What is 

People
Operations?
01
Defining
People Ops
People Operations.
You may have heard the
term before, but what People
does it really mean, and
why are so many people
talking about it?

People Operations
(People Ops, or POPS)
is a people-centric business
approach that emphasizes
workforce empowerment
to drive growth. With a focus
on automating traditional
HR processes, POPS shifts
attention from tactical
administrative work
to people and productivity.

Operation
People Ops is a simply a combination of two key components:

People - /ˈpēpəl / (n.) are beings that have certain capacities or attributes
such as reason, morality, consciousness, or self-consciousness, and being
a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship,
ownership of property, or legal responsibility.

Operations - /ˌäpəˈrāSH(ə)ns / (n.) - is everything that happens collectively

within a company to keep it running and earning money. It incorporates
the systems, methodologies, people, processes, and technologies needed
to make the organization function.

These are the two most critical components of any business. People
are the most valuable asset, opportunity, and expense. Operations are
how the company delivers on its very purpose and reason for being.
Combined, “People Operations” makes magic. It is one of the most
important business functions.

What is People Operations?  |  4

 People Ops
Manifesto
No paper. No forms. No filings.
People Ops lives in a digital-must world.

No spreadsheets. No manual tasks.

People Ops embraces automation.

No authoritarianism. No politics. No hassle.

People Ops empowers people to do their best work.

No guesswork. No anecdotes.
People Ops surfaces data and insight.

No fluff. No waste. No BS.

People Ops is driven by outcomes.

No busywork. No inefficiency.
People Ops drives productivity.

Less paperwork, more peoplework.

This is People Ops.
 In this short guide we cover the basics
on People Operations. Enough for you
to get key principles and be dangerous.
If you want a more in-depth look at the People Operations approach,
check out our full length book: People Operations: Automate HR, Design
a Great Employee Experience, and Unleash Your Workforce (Wiley, 2021).

CLICK TO ORDER BOOK

02
First, a little
history...
People Operations as a term can trace its origin
back to Google, circa 2006.

Notably, this was when Laszlo Bock first started working in HR at Google.
Allegedly, the tech giant put the term “People Operations” on his offer
letter to which Laslzo balked. He was coming from a seasoned career
in Human Resources and wasn’t immediately impressed by — or
in agreement with — ditching the HR title. But Google was firm on the
term. According to Google, engineers regarded “HR” as “administrative
and bureaucratic,” whereas the term “operations” implied “a credible title,
connoting some actual ability to get things done.”

The company preferred the term “People Operations” because it somehow

gave greater power to HR leaders out of the gates.

The term was ahead of its time. It was “Google-speak for Human
Resources,” according to a 2016 NPR story that featured Laszlo.

Fast forward nine years, and it would seem Laslzo had a complete about-
turn on the phrase, becoming a full supporter of People Operations.
In fact, the SVP of People Operations at Google would go on to write
Work Rules!, a seminal work on People Operations its inextricable links
to business growth and strong leadership. The book put the phrase
People Operations in the mainstream, with experts such as Daniel Coyle,
author of The Talent Code, lauding it as a book that “should be given
to every leader, every entrepreneur, every manager, every student, and
every human being who wants to understand how to build a successful,
cohesive, high-performing workplace.”

What is People Operations?  |  8

Needless to say the term People Operations — or in recent years,
“People Ops” or “POPS” — stuck.

Now in 2021 People Operations job titles are growing 10 x faster than
Human Resource jobs on LinkedIn, and entire technologies are being built
to support the function.

There’s little doubt at this point that the term and approach are here
to stay. So the next question is how to bring People Operations
approaches into your small or medium sized business.

What is People Operations?  |  9

We spend more
time working than
doing anything else
in life. It’s not right
that the experience
of work should be so
demotivating and
dehumanizing.
LASZLO BOCK

What is People Operations?  |  10

03
Bringing People
Operations into
your company
Putting people and operations at the heart of your
HR and small business is not as esoteric as you
might think. In fact, be the competitive edge your
company needs to stay in front of the pack.

Why? We can likely agree that at every company, people are one of — if
not the — greatest asset to a business. We can probably agree, too, that
smaller companies often know their employees on more personal levels.
Smaller companies understand individual strengths and weaknesses
professionally, and often know details about individuals’ lives that impact
their work and focus. These connections lend themselves to an improved
ability for employers to tap into authentic employee motivators in work,
which in turn drives loyalty, resilience, and productivity in teams.

What is People Operations?  |  12

63.3% of companies
say retaining
employees is harder
than hiring them.

What is People Operations?  |  13

This also ends up manifesting as a competitive advantage over larger
companies in talent wars. Small companies know their people, and treat
them with as much respect and trust as friends would. To keep this
advantage, small businesses would likely gravitate towards a “people
operations” approach over HR anyday.

Thus, POPS has evolved to become today’s better answer to HR.

It puts people back into the center of an organization which builds
productivity and profit.

What is People Operations?  |  14

STEP 1:

Assess Your Current State

A small POPS approach is part efficiency, part intimacy. It scales back and
reverse-engineers what was developed for larger companies. They have big
tech? Small businesses have mobile, integrated, affordable, small tech that’s
just as smart, and lets you shine where you already shine: in adaptability and
your personal knowledge of your work, customers, and employees.

It’s useful to assess where you and your business stand in terms of your
POPS-ready tools and processes. You can assess yourself on the 5-level
People Ops Maturity Model to see where your company stands.

The People Ops Maturity Model measures the extent to which

an organization’s People Operations are driven by established and
documented best practices, processes, standards and metrics proven
to drive business outcomes. It’s based on an amalgamation of Zenefits’
work with more than 30,000 small and midsize businesses and helps
companies develop and refine their people programs.

Use the model to:

✓ Create strategies proven to drive business alignment and success

✓ Enable companies to self-diagnose and assess their current state

✓ Assess the gaps between your current and desired future states

✓ Provide a roadmap for achieving world-class people operations

✓ Develop and refine people operations priorities over time

What is People Operations?  |  15

PEOPLE OPERATIONS MATURITY MODEL

L EVEL 2: REACTIVE LEVEL 4: SCALING

STRATEGY STRATEGY
Reactive to people and HR All core processes automated.
programs and issues. Primarily Focusing on workforce
focused on time & payroll. collaboration, engagement,
An emerging company. and productivity.
A great company: employer of choice.
TECHNOLOGY
Primarily spreadsheets and digital TECHNOLOGY
documents. Inadequate HR Single digital platform to manage
resources and tooling. Limited all HR, benefits, and people needs.
security & employee self-service. Strong mobility, self-service
and unified reporting. Proactive
RISKS & OPPORTUNITIES compliance guardrails.
Compliance and data exposure
from errors & deficiencies. RISKS & OPPORTUNITIES
Inability to focus on the business. Opportunity costs from workforce
Limited visibility into basic productivity, engagement,
metrics and compliance. Hidden and talent gaps. Scaling talent
costs & missed savings. recruiting and retention efforts.

HR ADMINISTRATION build PEOPLE OPERATIONS

start grow

L EVEL 1: CHAOTIC LEVEL 3: LIMITED LEVEL 5: MASTERY

STRATEGY STRATEGY STRATEGY

Ad hoc. Only deal with people Automating core HR, benefits, and Repeatable best-in-class
and HR issues when they happen. compliance processes. Starting processes, benchmarked and
Getting started. to focus on people and culture. validated with industry peers.
A good company. Elite company: ‘best place to work’.
TECHNOLOGY
Manual, paper-based processes. TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY
Lack of HR resources, knowledge, Semi-automated processes with Single digital platform for the
and tools. Limited data and moderate use of the cloud. Often entire “fluid workforce.” Complete
mobility. disparate technology, workflows, mobility for workers. Predictive
& reporting silos. Semi-digital people analytics, insights, and
RISKS & OPPORTUNITIES employee experience. recommendations.
Major compliance & data (PII)
exposure from audit deficiency, RISKS & OPPORTUNITIES RISKS & OPPORTUNITIES
fines and errors. Inability to scale Lost profits and revenue from Higher level challenges and
the business. Time wasted hidden costs. Inability to focus opportunities: employee motivation and
on paperwork. Hidden costs. on people, productivity, and culture. wellbeing; operationalizing diversity,
Moderate compliance exposure equality, and inclusion; maximizing
from disparate systems and errors. employee collaboration & productivity.
STEP 2:

Invest in the Right Technology

A true POPS approach involves embracing technology more
comprehensively than you may have done in the past, with efficiency,
productivity, and profitability as an end goal. In some industries like tech
of information sciences, this idea is second nature. But if you’re a coffee
roaster or a home builder, leading with technology may feel like the
opposite of a people-centric goal. It isn’t.

Whether you’re drawn to technology or not, the foundational goal of this

massive first step is: Make the stuff you have to do easy — and hands off.

HR automation is the use of computers and technology to perform human

resources work with minimal human assistance. Small businesses may
feel at a disadvantage here; the most integrated tools (human resources
information systems, or HRIS), were once only available at high costs
and required special skills to use. But in the last few years, a proliferation
of Software as a Service (SaaS) companies have made technology
solutions more affordable and ubiquitous. Now, there are robust, scalable
technology solutions for businesses (and budgets) of all sizes, and most are
surprisingly easy to use.

So a critical step is to acquire a People Operations platform and begin

transitioning to it immediately.

What is People Operations?  |  17

What this gets you:

✓ Information stored in the cloud - The cloud refers to any product

or service delivered via the internet. When something is stored
in the cloud, it can be accessed anywhere, anytime, eliminating
the risk of data loss tied to a physical ledger, computer, or
geographic location.

✓ All-in-one integration - A comprehensive POPS system puts HR,

payroll, benefits administration, performance management, time
tracking, and more, in the same place. No more systems that don’t
play well together. Basic employee data is integrated with secure
storage of sensitive documents, team and performance data, and
has the ability to store different (and legally required) levels of data
for gig workers and contractors.

✓ Security - The nature of your business may or may not be top-

secret, but people data, from social security numbers to sensitive
health information to signatures, is sensitive, and keeping it
secure is a legal obligation for employers. A secure system
keeps data safe, and provides different levels of access, from
administrators to managers to users.

What is People Operations?  |  18

✓ Mobility - A good POPS platform offers a mobile component.
This provides immediate and intuitive access to POPS systems.
Mobile became even more important as remote work (and
COVID quarantines) pushed employers and employees into
different spaces. You can even use mobile technology to track
employee time tracking and locations.

✓ Self-serviced HR - When you have an easy-to-use People Platform,

employees can access personal and company information on their
own time, and perform common tasks on their own. This saves
you time and costs. It also makes employees feel empowered
to manage their own sensitive data.

✓ Additional features - POPS systems vary, but in addition to the

critical features above, some also give you tools that non-
integrated platforms don’t have, such as employee engagement
surveys, HR analytics and reporting, and integrations with other
productivity apps like G-suite, Slack, or Quickbooks.

What is People Operations?  |  19

STEP 3:

Outsource the Tedious Stuff to Technology

The reason you’ve invested in technology is so that it can do
most of the tedious tasks of HR for you.

✓ Managing employee documents

✓ Staying in compliance

✓ Ensuring your systems are accurate

across various areas: payroll, benefits, etc

✓ Running payroll

✓ Filing taxes

✓ And more

Again, we go deeper into each of these sections in detail in our book

People Operations: Automate HR, Design a Great Employee Experience,
and Unleash Your Workforce. Or, if you want to get a free demonstration
of how this looks in a People Operations platform, we can set you up with
a free demo of the Zenefits platform to help educate you.

Start a free demo on your own

Request that a real human walks you through the product in a Zoom
meeting & where you can ask live questions

What is People Operations?  |  20

STEP 4:

Build a Great Employee Experience

Once you invest in technology and implement your systems, your HR
tasks will be running without any work required by you. What that gives
you back is: time. And with time you can start focusing on the best part
of People Ops — the people!

Building a great employee experience improves your employee

retention, increases productivity, and increases innovation and
collaboration between teams.

This is similar to, but distinct from, building company culture. While building
culture refers to setting core values and conduct within a company, building
a great employee experience means looking at individual workers and teams
and building systems that work with their unique needs When you can
build human management systems that take individual needs into account
at scale, you’re truly maximizing your investment in people.

Here are some ways to start thinking about how to operationalize the
people part of People Operations:

✓ Brush up on theories of authentic human motivation. Especially if

you are a one-person POPS department, lean on POPS experts that
consult for small business. They already understand established
models for optimizing motivation, including what workers in different
generations want. Are the workers you’re trying to attract and retain
concerned with company culture? Fair pay? Benefits? Autonomy?
Mastery? Education? Purpose? Recognition? Online communities
that come with gold-star POPS platforms can also provide a sounding
board for your questions. People ops are not the same across all
industries, but you’ll soon get a feel for which factors are universal.

What is People Operations?  |  21

✓ Figure out your own peoples’ independent motivators, and build
systems (incentives, pay, rewards and recognition, etc) around
them. This means talking to employees and managers.
Open communication involves truly listening, as well
as providing transparency. Empowering employees to learn,
to safely air grievances and reconcile situations, recognizing
their accomplishment and growth, and helping provide for their
wellbeing, all build a strong organizational culture. Don’t risk
losing your top performers because you didn’t factor in what
makes them perform.

✓ Build motivation into cascading goal frameworks that pay off

larger company goals. Cascading goals — like V2MOMs, OKRs,
or BHAGS — are a great way to align disparate team goals
to larger business objectives without losing sight of the more
entry level professionals and their needs.

✓ Connect employee work to the greater purpose of the business.

Through cascading goals, performance alignment, manager
and employee one on one conversations, and host of other
techniques you should aim to remind your employees how their
individual work is helping to achieve the broader vision of the
company. This will cement feelings of purpose and belonging
in your organization.

What is People Operations?  |  22

STEPS 5:

Measuring The Impact of People Operations

People analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing data across the
employee lifecycle for the purpose of improving an organization’s overall
workplace performance. This process is also sometimes called people
analytics, workforce analytics, or talent analytics.

Identifying which metrics to track is the first step in building an effective,

data-driven people operations team. It’s not enough to simply know what
was happening. You also need to know why, and — in a highly optimized
workplace — what could happen next.

To do this, People teams must develop a comprehensive measurement and

reporting strategy, one that coexists with the entire business.

What is People Operations?  |  23

Some of the core components to people analytics include:

✓ Operational reporting: a collection of basic historical data

used to identify and reflect on what has happened in the past.
An example of this would be a headcount or turnover report.

✓ Advanced reporting: more sophisticated reports, usually

including additional data sources, that surfaces trends that
directly impact decision making. Examples include employee
engagement and wellbeing scores.

✓ Strategic analytics: statistical analysis and modeling of reports

to proactively identify business opportunities and vulnerabilities.
Examples include diversity scoring and its impact on the business,
detailed employee turnover analysis, and benefits benchmarking.

✓ Predictive insights: prediction of future outcomes and scenarios

based on strategic analytics, data models and scenario planning
- empowering decision makers with actionable insights for rapid,
data-driven decisions. Examples include projected salary costs,
and forecasted retention rates and costs.

What is People Operations?  |  24

04
How to track
your progress
A good way to organize the levels of sophistication
of people analytics is to align them to the People
Operations Maturity Model.

Here are some examples of the types of metrics tracked at each stage
of maturity.

What is People Operations?  |  26

LEVEL 1: CHAOTIC

At this level, you’re likely tracking things manually. Data needs to be created
from manual sources (pain in the ***), dug up from original sources such
as your employees, or exported from various systems. It takes minutes, if not
hours, and insights are pretty basic. Executives, managers and employees
typically need to come to you in order to get the information.

Common metrics at this stage include:

✓ Headcount

✓ Salary

✓ Turnover

✓ Absence

✓ Time off

✓ Hiring costs

✓ Training expenses

What is People Operations?  |  27

LEVEL 2: REACTIVE

At this level, you’ve digitized some basic processes and have a better
understanding of your workforce. This provides quicker access to some
basic metrics and the ability to drill down into more specifics. Some
information still needs to be pulled from manual sources and a lot
of spreadsheets are involved. It still takes minutes - and sometimes hours -
to complete most queries.

Common metrics at level 2 include:

✓ Headcount trends (insights by type, location, department, location)

✓ Compensation breakdown

✓ Overtime expenses

✓ PTO accrual and liability

✓ Voluntary & involuntary turnover rates

✓ Time off details

✓ Workforce expense details

✓ Time to hire

What is People Operations?  |  28

LEVEL 3: MODERATE

At level 3, you’ve digitized the majority of your processes and have

access to more data. Challenges center around aggregating and
reconciling data across sources and systems—and keeping it all in sync.
You have line of sight into core workforce trends and things like time, pay
and benefits. You can access most of these in seconds from a dashboard
on your computer or smartphone. Everything is updated in real time.
More sophisticated analysis like trends reports and comparisons takes
more time and effort. At this point, you’re starting to surface more
valuable business insights.

Common metrics at this level include:

✓ Workforce insights (starts, exits, promotions)

✓ Tax, wage & labor distribution

✓ Turnover causes & costs

✓ Benefits utilization trends

✓ Benefits cost breakdown

✓ Speed to open enrollment

✓ Time to productivity

✓ Ability to slice, dice and drill down

What is People Operations?  |  29

LEVEL 4: SCALING

At this level, core processes are completely digitized and integrated. You
no longer have to spend time aggregated and integrated data sources.
For the most part, you have one view of the truth at your fingertips from
a variety of purpose built dashboards. This frees you and your team up
to focus on more strategic people analytics—things like the employee
experience, engagement, and wellbeing. You’re also starting to run
trends and do benchmarking to see you’re doing versus peers and market
comparables. These insights are valuable to your executive peers and all
people managers.

Common metrics here include:

✓ Fluid workforce composition trends

(full time vs. part time vs contingent)

✓ Compensation changes & trends

✓ Employee engagement

✓ Performance alignment

✓ Salary benchmarking

✓ Benefits benchmarking

✓ Diversity & inclusion breakdown

What is People Operations?  |  30

LEVEL 5: MASTERY

Finally, at level 5, you’re getting predictive. You’re leveraging trends and

benchmarks to identify business risks and opportunities. You’re able
to model future scenarios, anticipate challenges, and surface insights
to decision makers. Data is accessible on demand in seconds—often being
pushed to you proactively in the form of alerts, nudges, and scheduled
reports and analytics. When you’re making a job offer, it tells you it might
not be accepted because the salary is lower than the market rate for that
position. You can predict lower turnover rates due to recent changes in your
benefits offering. You’re turning insights into a competitive advantage.

Common metrics here include:

✓ Employee wellbeing

✓ Team wellbeing and burnout

✓ Employee engagement details

✓ Workforce productivity

✓ Forecasted retention rates

✓ Potential employee flight risks

✓ Diversity, equality and inclusion benchmarks

✓ Peer cost benchmarks

What is People Operations?  |  31

05
Are you ready?
Readiness to change business strategy is part
attitude, part knowledge. But there is very little
risk to diving in. You’ve already started.

Remember: Your best case scenario is to acquire a POPS platform and

begin transitioning to it immediately.

Can’t do that? Here are some smaller things you can do today
to move towards POPS adoption and people-based nirvana:

1. Figure out where you are on the POPS maturity model.

Here’s a free analysis tool

2. Move towards cloud and automated tools. If you’re using

ledgers and paper, any software is better than none. While
you don’t ever want to put secure or confidential information
into an unsecure (read: free) cloud platform, some of the
free tools out there let you store things like letter templates,
and less critical employee data such as lunch preferences or
shirt sizes. As you begin trying to understand motivation and
culture for your own people, you can use free online forms
to create surveys and cloud spreadsheets.

3. Keep learning. Check out our People Operations and HR

resource center: Workest where you can combine your Work
with you Best.

What is People Operations?  |  33

zenefits.com

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as well as use of, and access to, this publication or
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assets, are for informational purposes only and not
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to any particular issue or problem.

© 2021, YourPeople, Inc., d/b/a Zenefits.

All rights reserved.