Team
Team Meraki
We are a small but perfectly formed team of HR professionals and qualified Coaches/Trainers with significant experience of successfully delivering professional, commercial and practical HR & Coaching/Training solutions. Our experience includes roles as HR Business Partners, HR Managers and HR Directors allowing us to get to the nub of any problems or people related issues that maybe stopping you from achieving your business goals.
Emma Browning
Managing Director
Emma is a highly qualified and experienced HR Director, with a strong and proven pedigree in delivering results to the bottom line, fast. She continues to work with clients directly and particularly likes to work with growing businesses to help them develop the right people strategy that will enable their growth, and works with business leaders/people managers who want to improve their leadership skills. Emma is also an engaging trainer and facilitator who will create and deliver workshops on a wide range of people management topics such as Recruitment, Coaching skills for the Manager, How to have Difficult Conversations as well as How to Conduct an Effective Appraisal.
Emma is a Fellow of the CIPD and has a Postgraduate and Masters Degree. Emma recently won the Woman Who Micro Business Award in 2019 and was a finalist in two categories for the 2019 B4 Business Awards, 50 People to watch in Oxfordshire and 50 business to watch in the Innovation category.
Any of you who know and have worked with Emma, will know the high standards she works to and you can expect nothing less of her team!
Emma’s favourite pastime is hill and fell walking in the UK with her husband.
Rachel Sherson
Senior HR Business Partner
Rachel is a highly qualified HR consultant with over 10 years experience of working in HR within various industries including; engineering, manufacturing and automotive. Emma recruited Rachel into her team at Harley-Davidson and they worked together for two years before Emma left Harley-Davidson to set up Meraki HR.
Rachel has a Bachelor of Commerce (BCom) in Human Resources and Industrial Relations and has a CIPD Advanced Award in Reward Management.
Rachel is from New Zealand and made the UK her home 8 years ago. Rachel is an excellent netball player and a real outdoors girl.
Donna Chadbone
Senior HR business partner
Donna is a highly experienced HR Generalist with over 20 years’ experience gained across a range of industries including hospitality, retail and leisure, construction, charities, educational settings, engineering and many more !
Donna started her career in the corporate world of business banking before deciding to broaden her knowledge of different sectors as an HR Consultant. She has worked with both private and public sector businesses and loves the fact that the diversity of clients she works with means that every day is different.
Donna has a diploma in Human Resources Management from the University of Salford.
Donna loves to travel off the beaten track with her family, she loves skiing in the winter and paddle boarding in the summer.
Nicole Steward
HR Administrator
Nicole has over 10 years’ experience in the UK higher education sector with a focus on customer service and administration. Nicole started her career in recruitment and then moved to work for local government in the HR department as a Human Resources Practitioner, in South Africa.
Nicole holds an Honours degree in Psychology from the University of South Africa and has completed her PRINCE2 qualification in the UK.
Nicole moved to the UK from South Africa in 2014. Nicole is an avid reader of crime novels and enjoys HIIT and spinning classes.
Elise Chownes Dove
HR Consultant
Elise is a CIPD qualified HR professional with over 15 years’ experience within HR and Operations in both small and large sized companies across different industries.
Elise’s main focus is on ensuring employees have the right support to work to the best of their ability. Elise works with our clients to create the right environment for staff to learn new skills and create effective teams to help you achieve your business goals.
Elise particularly enjoys working with clients who are at the very start of their HR journey and who value and recognise their staff.
Elise was a lifeguard in Greece and a ski host in the Alps in 2000.
Helen Joy
LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT SPECIALIST
Helen believes that we are all capable of creating a motivating and inspiring workplace and has spent the past 20 years helping a range of businesses to achieve this.
A Learning & Development specialist, Helen’s passion is Leadership & Management. Great managers create great teams, and they need support to build their skills, strengths and confidence in order to reach their own potential. By combining theories and models, commercial awareness and soft skills, Helen helps managers understand their role in the business, how they impact on others and how they can be accountable and responsible for achieving their goals. Her workshops are practical and engaging and focus on how learning can be translated back into the workplace.Helen has completed two half marathons and is currently training for her third, determined to beat her PB.
Kerry Bains
Recruitment strategist
Kerry Bains is our Recruitment Strategist who has over 20 years recruitment experience. She specialises in working with growing businesses that need her expertise in creating a robust internal recruitment strategy and process that delivers tangible results.
During her time in recruitment, Kerry has built and continues to own a successful recruitment agency in Staffordshire and now works on a consultancy basis. Kerry helps our clients design and create their own recruitment strategy and processes that work for them. She is a highly organised professional whose priority is to give outstanding customer service by creating an exceptional recruitment experience for both candidates and hiring managers.
A Supermum running several businesses, Kerry is married with 3 children, a dog, 6 hens and spends most of her free time as a taxi driver to her children!
Vanessa Frampton
HR Consultant
Vanessa is a Chartered Fellow CIPD along with Level 2 Certificate in Counselling Skills. She has 25 + years HR experience working with many well known brands including BBC, Q8, McVitie’s and GE. Vanessa provides strategic and operational support in all areas of the employee lifecycle.
Vanessa loves the fact that small businesses are often not tied down by bureaucracy and are often flexible and agile in their decision-making. She appreciates a “roll your sleeves up” environment (and mentality), which she demonstrates in how she works with clients!
Vanessa runs a roller disco at the weekends, enjoys Zumba and is an accomplished ten pin bowler, all despite the fact that she once broke her ankle before a school PE lesson had even started just by coming out of the changing room…!
Tina Jennings
CULTURE TRANSFORMATION EXPERT
Tina is a heart led values leader, Chartered Fellow of the CIPD and believes that anything is possible with the right purpose, people, and plan. She has a proven track record in change and cultural transformation where unlocking the power of people is her thing.
Over the past 24 years she has worked with leaders in multiple countries, functions, and industries, in hyper growth and downsizing moments, to understand and diagnose required change and business ambition.
Whether change is around improving cost, efficiency, performance, or culture she has been there and gets energy from helping people like you make the complex simple.
Skilled at creating and implementing seamless and transformative change, which ignites business growth and positively impacts the bottom line she loves nothing more than supporting people to thrive.
Tina has a reputation for leading the business agenda ‘adding tangible value’ and having a clear approach to people, ‘unlocking potential and results time and time again’.
Tina can be found on an island, on the beach with her family and dog most weekends!
Lisa LLoyd
CHARTERED PSYCHOLOGIST AND PSYCHOTHERAPIST
A drive for enabling people to be their best and thrive underpins the way Lisa works with our clients. Being a chartered psychologist gives her a point of difference to understand what’s going on and enable change. Her mantra is simple… “When we get people right, we get business right.”
Lisa is determined to make a positive impact on people in their day-to-day lives, whether that’s in their own space or at work. She firmly believes that if we all start to do things a little bit differently, we’d achieve huge results. Lisa specialises in mental health, wellbeing and getting the workplace culture right. She supports companies to create a culture that people enjoy and are proud to be part of, where they are fully engaged and are able to perform to their true potential. That might be about working with leaders, consulting across the organisation or providing training to employees.Lisa’s biggest priority is her family, and Lisa loves throwing herself at life, enjoying the outdoors, being active, seeing friends and travelling around in her campervan.
Prisca Bradley
EMPLOYMENT LAWYER
Prisca Bradley is an experienced employment lawyer and specialist Diversity and Inclusion trainer. With a particular interest in discrimination, Prisca is committed to helping organisations understand the importance of diversity in a performance, retention and wellbeing context.
Prisca has developed training over the last 15 years which is both informative and highly engaging. Creating a safe environment within which to share views, there are many opportunities for interaction and debate.
Prisca’s annual EDI training helps organisations with a statutory defence to claims of discrimination. The Equality Act affords a defence to organisations facing such claims where they can demonstrate that they took “all reasonable steps” to prevent discrimination. Training staff every year plays a significant part in evidencing these ‘reasonable steps’. The session also acts as a discrimination case law update looking at examples from recent important cases.
David Yeabsley
TRAINER & COACH
David helps Businesses to Future Proof themselves by developing and improving the contribution all of their team members make to their organisation’s future outcomes.
Future Proofing itself is not a new concept, but how David works with businesses and their people on Future Proofing is! David helps People to stay relevant and of value to their employers for the rest of their working careers by “Future Proofing” themselves.
David’s work in Coaching helps Technical Experts to make the transition into management and on to Leadership. For most Technical Experts they have a true passion for their profession and still love being involved in the day-to-day activities. Moving into Management and Leadership roles often means they find it hard to step back and enable others to be effective by empowering and delegating to their team members. David coaches’ people through this process and on into leadership so they can take a more strategic approach to their work and have a greater impact on the business / organisation.
David also helps individuals who have been made redundant by their current company via outplacement support services to position themselves / self-manage to make themselves employable as possible and manage their careers and the contribution they make in very uncertain and challenging times.
David is a professional speaker and loves cycling and will often be found out and about at the weekends on a short bike ride (just 100kms or so!)