself on troubleshooting and making sure someone feels heard.
After work, the first thing I will do is go and see my daughter. My son is at university so he is not around, but I will go and see my daughter and she likes to, in much detail, download what has happened in her day.
She needs that but also I like it because it takes me away from thinking about work.
Then I very much love cooking. So I pour myself a glass of wine and get out my recipe for the evening. Even if it takes ages, I really enjoy the process of cooking a really lovely meal and I do that most nights. That is my thing to wind down and relax after work.
We deal with a huge variety of clients. It could be a care home or a warehouse or a solicitor’s firm or a hairdresser or an estate agent that we are speaking to.
We could have up to 40 queries a day, which is 40 different businesses that we are trying to help and make sure that we understand because they are paying us money for us to get to know their business and then help them. Whereas if you were working internally in an HR department, it is the same business every day and you get to know the employees but the daily queries can get a bit monotonous.
I love the job because it is just so varied and I have to be on the ball all of the time.
As lead HR consultant, Abi Ashford manages a team of ten HR consultants. She has worked at HR Solutions for 19 years.
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