What is People Operations (PeopleOps)?

People Operations (PeopleOps) is a strategic business function that focuses on optimizing employee performance and experience, integrating HR processes, and aligning them with the company's goals. It goes beyond traditional HR by emphasizing employee engagement, data-driven decision-making, and fostering a positive workplace culture.

At Deel, we believe that People Ops is the more modern, human-centric, experience-based, and analytical approach to HR. Here's our breakdown of what the People Ops department does:

• They encourage higher employee productivity and increase performance results by shifting from task-based management to objective-based management.
• They build, transform, and maintain an organization’s employer brand by offering one-size-fits-one/unique and highly desirable perks and benefits.
• They foster relationships and build communities to boost employee wellness and retention.
• They remove, improve, and automate tasks to enhance employee motivation and eliminate tedious and unrewarding work.
• They brainstorm, deliberate, and redesign employee compensation to attract top talents.
• They identify candidate disengagement markers and implement processes to provide a fantastic employee experience.
• They encourage experimentation, and reiterate trust and autonomy, thereby improving employee engagement.
• And most importantly, they give employees the tools needed to live up to their potential and perform at their best.

How does People Operations differ from traditional HR?

It isn't surprising that companies use the terms "human resources" and "people operations" interchangeably. After all, both departments have some similarities, with people ops technically operating under the HR umbrella.

Regardless, both roles are different and have distinct responsibilities:

Functions of an HR Generalist

• Maintains an employee database
• Enforces compliance with an organization's rules and regulations
• Manages employee compensation and benefits
• Recruits, hires, transfers, promotes, and fires employees
• Serves as mediator during employee conflict resolutions

Functions of a People Ops Manager

• Boosts engagement and retention.
• Identifies and implements new ways to empower employees to ensure they thrive.
• Creates and maintains a holistic company culture.
• Reduces time to hire and improves the quality of hire.
• Builds and maintains a company's positive reputation.

What are the key components of People Operations?

The key components of People Operations include:

• Talent acquisition: Recruiting and hiring the right talent to meet organizational needs
• Onboarding: Ensuring new hires are effectively integrated into the company
• Employee development: Providing training and development opportunities to enhance skills and career growth
• Performance management: Implementing systems to evaluate and improve employee performance
• Employee engagement: Creating programs and initiatives to keep employees motivated and satisfied
• Compensation and benefits: Designing competitive compensation packages and benefits to attract and retain talent
• HR analytics: Using data to inform HR decisions and strategies.
• Compliance: Ensuring all HR practices adhere to legal and regulatory requirements

What role does People Operations play in global hiring?

In global hiring, People Operations plays a crucial role by:

• Navigating compliance: Ensuring that hiring practices comply with local labor laws and regulations
• Standardizing processes: Developing standardized hiring processes that can be adapted to different regions
• Cultural sensitivity: Promoting cultural awareness and sensitivity in the recruitment process
• Remote hiring: Implementing strategies to effectively hire and onboard remote employees across different time zones and locations
• Global mobility: Managing relocation and visa processes for international hires

Why is People Operations important today?

A Gallup study shows that business or work units that score in the top quartile of their organization in employee engagement have nearly double the odds of success compared to those in the bottom quartile.

Companies like Uber and Tinder have paid the price for lack of people orientation, having learned the lesson the hard way.

All-in-all, People Operations impacts more than "just being HR" in an organization.

• Listens to and advocates for employees; while also ensuring that employees' needs align with the company's overall mission.
• Modernizes the talent pipeline and the overall company using technology such as Employee Development programs.
• Keeps employees connected (irrespective of location), builds stronger relationships, and encourages social interactions.
• Works alongside the Internal Communications department to develop and improve organizational culture and enhance employee relationships.
• Collaborates with HR & management to track and maintain workloads and expectations such as interviews, preboarding, and onboarding new hires.
• Monitors, maintains, and improves employee working conditions, well-being, and turnover rates.
• Assists employees with transitions into new roles or a part of a broader business restructuring.
• Recognizes and rewards top-performing employees.
• Assist with building and launching innovative and smartly-delivered Employee Training programs to update employees' skills and empower them to be the best at their jobs.
• Cultivates and promotes an organization as an employer of choice and creates a sustainable brand image starting with its employees (via employer branding).

What does a People Operations Manager do? Departments & roles

Here are some of the roles within the People Operations department and their primary responsibilities.

Director of People Operations

The Director of People Operations oversees the entire People team and is responsible for driving people strategy, paying particular attention to creating and supporting a great workplace culture. Some of their responsibilities include:

• Driving the people strategy aligned with an organization's practices, values, and strategy.
• Partnering with managers to identify each business unit's talent gaps and development needs, identifying and supporting learning activities and initiatives to grow leadership at all levels.
• Serving as a resource to managers on employee relations issues and partnering with them to ensure that they lead and manage employees aligned with the organization's goals.
• Actively participate as a key executive in functional areas that require tight alignment and consistency for equity, fairness, simplicity, and efficiency.
• Providing data analysis, metrics, and tools that demonstrate progress toward achieving key milestones and help drive strategy.
• Effectively interfacing with all levels of the organization to coordinate and oversee all people-related activities.

People Operations Manager

A People Operations Manager oversees a company's entire employee lifecycle, including onboarding, internal operations, and employee experience.

They connect executive leadership and employees, manage all People Operations functions, such as onboarding / offboarding, benefit & compensation administration, visa-related requests, payroll, time-off requests, and performance management, build and implement systems to support diversity and inclusivity within the company, and plan and direct employee engagement events to promote a mission-driven culture.

People Operations Specialist

The People Operations Specialist develops, optimizes, and implements people processes and programs while overseeing the day-to-day responsibilities of people operations. Some of their duties include

• Documenting, implementing, and improving upon processes, procedures, and programs regarding team member lifecycle.
• Ensuring the delivery of critical people operations processes such as unemployment claims, offboarding, and job information changes, including compensation, promotions, and transfers.
• Providing functional and technical support regarding employee experience.

People Data Analyst

They are responsible for building new analytics and reporting capabilities to support program evaluation and operations. They also handle ad hoc reporting and analytics requests while addressing long-term stakeholder needs and driving insights for HR Partners and Executives using the existing dashboard, HRIS data, and leveraging the people data ecosystem.

Other roles in the People Ops team are

• L&D Specialist,
• Employee Engagement & Advocacy Specialist,
• Employer Branding Manager,
• and Onboarding Manager.

People Ops key priorities: Best practices for strengthening employee engagement and experience

1. Give employees a voice and power

No one knows what they want or need other than the employees themselves. Let them decide. Since the People Ops team understands the organization's vision and where it is headed, it must leverage data and feedback to make informed decisions regarding professional learning initiatives, talent development, and employee engagement.

2. Track essential metrics

Traditionally, many HR teams felt overlooked. They just didn't always have the numbers to prove their value.

Modern People Ops managers should be KPI-driven. Key metrics include:

• time to hire
• quality of hire
• cost per hire
• employee turnover
• employee retention
• diversity ratings
• absence rate,
• employee engagement and job satisfaction

Data gotten from these metrics could help the team find answers to questions such as:

• What are we doing right for our people, customers, and the company?
• What areas should we improve upon to increase engagement and satisfaction?
• How are we contributing to the company's top and bottom lines?
• How are we measuring the department's effectiveness and impact on the organization?
• Is the information from these metrics contributing to the organization's overall growth?

3. Display proactiveness and focus on the future

While the typical HR department is reactive, People Ops is known to be proactive because they envisage where they want the organization to be in the future (say the next five to ten years).

What do you do? Begin to plan and implement strategies for the future.

For example, if future work trends suggest that top talents will ONLY work for organizations that are heavily ESG-focused (ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance), what do you do?

Your company may have a diverse workforce and implement DEI programs, but external audiences may not be aware. You can start planning by:

• Externally communicating key inclusion and diversity metrics and achievements in your organization.
• Communicating your operational carbon footprint, setting site-level greenhouse gas emissions targets, and giving your external stakeholders updates as you implement each stage.
• Developing a strategic ESG roadmap and framework.

4. Create a positive employee experience

Research shows that investing in employee engagement results in increased productivity, increased customer ratings, increased sales, increased profitability, and reduced employee absenteeism.

To maintain and improve employee experience, the People ops team can ask the following questions:

• Are our perks and benefits highly desirable to our employees?
• What tools can we use to gain the latest insights into what drives and motivates employees?
• Are there enough learning and development opportunities for our employees?
• What future learning and development trends should we start implementing?
• Do employees feel a sense of belonging at work? Do they feel heard, seen, and respected?
• Do our new employees enjoy a great candidate experience and seamless preboarding and onboarding experience?

5. Capitalize on employee enablement

Korn Ferry discovered that 33% of job seekers looking for new work cited the need for new challenges as their reasons for leaving their current employers.

Employee engagement will motivate your team to an extent.

But, for how long? The truth? Not so far!

For employees to truly do their best work, the People Ops team must enable them to do so. Employee enablement is the shift from assuming or merely analyzing what employees to - to giving them exactly that.

Enable your workforce with Deel Engage

At Deel, we provide all the tools to enable your workforce. Our offerings include:

• Workforce training and development solutions that are designed to drive performance, not just measure it
• Development plans to provide a clear path for career progression, helping your people understand their skills and experiences needed to advance
• Feedback systems that are tailored to competencies, culture, and teamwork
• Deel HR, our truly global HRIS solution, is always included for free

Deel Engage empowers companies with the expertise and tools to enhance employee development.

Request a demo today to see how we can help you build a highly-performant, motivated workforce.