Traffic Operations Manager

Your new role

Highways England is recruiting 5 Traffic Operations Managers to join Operations Directorate. These are full time and permanent positions based at our Regional Operations Centre in Newton Le Willows, Warrington.

You will lead a team of staff to ensure that we deliver the safe and effective operation of the Strategic Road Network across the North West region. You will take ownership of our customer's journeys, providing real time and accurate information. You will oversee the region's network performance on a proactive basis demonstrating effective leadership of control room resources and through the coordination and deployment of traffic officers, and other available resources (i.e. the supply chain), to incidents across the region.

You will be provide guidance and direction to the team to ensure that regional network operations run smoothly and that incidents are handled effectively, working through issues to seek resolution to restore the network to normality.

The role would suit an effective people manager with operational management experience within a safety critical 24/7 environment who is familiar with both incident and crisis management processes. You will also have strong influencing and communication skills.

This is a 24/7 role, within a team of Operations Managers working a 'double day' shift pattern (07:00 - 15:00 / 11:00 - 19:00) providing on call support overnight. Due to the operational nature of the role there may need to be some variation and flexibility to the core hours, in order to meet operational requirements.

What you'll be leading on

*Take responsibility for the health and safety of the wider team and yourself by challenging, reporting and acting on any unsafe activities or conditions.
*Promote and embed a strong safety culture ensuring that this is the first imperative across all areas of your responsibility
*Be proactive in generating and maintaining a positive operational culture to encourage a productive and safe working environment
* Provide front line team management - setting objectives for the wider team, supporting and developing performance and managing resources to ensure knowledge and competence is maintained.
* Act as incident commander on behalf of Highways England for more complex incidents, proactively keeping senior management informed, as required.
* Leading crisis management situations, working with a range of stakeholders (including the emergency services) at all levels to ensure all those involved are clear on the strategic objectives, working safely and collaboratively to resolve the incident and to restore the network in a timely and safe manner.
* Be an effective decision maker on an assessment of network operations, network condition and risk.
* Identify team or individual capability requirements and gaps, to ensure team can operate effectively to deliver current and future work.
* Actively seek out, analyse and act on feedback from customers and stakeholders to improve performance and our effectiveness against current customer service standards.
* Monitor and evaluate team performance against objectives and performance indicators to support ongoing continuous improvement

* Actively build and maintain a network of colleagues, partners and wider stakeholders to achieve progress on agreed business objectives to deliver a professional frontline service and enable effective and timely resolution of incidents.

To be successful you will need

* Experience of demonstrating a strong safety culture and of operating a productive and safe working environment.
*The ability to be an effective decision maker based on an assessment of network performance and risk in order to restore the network in a timely and safe manner.
* A strong understanding of an operational environment
* The ability to work in a complex service delivery environment to tight deadlines
* Experience of managing a busy workload whilst setting objectives for the team, ensuring morale is high and that the team feel valued and suitably rewarded.
* The ability to drive best practice forward to effective implementation dealing constructively with setbacks.

A bit about us

Making sure our customers have safe and reliable journeys is at the heart of everything we do in Operations. We keep the roads open for business and play a key role in making sure the network we manage is fit for purpose today and for the future.

Why you should join us

At Highways England we believe in a connected country. We are passionate about creating a culture where colleagues feel connected, included and enjoy greater wellbeing to achieve this. We're proud that as an organisation we are continually striving to do better and actively encourage and support our colleagues to do the same with their careers.

So if you put safety first, take ownership of your work, show passion for what you do, work effectively in a team, and demonstrate integrity in how you do it - then you'll be a great fit for our organisation

And finally

And finally we reserve the right to close before the advertised closing date, so we recommend completing your application as soon as possible.