HR Program Manager

Job Description

Citizens is advancing Network Evolution & Xperience Transformation (NEXT), a multi-year effort to strengthen how our branch network, leaders, and frontline teams support growth, advice-led relationships, and stronger customer outcomes. The People and Talent workstream is central to that work. We are looking for a Program Manager who can bring structure, pace, and follow-through to the HR-related work needed to move NEXT from strategy to execution.

The NEXT HR Program Manager will partner with the HR team, Development Partner, business leaders, consultants, and cross-functional partners to support the People & Talent workstream. This is complex work that requires operating across the broader NEXT ecosystem, connecting interdependent business initiatives with HR planning and execution, and helping ensure the right partners, decisions, and delivery plans are aligned.

In this role, you will help coordinate work across teams, governance forums, and delivery partners; track milestones and decisions; prepare clear updates; and ensure people-related impacts are understood before the work moves into pilots, activation, or scale. The right candidate is organized, practical, comfortable with ambiguity, and able to connect work across business and HR teams so a complex set of activities becomes a clear, coordinated plan of action.

Key Responsibilities:

• Program Planning and Strategy:
  Partner with the HR Lead, Development Partner, business sponsors, and workstream owners to define program objectives, scope, deliverables, timelines, and integrated roadmaps for the People & Talent workstream.
• Program Governance:
  Manage the HR workstream cadence, governance routines, status updates, decision tracking, and follow-up needed to keep the work organized and moving.
• HR and Stakeholder Management:
  Act as a central connector across the HR Lead, Development Partner, HRBPs, consultants, functional SMEs, business initiative owners, and other cross-functional partners. Proactively manage stakeholder engagement, clarify roles and decision rights, surface alignment needs, and ensure the right partners are brought in at the right moments as NExT and related business initiatives move from design to pilot, activation, and scale.
• Cross-Workstream Alignment:
  Help connect people-related work across Experience & Change, Operating Model & Roles, Talent Enablement, Tools & Capabilities, and broader Network Transformation priorities, ensuring HR implications, dependencies, risks, and readiness needs are understood and integrated into program planning.
• Milestone and Dependency Management:
  Drive visibility and follow-through on key deliverables, owners, decisions, and dependencies across Experience & Change, Operating Model & Roles, Talent Enablement, Tools & Capabilities, related business initiatives, and HR work streams.
• Risk, Issue & Decision Management:
  Identify risks, open issues, and decisions early; make them visible; recommend practical paths forward; and move them through the right governance channels.
• Executive Reporting:
  Prepare clear, concise updates for steering committees, executive governance forums, and other leadership discussions, including pre-reads, asks, and follow-ups.
• Readiness and Change Enablement:
  Help the team understand leader, colleague, and field readiness needs before key decisions, pilots, activations, or broader rollout.
• Workshop & Working Session Facilitation:
  Design and facilitate workshops, review sessions, branch visits, and cross-functional working sessions that clarify objectives, surface decisions, align stakeholders, and advance program deliverables, with project analyst support for scheduling, logistics, materials, notes, and follow-up.
• Documentation & Delivery Discipline:
  Keep program materials, decision logs, action trackers, and governance documents current and easy to use, leveraging project analyst support where appropriate.

Experience, Skill and

Competencies:

• Experience:
  
  8 years of experience providing program management expertise for complex, business-level projects or program portfolios in a large, matrixed organization. Experience should include planning, organizing, controlling, and delivering multiple parallel work efforts; managing milestones, dependencies, risks, issues, decisions, funding or resource considerations, and stakeholders across business and HR teams.
• HR and Talent Fluency:
  Understands HR, talent, workforce, onboarding, learning, performance, incentives, and colleague readiness to ask the right questions, interpret business issues, recommend practical approaches, and bring the right partners into the work.
• Executive Communication and Influence:
  Can translate complex information into clear updates, decision materials, and leadership-ready communications; anticipates questions or objections and influences stakeholders toward alignment and action.
• Stakeholder Management:
  Builds trust across project sponsors, HR, business leaders, consultants, functional SMEs, and cross-functional teams;…