As the HR role continues to change, focusing more on talent as a part of a company’s strategy, the concept of “people operations” has gained traction.
“People operations” is the glue that holds together company strategy and human capital, said Jake Canull, regional director of The Top Employers Institute. HR managers are now included in leadership discussions and decisions rather than being told after the fact about the people needed to reach those set goals — meaning people operations is becoming a much more important HR function.
“Think of sales operations, which helps enable sales people,” Canull said. “In the same way, for heads of HR, people operations is really helping them.”
People Operations are on a nearly 20-year rise
The idea of people operations started to gain traction in the early 2000s because of Google — not that their search engine was pushing it as a result, but because the company itself started to use it.
According to a report from Trinet, Google engineers thought “HR” was administrative and bureaucratic, whereas the term “operations” sounded like a department that was getting something done. The idea caught on, as many innovations from Google do. Former Google head of people operations Lazlo Bock went on to write a book about it.
By 2021, “people operations” job titles were growing at 10 times the rate as human resources jobs on LinkedIn, according to Trinet.
It has been a move away from the traditional HR model, wrote Katy Cherkas, marketing director at The Custom Companies, in 2023. “Instead, People Operations placed emphasis on the employees – their well-being, satisfaction, and professional development. This approach aimed to foster a work culture that prioritizes employee engagement, thereby improving overall organizational performance.”
Canull said he watched people operations become much more popular over the last three to five years. Before, those supportive HR functions were found in learning and development, and then organization development.
“Now it’s really turning HR in general into being part of organizational effectiveness,” he said. In a people operations setup, “it’s not just how do we attract the best people and give them the best experience, but do we drive improved business outcomes and improved profitability.”
People operations is now affordable
As one of the biggest companies in the world, Google was able to pioneer not just people operations but a technical approach to it, using automation to help take mundane tasks off the plate of their HR professionals so they could instead focus on being strategic partners to the business.
Now, the price of entry has been lowered, according to Trinet. Cloud integration and software-as-a-service have made human resources information systems not just cheaper but easier to use, according to their report.
The success of such a shift is easier to track, too, said Canull. Companies that successfully switch to the people operations mindset “are using instruments to capture a data-driven baseline of where their people practices stand today, and then leverage that baseline to communicate where they’re ahead.”
That information can show them if their people operations system is attracting talent, if they’re not, and what they need to do to improve those metrics. They can then use those statistics “and go to the [executive board] and say ‘hey, board this industry is eating our lunch, we need to go and improve these practices,’” he said.
