Join Opus as our Operations Manager

Basic information

Hours: 3-5 days per week (37.5 hours pro rata), subject to discussion and applicant's preference

Pay: £28,480 (pro rata), with pay rises expected

Terms: Permanent contract, subject to a probationary period of 3 months

Start: Ideally 1st July 2025, but flexible, based on notice needed

Location: Remote working primarily, but in-person workshops and meetings require regular commuting to Sheffield, UK

Applications must be received by: 14th May 2025 (please note, this deadline has been extended from 30th April)

Interviews: We anticipate the recruitment process consisting of shortlisting and two rounds of interviews starting in the week commencing 26th May 2025.

Background and invitation

This role is centred around the smooth running of Opus’s day-to-day operations. This involves supporting and helping to maintain all the nuts and bolts of our projects, all the ‘on the groundwork’, as well as how the projects interact with each other and how the company functions as a whole.

While the person in this role would not be expected to work directly on company strategy unless they wanted to, they would need to have a firm understanding of it and be able to work through its implications for the work Opus is doing day-to-day.

What is Opus?

Opus is a worker-owned social enterprise with the aim of finding systemic responses to society’s most complex problems. We're based in Sheffield, northern England. Our work recognises that the problems faced by our city, the UK and the wider world are complex and intersecting. We can't solve these problems one at a time – that's why we're involved in dozens of different projects seeking to make change in areas such as climate, poverty and marginalisation. Instead of radical reforms to fundamentally flawed systems, our work focuses on emerging futures – new systems based on equity, justice and staying within our planetary boundaries. We think big because we have no other option.

The mission

Opus is a mission-led organisation. We aim to explore and further systemic change as part of a just transition, not to make a profit or to tinker with existing systems. By working here, you’ll become part of what we’re building together.

The work is not ‘yours’ or ‘ours’, but part of a collective endeavour grounded in a shared purpose. Working at Opus is fundamentally relational, not transactional. This means that we will shape the role together as the organisation changes and evolves. Like all roles at Opus, this role is an invitation to take shared ownership of the mission and to co-create something fundamentally transformative.

The role

Broad responsibilities include:

Maintaining a working knowledge of activity in different workstreams and checking in with leads in these workstreams to ensure they’re on course (for example; the Wellbeing Lead, the Communications Leads and the Finance Lead).
Having a broad overview of work going on in different workstreams, so as to be able to spot opportunities, gaps, problems, potential conflicts, and to be able to pick anything up that ‘falls through the cracks’.
Ensuring that different workstreams are functioning properly and have sufficient capacity and resources, and flagging when this isn’t the case.
Ensuring that different workstreams are interacting with each other appropriately and effectively (for example, making sure that Opus Productions is aware of what’s happening in the Demonstrators portfolio).
Attending Directors' meetings and making sure decisions at these meetings are implemented.
Looking after company-wide matters, like formation and implementation of new policies and working practices, coordinating away days and other important company-wide matters as identified by Directors and members.
Working with the Finance Coordinator and having a fairly detailed knowledge of the company’s finances, in particular relating to long-term finance, finance strategy and in-progress funding bids.
Information and knowledge management - making sure that the information and resources used by people across the company are easily accessible and kept up-to-date and well-ordered (for example, on the existing Opus Intranet).

Specific tasks include:

Keeping track of all the funding bids that people are applying for across the company, what the deadlines are for these, who is responsible for them, and making sure they’re submitted on time.
Creating spaces for learning conversations, and tracking learning and development across the organisation.
Maintaining and renewing company-wide spending commitments such as for software, and researching potential better, more cost effective ways of working.
Organising various team meetings, and supporting the Chair of the Board with full Opus board meetings.
Monitoring and managing company-wide communications channels (for example, the info@ email inbox) and ensuring that communications are passed on to the right people.
Reviewing and updating company policies and strategies, and taking shared responsibility for their implementation and visibility to others.
Making sure that the most up-to-date versions of policies and documents are maintained and available on the company intranet and Google Drive, and that information that is no longer relevant or needed is deleted or archived.
Managing recruitment processes (while working with other colleagues) and taking a role in onboarding new team members.
Working with the Financial Coordinator and Directors to build organisational foundations and anticipate organisational risk, such as capacity gaps in workstreams, funding gaps, rate of investment in certain areas and supporting the governance structure to ensure efficiency in our processes.

Skills and attributes we are looking for include:

Project coordination - Ability to oversee multiple workstreams, track deadlines, and ensure smooth operations across teams.
Financial awareness - Comfort working with budgets, funding bids, and financial planning (experience in finance is a plus but not mandatory).
Information management - Strong organisational skills to maintain digital systems (intranet, shared drives) and maintain current key documents.
Communication & facilitation - Clear written and verbal skills to manage company-wide communications, organise meetings, and support cross-team collaboration.
Governance & compliance - Experience or willingness to assist with policy updates, HR processes (recruitment, onboarding), and risk management.
Systems thinker - Able to spot connections between different projects, identify gaps, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
Proactive & hands-on - Willing to step in where needed, from admin tasks to strategic support.
Adaptive & collaborative - Comfortable in a dynamic role where responsibilities may evolve with the organisation’s needs.
A detail-oriented, big-picture mindset - Can manage granular tasks while keeping the broader mission in view.
Ideally, some experience in social enterprises, nonprofits or cooperatives.
Ideally, some experience with policy development.

Employee benefits

Join a uniquely talented, diversely-skilled, collaborative and passionate team engaging with complex and stimulating projects.  
Opportunities to develop your connections and skills through our large network, in-house training opportunities and peer learning.  
Flexible working - you will be able to choose your working days and agree a split of remote and in-person working.
In addition to your regular annual leave allowance (28 days for full-time roles), you will also receive bonus annual leave from 24th December to 1st January inclusive, every year.  
If, for any reason, you are unable to take your full quota of annual leave in a year, you will be able to carry up to 3 days into the following year.
We offer a £26 monthly contribution for working-from-home support and we cover the cost of everyone's phone bill during working hours.
Up to £50 contribution to eye glasses for all workers.

Pay

Our current full-time salary at Opus is £28,480. All Opus employees, including the company’s Directors, are paid the same. We have listed a salary range for this role because we anticipate bringing in a significant pay rise for all staff in 2025.

As a worker-controlled company, everyone gets a say on when and by how much we increase our pay. Whenever we raise wages, we do so for everyone who works at the company.

How To Apply

Please email your CV and a cover letter, explaining why you are suited to this role, to jobs@weareopus.org by 14th May 2025.
The cover letter should be no longer than one side of A4. You are welcome to submit it in another format, for example as a voice note or a video recording.
Optional: We would appreciate applicants filling in our Equality & Diversity Monitoring Form - it is anonymous and treated entirely separately to your application. It helps us understand the field of applicants so we can build a diverse workforce at Opus.
In recognition of the inaccessibility of a lot of jobs and education, we will guarantee an interview to any disabled candidate who meets the essential skills and experience for this role. Please mention this directly in your application if it applies to you, because any other equal opportunities information you provide to us is kept separately to your application.
If your application is successful, you will need to provide two professional references.
If your application is successful, you will not need to undergo a health check before starting work.
Your data will be stored in accordance with GDPR regulations.
The law requires us to ensure that you demonstrate that you have the right to work in the UK.

Diversity & equal opportunities

Diversity in our workforce is a priority for Opus. As well as the clear moral imperative of properly reflecting our home city of Sheffield and its many communities, diversity in our team improves how we work, how we ‘frame’ problems and their possible solutions, and how we interact with stakeholders and audiences.

We particularly encourage applications from groups that are currently under-represented at Opus. This includes but is not limited to people of global majority descent (i.e. people of African, Asian, Indigenous, Latin American, Middle Eastern/Arab, Polynesian/Pacific Islander, or mixed race heritage), disabled people, LGBTQI+ people and people from working class backgrounds.

About Opus

Opus is a not-for-profit social enterprise based in Sheffield, established in 2008. Our projects include Now Then Magazine, Festival of Debate, Opus Distribution and UBI Lab Network.

Opus works to contribute upstream solutions to complex system problems. We do this through strategic partnerships, engaging arts and culture, research, identifying leverage points, and co-creation. We incubate and deploy services, projects, platforms, decentralised networks, and movements that are proportionate to the challenges ahead.

Opus is multidisciplinary, cross-sector and adaptive, working across hyper-local, regional, national and international contexts. We work with citizens, communities, neighbourhoods, businesses, voluntary groups, cities, campaigns, research institutions, infrastructure organisations and governments to address the entangled ecological, social, economic, political and cultural crisis we collectively face.

We recognise that this is a long-term and systemic approach to social change. There are no easy fixes and few quick wins, so we spend our time and energy creating the space – whether that’s a platform, a network or something else – for new ideas to emerge and develop.

Opus reaches more than 150,000 people annually through live events, broadcasting and publishing in Sheffield and beyond.

More info

Read our annual report for 2024
Find more information about all our different workflows