HR, People Ops, People Experience | Definitions.
People Teams. What do they do?
What’s People Operations, that thing that’s like HR but refuses the label?
Why is it all so confusing? Is it already outdated?
And … what’s next?
🛣 Common ground between all People teams
All People teams are responsible for the Employee Journey, irrespective of whether they are labelled Human Resources, People Operations or People Experience.
The Employee Journey is the building blocks that structure the experience an employee has at work. It starts with attracting employees before they join, and ends after they leave.
They have a broad range of responsibilities from advising, coaching, whipping up contracts and letters, administering time off, implementing policies, frameworks, training, guidance and so on, all while abiding by the law. Nothing less.
Human Resources
🐣 The birth of HR
We must understand the history of unions to understand the history of HR.
Unions are ‘organisations of workers who come together to achieve common goals across wages, hours, and working conditions.’
In search of a decent life, printers were the first union to go on strike in 1794 US. Cabinet makers followed in 1796, and carpenters in 1797. Negotiation and strikes became more frequent.
Around the same time, two dudes in 18th c. industrial revolution Europe noticed that:
- Workers are crucial resources to the success of an organisation
- Healthy & happy workers strike less and produce more
They concluded that workers, like any organisational resources, should be managed adequately to perform adequately.
The whole HR thing trickled down from that paternalistic idea.
As a result the profession emerged in the early 1900s, providing personnel management principles. Thanks to Human Resources Management, organisations would comply with employment law and protect employees’ basic needs.
📝 HR Today
Wikipedia, teller of truth, says that Human Resources is a department ‘responsible for (…) maximising employee performance’ through ‘staffing, training and development, performance management and evaluations, payroll and benefits, and succession planning.’
In short, HR maximises performance by ensuring legal compliance + effective organisational development, culture and leadership.
It’s now safe to say: the building blocks of the Employee Journey have been a HR responsibility since its birth in the early 20th century.
🙁 What’s with the bad rep?
*Spoiler alert* HR got itself a bad rep, rooted in its controversial origins.
As a department that focussed more on efficient resource management than strategically adding value to people’s experience of work, it was virtually reduced to bureaucracy.
Perhaps, employees would eventually kinda want to emancipate from the legacy of traditional HR.
Perhaps they would want to get some focus on their individual experience, aka TLC and acknowledgement. The type of stuff we’re all after, after all.
Perhaps, so long as they needed jobs more than company needed their competencies, that wouldn’t change much.
For companies to effectively attract, nurture and retain top Talent, for people to be fulfilled and do their best work, the HR paradigm would need to shift.
Let’s see how that happened.
Times are a’changing
🌐 The birth of the internet
A shift was about to impose itself because of a substantial external factor: The birth of the internet and the tech-enabled, knowledge-access revolution that came with it.
The traditional power dynamic between employers and employees was thrown upside down.
It started with Engineers: Tech top Talent became in higher demand than they were in supply.
And today, as JooBee Yeow puts it, ‘the current workforce is increasingly more mobile and if their needs as employees are not met, they will seek to fulfil their needs better in another organisation.’
👂 No choice but to listen
The supply and demand flip in Tech Talent means employee voices must be taken into account if the business wants to attract and retain them.
Google was the first to label its People team People Operations in 2006.
As Buffer explains, ‘‘HR would be viewed as administrative and bureaucratic. In contrast, Operations was viewed by Engineers as a credible title, connoting some ability to get things done.’
That’s why Laszlo Bock, the Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google, turned HR into People Operations.
🧭 New name, new HR?
The shift from HR to People Ops can be confusing and feel like it’s just marketing, because some baddies from the start-up nation out there appropriated the label without adopting the progressive practice. Rude.
People Ops is a title change, but not just. It’s HR that won a leadership coup d’etat and got a seat at the table, proving it can shake off its old reputation of being an admin function and transform into a strategic, net value-adding partner.
As a label, People Operations signposts a fundamental shift in paradigm. It’s HR with a new approach to maximising performance. For companies to effectively attract, nurture and retain top Talent, a cosmetic change wouldn’t have cut it.
Let’s take a closer look at how People Operations operates in practice.
People Operations
⚙️ Defining People Ops
People Operations is the department responsible for enabling employee performance at scale through empowering systems, processes, tools and guidance.
As Andy Chan puts it, ‘People Operations is an all-encompassing department that accounts for human resources as well. The reality is that companies also need mechanical processes to stay legally compliant. Breathing life into it makes it a lot more engaging.’
🚀 Ways of working
The “People Operations” label accounts for a fundamental change in
- methodology (scalable, efficiency-driven ways of working focussed on impact, vs task-based administration)
- mindset (people as individuals with a will of their own, vs resources)
- scope (strategy that accounts for what people want + need)
In short, People Ops is about treating employees like adults by giving them the opportunity and responsibility to do their best work.
🚧 Limitations of People Ops
We saw that HR got a bad rep rooted in its origins… It’s not an exception. Let’s look at People Ops a little closer.
On the one side, adopting an efficiency-driven Ops mindset and taking everybody’s needs into account translates into empowering ways of working (like being hours-agnostic!)
On the other side, adopting an efficiency-driven Ops mindset without taking people’s needs into account, for example if they don’t hold as much power as Engineers had at Google in 2010, can have terrible consequences.
It can end up feeling like an efficiency-driven, tech-enabled version of resources management, oppressing the oppressed through control and discipline.
One example is the AI monitoring of productivity, essentially micromanagement that puts workers under the kind of pressure that leads them to not even take a toilet break.
Another example is Deliveroo and Uber’s models that takes advantage of contracting loopholes that put already precarious workers in even more precarious situations — no protection, no leave, no basic rights.
Another example from more privileged spheres is the Basecamp decision to ban societal and political discussions internally to improve productivity, because ‘it’s a major distraction’. Censorship oppresses the oppressed. Marginalised groups can’t leave their politicised lives at the office door because it’s convenient for some.
But I hear you: in those examples the Amazons, the Basecamps and the Ubers focus on operational efficiency without taking employee’s needs into account.
That’s why it’s already time to shift away from People Ops. People teams that leverage operational efficiency, while taking employee needs into account to make the most of a mutually beneficial exchange of value, need a new label that says:
- we put employees at the centre of their own experience, one we co-create so it’s mutually beneficial (yes, that means we drive productivity like you’ve never seen before, too.)
- we give employees the opportunity and responsibility to own their Employee Journey and do their best work
- we respect and protect people’s rights through enabling policies, and always strive to build safer and more inclusive spaces
Let’s see what the future holds.
The future is now
🏷 A new label
Yes, I’m serious. People Ops needs a new label already — hear me out.
People Operations was picked to please Engineers who thought ‘Operations’ sounded like ‘stuff would get done’, but optimising operational efficiency sounds an awful lot like a tech-enabled version of resources management.
It quickly evolved beyond HR x Ops, pulling in ways of working from a bunch of other disciplines.
You guessed it, I use Product methodologies like working in Agile, my favourite word is holistic and my team is called People Experience.
Caveat — at this point we know that no label is a silver bullet, not even People Experience.
To make it a little more confusing, it’s not actually about what your team’s called. You can be called HR or People Ops, and operate with People Experience principles.
There‘s excellent People Operations teams who put employees at the heart of their experiencers, fantastic HR teams who are trusted strategic partners, and terrible People Experience teams who only worry about the scalability of admin processes.
Sigh!
🤝 Mutuality
People Experience frames work as a mutually beneficial dynamic, where employees get value as they add value, grow as they do their best work, thrive as the business thrives.
As a result, they co-create phenomenal experiences across the Employee Journey that fuel performance and drive results. It’s designing work so that you want to be there.
Who knew it would take a tech revolution, a power shift, and so much work to get there.
You could think of Business needs and People needs as two sides of the same coin, with the People Strategy weaving them together. A high-performance culture is one which understands & values learning, diversity, and inclusion.
✨ Co-creation
The Employee Experience is a joined responsibility, and should be co-created with employees. I mean, how else could we design work so employees want to be there?
People teams enable this by:
- Being facilitators. They upskill others by holding them accountable and asking questions and giving guidance rather than answers.
- Taking an Agile, co-creative approach. Owning the Employee Journey doesn’t mean doing all the work. It means leveraging and empowering others to craft their own experience. Everyone, roll up your sleeves!
♻️ Intersectional methods
To breathe life into the Employee Journey, we can learn to treat employees like customers, consumers, users.
To do that, we must walk a mile into their shoes.
If employees are like users, it’s only fair to think of the Employee Journey as a Product, and employees are both users and actors of that experience.
That’s why People Experience leverages principles from other disciplines to build the best Employee Journey.
They drive business excellence and come from Operations (eg. automating processes), but also from Sales & Marketing (eg. attracting & engaging Talent), Product (eg. Agile workflows), and more.
🏗 Retro-engineering
Where HR responds to business needs that involve employees, People Experience reverse-engineers and asks “what are we trying to achieve?” to work backwards from that in collaboration with the business.
Where HR tells employees about policies, processes etc, People Experience reverse-engineers and asks “what do you need to thrive?” to work backwards from that in collaboration with the employees.
For example, it’s the difference between telling employees what and how to learn with a one-size-fits-all Learning Management System (boring), and giving them individual learning budgets + a curated selection of learning resources tied to specific skills to help them grow however works best based on their individual needs and preferences (empowering).
🤔 Does it work?
👏 Y 👏 E 👏 S 👏 it works to put people at the centre of their experience. It works for users, for customers, and for employees.
Look at how Product had to shift from Project Management to Agile Product Development to build excellent apps. With the shift from HR to People it’s same story, different focus.
Here’s an example: in the peak of Covid, Learnerbly’s eNPS (employee net promoter score) was 85.
Wouldn’t you love for low employee turnover to be your main challenge?
🪙 Tips to structure your People Experience team
How big your People team is and how it’s structured depends on your company size and needs.
If you’re a team of 20, you’ll likely have only 1 People person handling it all regardless of whether they’re called HR Partner, People Operations Manager or People Ninja Superstar (please don’t do that though, it does not account for a shift in paradigm).
Before your team scales, define what you’re trying to achieve, learn from other teams to build a fit-for-purpose People team for your startup, and retro-engineer your People org strategy from there. Bring it to life with Agile and you’re good to go.
Knowing that headcount is your main business cost, that 100% of your employees are people, and that your People teams’ goal is to unlock their potential, I think it’s worth investing in.
Here is an example of how we structure the People Experience team at Learnerbly. We’re a SaaS company that’s building a product, so since the People Experience is a product we’ve mirrored that in our structure.
For context, we’re a team of 80 and growing. Our People Experience team averaged 7 people this year, with the following functions:
🤔 What about HR and People Ops?
People Operations is a key pillar of the People Experience team. You need People Operations to optimise and automate processes. It’s a must-have to enable a smooth, scalable experience!
Remember Andy Chan: People Ops accounts for human resources. Companies need to stay legally compliant.
Well, the same goes for People Experience teams. Operational excellence fits in in an embedded way — kinda like how HR legal & compliance fits into People Ops.
Spotted a tYpO? Found yourself confused? Have some suggestions or stuff you want to challenge?
Please, please, share your feedback here or in the comments. Or anywhere that reaches me, really. I want to keep learning and iterating, and I value your thoughts.
Thank you!
🌞 Marie
This article stands on the shoulders of those who shared feedback: Barry Cranford, Claire Linder, Elisa Piau, Emilie Leury, Guy Reading, Jacq Bridge, JooBee Yeow, Kasia Szelagowska, Lucas Brech, Mojtaba Hosseini, Olya Yakzhina.