Salary: Depends on experience and skills set
Job Summary
We are seeking an experienced, proactive and values-driven Senior Operations Manager to lead the operational delivery and ongoing development of our food, volunteer and community support services. This is a full-time role with responsibility for overseeing the Community Supermarket and Free Café, together with contracts management, fleet management and wider operational coordination.
The successful candidate will provide strong leadership across multiple teams and workstreams, ensuring services are safe, efficient, compliant and responsive to the needs of the people we support. This role will line manage the Volunteer Manager, Chef and Food Coordinators, while also supporting service improvement, resource management and external partnerships.
Responsibilities
- Provide strategic and day-to-day operational leadership across the Community Supermarket, and Free Café.
- Oversee food service delivery, ensuring high standards of quality, safety, hygiene and customer experience.
- Oversee and coordinate donation activity, ensuring all incoming donations are appropriately recorded, acknowledged, and distributed in line with organisational need and governance requirements. Identify opportunities to improve donation income and engagement.
- Line manage and support Volunteer Manager, Chef and Food Coordinators.
- Monitor team KPIs on a regular basis, ensuring performance is tracked, reported, and acted upon where required.
- Develop and implement SMART objectives for teams and services, ensuring alignment with organisational priorities and service outcomes.
- Manage contracts, including supplier agreements, service monitoring, renewals and performance review.
- Oversee fleet management, including vehicle use, maintenance, compliance, scheduling and operational safety.
- Maintain robust systems for stock control, procurement and inventory management.
- Monitor budgets, departmental spend and value for money, identifying efficiencies where appropriate.
- Ensure compliance with food safety, safeguarding and organisational policies.
- Carry out regular checks, audits and training to maintain safe and effective service delivery.
- Lead on incident response, complaints handling and operational problem-solving.
- Work collaboratively with colleagues, partners and external stakeholders to improve service delivery.
- Produce reports and updates for senior leadership, funders or trustees as required.
- Support service development, business planning and continuous improvement across operations.
Skills and Experience
- Significant experience in operational management, ideally within a charity, community, hospitality or service-delivery setting.
- Proven line management experience, including supervising and developing staff and volunteers.
- Experience of managing contracts, suppliers and service performance.
- Knowledge of fleet management or transport operations would be desirable.
- Strong understanding of food safety, health and safety, compliance and operational standards.
- Experience of budget monitoring and resource management.
- Excellent organisational and problem-solving skills.
- Strong communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to build effective relationships at all levels.
- Ability to work calmly and effectively under pressure.
- A collaborative, compassionate and solutions-focused leadership style.
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