Organisation Development Lead - Census

Job summary

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution, and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime, and migration.

We’re looking for an experienced Organisation Development Lead to join the ONS Organisation Design and Development Service. In this exciting role, you’ll play a pivotal part in supporting our OD&D practitioners to deliver high impact organisation design and development initiatives that will shape and enable the successful delivery of the 2031 Census programme.

Census 2031 represents our most ambitious data collection project yet – a once-in-a-decade opportunity to capture a complete picture of everyone living in England and Wales. Building on the digital success of 2021, we're pioneering new ways to reach every household and community, ensuring no one is left uncounted. This vital work will provide the foundation for policy decisions, resource allocation, and community planning for the next decade.

Job description

We’re looking for an experienced Organisation Design and Development Lead to join the ONS Organisation Design and Development Service, where you’ll contribute to one of the most nationally significant programmes of the decade. The next UK wide population census in 2031 is a critical endeavour that requires a new programme organisation to come together quickly and perform at its very best. This role sits at the heart of making that possible.

As a Grade 7 Organisation Development Lead, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the culture, ways of working, and team effectiveness needed for people across multiple functions and locations to operate as one high performing, cohesive programme team. You’ll design and deliver organisation development interventions that embed shared values, build trust, and cultivate collaborative behaviours, ensuring leaders and teams can work seamlessly across boundaries.

This is an exciting opportunity to create the conditions for success: fostering a culture of inclusion, accountability, agility, and adaptability so that the census programme can deliver accurate, timely, and trusted data for the UK. Your work will directly influence how thousands of people work together on a fast moving, complex national programme and how the Census organisation evolves, grows, and succeeds through mobilisation, live operations, and final programme delivery.

Role Responsibilities:

• Working in partnership with the Employee Experience team, define and embed a clear cultural framework aligned to the ONS and Census mission, as well as the ONS leadership commitments.
• Develop and implement ways of working that enable rapid decision-making, transparency, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Create mechanisms for feedback and continuous improvement to sustain culture through the end-to-end programme life cycle.
• Design and deliver team development interventions across the programme where required, focusing on trust, psychological safety, and shared accountability.
• Facilitate team effectiveness workshops to clarify roles, decision-making processes, and inter-dependencies.
• Working in partnership with the ONS Leadership Development team, build leadership capability to lead through complexity, ambiguity, and high-pressure operational cycles.
• Integrate cultural principles into performance management.
• Work with senior leaders to model desired behaviours and champion cultural change.
• Engage widely across UK administrations and delivery partners to ensure alignment and shared purpose.
• Working in collaboration with the ONS People Analytics team to define metrics for cultural health, team effectiveness, and engagement.
• Monitor progress and adapt interventions based on evidence and feedback.

This role may be responsible for line management of 1 or 2 roles.

Person specification

EssentialCriteria:

• Working in close partnership with the Census Organisation Design and Development lead (G7) and Census HR Business Partner this role holder will have proven experience in designing, facilitating and embedding successful cultural and ways of working interventions within a complex and/or newly formed organisational unit.
• Innovative, action-oriented and results-driven, with the ability to identify key outcomes and measures and solve problems in a collaborative and proactive way.
• Able to create effective and collegiate working relationships with a diverse range of stakeholders within and outside the organisation, with a proven ability to influence key decisions in a complex stakeholder landscape.
• Successful senior stakeholder management with a reputation as a trusted adviser, able to engage with colleagues at all levels to surface and tackle complex issues.
• Adept at role-modelling the leadership behaviours desired in the modern organisation (relational leadership traits of inclusion, agility, respect) to garner trust from people at all levels.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and complexity, with the confidence to make positive interventions even when the data is incomplete, or people hold conflicting views. Able to create and hold the space for people to re imagine the problem, find common ground and take forward opportunities.
• Strong change management skills with a focus on behavioural and cultural change.

Qualifications

CIPD level 7 qualification, or willingness to work towards.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Communicating and Influencing
• Changing and Improving
• Working Together
• Seeing the Big Picture

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £56,861, Office for National Statistics contributes £16,472 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

The Office for National Statistics is part of the Civil Service, and as such we share a number of key benefits with other departments, whilst also having our own unique offerings to support our valued colleagues across the organisation.

Whether you are hearing about us for the first time or already know a bit about our organisation, we hope that our careers site will give you a great insight into the benefits and facilities available to our colleagues, and our fantastic working culture.

Inclusion & Accessibility

At ONS we are always looking to attract the very best people from the widest possible talent pool, and we are proud to be an inclusive, equal opportunities employer. As a Disability Confident Leader we’re committed to ensuring that all candidates are treated fairly throughout the recruitment process.

As part of our application process, you will be prompted to provide details of any reasonable adjustments to our recruitment process that you need. If you would like to discuss any reasonable adjustments before applying, please contact the recruitment team in the first instance.

If you would like an accessible version of any of the attachments or recruitment documents below or linked to in this advert, please contact the recruitment team who will be happy to assist.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Experience.

Security Clearance:

The requirement for SC clearance is to have been present in the UK for 3 consecutive years immediately prior to applying.

A lack of UK residency in itself is not always a bar to security clearance but the Department will need to consider eligibility by exception on a case-by-case basis. You will be asked to provide information regarding your UK residency during your application, and failure to provide this will result in your application being rejected.

If you are unsure that you meet the eligibility above, please read the information available on Gov.uk on this link, or contact the recruitment email on the advert before applying to discuss, as failure to meet the residency requirements will result in your security clearance application being rejected and any offer of employment being withdrawn.

At the point of SC application, you will need to provide or give access to the following evidence:

• Departmental or company records (personnel files, staff reports, sick leave reports and security records)
• UK criminal records covering both spent and unspent criminal records
• Your credit and financial history with a credit reference agency
• Security Services records

Application process:

Number of Stages: 2 stage process

Stage 1: Application

Stage 2: Interview

Stage 1 – Application

The assessment process at the application stage will be based on your work history, CV, skills, experience, and personal statement. It is important that your application is tailored to highlight the skills, knowledge, and experience relevant to the role.

A personal statement is required at application stage, the maximum word-count allowed is 1250, which should not be exceeded. You should provide evidence for each essential skill criterion listed in the person specification. As these criteria are scored, it is advisable to give clear examples for each one, including the impact of your actions, ideally utilising the STAR technique (Situation, Task, Action, Result).

Please note that Success Profiles Behaviour examples are not required at this stage of the application process.

In instances where a high number of applications are received, the sift pass mark may be adjusted, and candidates will be invited to interview based on merit order, i.e., those with the highest scores.

Stage 2 – Interview

If invited to interview, you will be assessed using techniques aligned with the Civil Service Success Profiles framework, covering all behaviours listed in the job advert.

You will be required to provide a 10 minute presentation at interview. The presentation topic will be provided to candidates who have passed the initial online application stage, on the day of their interview, you will be given time to prepare. This presentation will assess candidates against the Success Profiles Behaviour 'Seeing the Bigger Picture'.

Interviews will be held online via Microsoft Teams.

A reserve list may be held for a period up to 12 months from which further appointments may be made.

Sift - w/c 2nd March

Interviews – w/c 23rd March

Dates are subject to change

For the full terms and conditions of the post, please see attachment below.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check.Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check (opens in a new window).

See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window).The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.

Diversity and Inclusion

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see theCivil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).

Apply and further information

This vacancy is part of the Great Place to Work for Veterans (opens in a new window) initiative.Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

Contact point for applicants

Job contact :

• Name : Sandra Fox-Macey
• Email : recruitmentoperations@ons.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : Recruitmentoperations@ons.gov.uk

Further information

If you feel your application has not been treated in accordance with the Recruitment Principles and you wish to make a complaint, in the first instance, you should contact recruitment.complaints@ons.gov.uk. If you are not satisfied with the response you receive from the Department, you can contact the Civil Service Commission

Attachments

2721 Advert 1B Permanent - ONS National v1-00 Opens in new window (pdf, 83kB)