It’s Not HR: Enter People Operations

Companies need to adopt a paradigm shift in how they value their employees

Photo by Vladimir Kudinov on Unsplash

Four years ago, IBM published a report through the IBM Institute for Business Value. Titled “Designing employee experience”, it was an executive report focusing on what IBM believed to be three core components in any compelling employee experience. Much like how designing customer experience has become a focus for many organizations, companies are also increasingly turning to win the hearts of their employees—83% of HR professionals believe that employee experience is important to their organization’s success.

Organizations often build mechanical human resource management systems, comprised of processes and rigidity. From there, problems arise: there is a persistent gap between HR and employees, and companies cannot afford to have that exist. So as long as employee engagement begins to break down, companies will start to incur hidden losses. According to a report by The Engagement Institute, employee disengagement costs U.S. companies up to $550 billion annually.

This cost comes from many things that companies cannot afford: absenteeism, lowered productivity, and burnout, just to name a few.

To bridge the gap and build a workplace where employees are productive, thinking like a designer is paramount. It is about designing an employee experience that breathes life into mechanical employee processes, creating a fork from human resources and venturing into people operations.

For a long time, HR has had a poor reputation. In 2006, Laszlo Bock, then SVP of People Operations at Google, wrote in his book WORK RULES! about why he chose to rename the ‘human resources’ department as ‘people operations’: it was a shift from being viewed as an “administrative and bureaucratic” place. Rather, people operations connoted “some actual ability to get things done”.

Fast forward to today, People Operations has become more than just a cosmetic change. As a PeopleOps Manager puts it: it “represents a shift in the way companies understand the value of their employees”. Traditionally, HR views employees as expendable cogs in the organizations to be calculated and managed for efficiency.