Head of HR Service Excellence

About the Role

The Head of HR Service Excellence provides strategic direction and oversight for Takeda's global HR service excellence agenda and is accountable for the quality, consistency, and continuous improvement of the HR service experience. This role owns the service standards, knowledge foundation, front-door experience, and platform process governance that enable end-to-end employee journeys to operate consistently at a global scale. As a senior leadership role, the position contributes to global HR strategy and translates it into a multi-year service excellence roadmap. The role drives digital, AI-enabled, and self-service delivery while balancing business needs, regional requirements, risk, and sustainable cost-to-serve.

Team and Scope

The role leads a globally distributed Service Excellence team of approximately 12-15 people across four capability areas:

• Journey Owners - accountable for end-to-end journey design, governance, and continuous improvement.
• Core HR Platform Partners - responsible for business process governance across core HR platforms, including Workday, ServiceNow, the HR front door, case management, knowledge, and workflow, ensuring consistent and scalable service delivery.
• Knowledge Partners - accountable for ownership and lifecycle management of the HR agent knowledge base.
• Front Door and Experience Owners - responsible for demand disposition, experience design, measurement, and adoption.

How You Will Contribute

• Provide strategic direction and functional leadership for the globally distributed Service Excellence team, directly and through capability leaders, shaping priorities, capacity, capability development, and succession planning across all four areas.
• Build and lead a distributed team across regions and GCC hubs, including hiring, capability development, and performance management.
• Partner with the HR PMO on prioritization, governance, quality assurance, and benefits realization for service improvement initiatives.
• Represent HR service performance and improvement priorities with senior HR and business stakeholders.
• Own the global service excellence roadmap and prioritization framework, aligning cross-functional initiatives with enterprise HR strategy and guiding trade-offs across experience, capacity, cost, risk, and regional requirements.
• Establish and govern enterprise HR service standards, including SLAs, tiering, escalation paths, quality measures, and right-first-time expectations.
• Embed an enterprise-thinking mindset of "global by default, local by exception," ensuring local variations are minimized, intentional, documented, and governed.
• Accelerate AI-enabled direct access and self-service capabilities, shifting capacity from transactional work to higher-value activities.
• Govern the allocation of HR roles within the HR Service Delivery Model, maximizing Tier 1 (0) through content quality, query deflection, ease of use, and knowledge management.
• Lead journey governance across design, handoffs, service expectations, moments that matter, and measurable improvement outcomes.
• Clarify roles, accountabilities, escalation points, and handoffs across People Solutions, COEs, HRBLs, People Partners, PLR, DD&T, and GCC.
• Own the HR front-door experience, including demand disposition, self-service versus human handoff, urgency routing, and the "no answer found" experience.
• Establish and govern the HR agent knowledge base, including standards, lifecycle management, quality controls, and adoption.
• Own business process governance for core HR platforms, including Workday, ServiceNow, the HR front door, case management, knowledge, and workflow.
• Partner with DD&T and HR product teams to ensure platform changes support simple, consistent, and scalable HR service delivery.

Qualifications

• Significant senior leadership experience in HR shared services, People Solutions, global business services, HR business partnering, or employee experience at enterprise scale.
• Experience leading distributed teams, including offshore and GCC-based delivery models, within complex global matrix organizations.
• Demonstrated success leading through other people leaders and driving cross-functional transformation initiatives.
• Proven track record of improving employee experience, service quality, cycle time, and cost-to-serve within multi-tier service delivery models.
• Deep expertise in knowledge management, including taxonomy, analytics, continuous improvement, self-service, service platform governance, and KPI-driven performance management.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent professional experience required.
• Certifications in service management, design thinking, product ownership, Lean Six Sigma, ITIL, or change management are desirable.
• Enterprise HR service leadership within tiered, multi-channel service delivery models in a global matrix environment.
• Strong expertise in service design, employee experience, and journey governance.
• HR technology fluency across Workday, ServiceNow, case management, knowledge management, workflow, and AI-enabled service channels.
• Executive stakeholder management, federated governance, and change leadership in complex, evolving organizations.