The OCC/TOC Team Lead is a key leadership role within Element’s Global Technology Operations Centre (TOC). This position is responsible for driving operational excellence and ensuring the consistent, high-quality support of critical IT services across the organisation. The role focuses on people leadership, managing, developing, and empowering a team of TOC Analysts, while overseeing real-time monitoring, incident response, and service availability across Element’s global infrastructure.
Acting as a central point of coordination within the TOC environment, the OCC/TOC Team Lead ensures timely detection, escalation, and resolution of operational issues, and maintains strong stakeholder relationships across Technology and the wider business.
The position requires varied shift cover: 08:00 - 16:00 and 09:00 - 17:00, and may require support for weekend business activity. The role may require out-of-hours on-call escalation support.
The OCC/TOC Team Lead reports directly to the Global Head of Service Management,
Key Responsibilities
People Leadership & Team Management
- Lead, mentor, and develop a team of TOC Senior Analysts and Analysts, ensuring high performance, accountability, and continuous growth.
- Conduct performance management, including objective setting, monitoring, coaching, and formal appraisals.
- Foster a positive, collaborative, and high-performing team culture aligned with Element values.
- Manage shift coverage and staffing to maintain operational support.
- Address workload distribution, prioritisation, and team wellbeing, ensuring balanced and sustainable operations.
- Manage conflict effectively and support a psychologically safe environment for all team members.
Operational Excellence
- Oversee real-time monitoring of critical infrastructure, applications, and network environments, ensuring rapid response to alerts and incidents.
- Ensure analysts follow established SOPs, KB articles, and escalations, maintaining service availability and rapid issue resolution.
- Drive consistency and quality in remote hands and eyes support across multiple regions.
- Identify service-impacting issues, validate customer impact, and escalate to SMEs and engineering teams as required.
- Ensure adherence to Element’s Incident, Major Incident, and Change Management processes, and support Major Incident Managers during critical events.
- Coordinate cross-functional teams during incidents to ensure timely and effective resolution.
- Process, Reporting & Continuous Improvement
- Lead continuous improvement initiatives by identifying trends, gaps, and automation opportunities.
- Support the seamless onboarding of new business units and services into the TOC operational model.
- Maintain and enhance operational reporting, ensuring regular SLA and performance updates are delivered to management.
- Contribute to Post-Incident Reviews by ensuring effective participation, accountability, and follow-through.
- Collaborate closely with the Global Head of Service Management and regional leads to evolve TOC capabilities and deliver best-in-class operational support.
Vendor & Stakeholder Engagement
- Manage relationships with third-party vendors and partners, ensuring accountability, timely support, and appropriate escalation.
- Attend monthly vendor service reviews to contribute insights on performance, incidents, and improvements.
- Build strong working relationships with technical and business stakeholders to maintain trust and confidence, especially during high-impact events.
- Governance & Compliance
- Ensure compliance with Element’s Purpose, Mission, Vision, Values, and technology policies.
- Maintain high levels of documentation quality, operational discipline, and audit readiness.
Experience & Knowledge Required
- Minimum of 5 years people manager experience within a high-pressure NOC/TOC, Command Centre, or Operations environment.
- Solid understanding of ITIL principles and structured operational processes.
- Hands-on experience using ITSM platforms such as ServiceNow.
- Proven ability to manage customer expectations and communicate effectively with stakeholders at all levels.
- Strong organisational skills with the ability to manage multiple priorities and lead under pressure.
- Demonstrated ability to manage conflict and coach team members through complex situations.
- Knowledge of voice and data networking (LAN, WAN, routing protocols, switches, routers).
- Knowledge of cloud technologies including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
- Knowledge of enterprise technologies such as Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, VPN, Windows OS, SQL, Virtualisation, Citrix, Wireless technologies, etc.
- Experience with monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., BigPanda, Zabbix, etc.).
Essential Skills & Certifications
- Experience in Operations or TOC environment where observability, response, and incident management are critical.
- Familiarity with Halo or similar ITSM tools.
- Technology-related degree or higher-level qualification.
- ITIL v3 or v4 Foundation certification.
Company Overview
Element is one of the fastest growing testing, inspection and certification businesses in the world. Globally we have more than 9,000 brilliant minds operating from 270 sites across 30 countries. Together we share an ambitious purpose to ‘Make tomorrow safer than today’.
