People Operations

Automate HR, Design a Great Employee Experience, and Unleash Your Workforce

Jay Fulcher, Tracy Cote, Kevin Marasco

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119785316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

How the Best Companies are Skipping HR and Winning the Future of Work with People Ops

People Operations: Automate HR, Design a Great Employee Experience, and Unleash Your Workforce explains how leaders at small- and medium-sized businesses can stop spending time on HR administration—"paperwork"—and start focusing on the "peoplework" that truly fuels employee growth and productivity. Authors Jay Fulcher, Kevin Marasco, Tracy Cote of Zenefits, the leading people operations platform, provide readers with a playbook for creating a massive competitive advantage by eliminating antiquated approaches to HR. The book takes a look at how work has changed and what companies need to do about it, and the new approach they must take to processes, systems, and best practices. You'll learn how to eliminate busywork and hassle, and how to use that newfound time and capital to empower your biggest asset: your people.

You'll receive the end-to-end guide to:

• Digitizing legacy HR functions
• Using robots for the busywork you hate
• Employing software to design and improve your employee experience
• Assembling and empowering your "people team"
• Utilizing the included plans and templates to guide each stage of your business transformation

Perfect for managers, leaders, small business owners, and executives, People Operations is perfect for anyone who wants to optimize HR, maximize their workforce investment, support their employees, and modernize their business.

PART I
The Rise of People Operations

CHAPTER 1
The Great Pivot: The New Work Order!

People are the lifeblood of any organization.

They're so significant that intangible assets—things comprised of and created by people—make up 90 percent of all business value. There clearly would be no business without people. But managing them can be hard, especially in the new world of work.

In the new world of work, companies are running away from traditional working practices. In the new world of work, everything is changing. The workforce is changing. The workplace is changing. Work styles are changing.

Remember when … we had full‐time employees who worked in offices? And all they really wanted was a paycheck? Do you remember walking into your boss's office on a Friday to get a paper check, and then going to the bank to deposit it just so you can use your own money? Ahh, the good old days! That was when work was just a job. That was before robots took over. That was before the COVID‐19 pandemic transformed the workplace and business forever. That was then. This is now—the New Work Order.

This book is for not only managing—but embracing—the new world of work. Regardless of your role—be it a small business owner or CEO, CFO, COO, HR leader, or office manager, if you oversee your workforce or wear the hat of the HR or people leader of your business, this book is for you.

Our way of doing things has been able to get us to this point. But what got us here won't get us there. Not in the New Work Order. We believe that the idea of human resources as we've known it is broken, and it is time for a change.

The solution? It's a paradigm shift—a new approach called “people operations.” People operations is designed for the new world of work. It champions technology, data, and the employee experience to accelerate business priorities. People operations is a competitive differentiator for any business, but especially small and midsize businesses looking to punch above their weight and do more with less. It allows you to better focus your time and effort on things that matter most to you: your people and your business.

Our goal with this book is to arm you with a step‐by‐step guide for implementing people operations in your organization. Your employees, leadership team, and shareholders will thank you for it.

If you're new to HR—perhaps a business owner, operating executive, or accidental HR person—pay close attention to Part II of the book, where you'll learn about a refreshing approach to an ageless challenge. You'll learn how to skip building out a traditional HR function—or worse yet, wasting your valuable time and resources on administrative busywork—and instead, lean on technology to advance your workforce productivity to the next level.

If you're an experienced HR pro or feel you have a solid HR foundation in place, you'll benefit most from Parts III and IV, where you will walk away with new ideas and techniques to unlock productivity and profits. These are things traditional HR playbooks have overlooked or dismissed. We believe the setup in Part I is a valuable context in either case, and we encourage you to read straight through, but feel free to skip around. After all, it's your book. With it, we're including several of our most popular guides, tools, frameworks, and checklists for free. These will be referenced throughout the book and are available online. You can find additional details and instructions for accessing the accompanying tools in the Appendix.

Thousands of companies are doing things differently. They're embracing people operations. They're changing the game and we hope you do too. Thanks for joining us on this journey.

Here Come the Robots

Let's cut to the chase. It's only a matter of time until a robot takes your job. Your job in its current form, that is.

I mean, think about it. We used to ride on horse and buggy, and that buggy was built by human craftsmen. But the buggy was replaced by the car—originally the “horseless carriage.” Not only do machines build them cheaper and faster, they actually make them better. Machines provide a better user (driver, passenger) experience with things like air conditioning, entertainment systems, and panoramic sunroofs. They also make them safer with seat belts, airbags, and emergency braking. Finally, they unleash the full potential of transportation with fast, easy, mass production—putting automobiles within the reach of most households. And now, they drive themselves too (in many cases, once again … better than humans).

The human‐machine relationship is quite an interesting one if you think about it: friend, foe, or subordinate? Perhaps it's all of the above. We used to compete exclusively with other humans at puzzles and games. Now, we play against computers. And, who usually wins? Today, computers can beat humans at even the most skilled games like chess, Go, and Jeopardy. Even in most video games, you can only win if you allow the machine to let you (“easy” level = let human win). (see Figure 1.1.)

Humans versus machines has been a long‐running debate. Technology has been replacing jobs for hundreds of years. At the turn of the twentieth century, farms employed nearly half the US workforce. Today, they account for less than 1 percent. Buttons displaced elevator and telephone operators. ATMs replaced bank tellers. And, when was the last time you booked a trip using a travel agent?

According to Gartner, automation technology usually costs one‐fifth the amount of a US employee—that's 20 cents on the dollar, and one‐third the amount of an offshore employee (Gartner 2020). But cost savings aren't the only benefit of automation. Regardless of industry, technology also helps:

• Improve speed
• Improve accuracy
• Reduce risk and variance
• Enable 24/7 output or servicing ability

FIGURE 1.1 Robot intelligence versus human intelligence.

Source: Zenefits, 2021.

Prior waves of mechanization clearly brought productivity improvements. They also brought plenty of debate, disruption, and anxiety. In the early nineteenth century, English textile workers actually destroyed machines as part of the Luddite movement. TIME magazine ran a story titled “The Automation Jobless” in 1961. It raised fears of technology advancements, stating, “automation is beginning to move in and eliminate office jobs too.”

It is true that these breakthroughs often brought some short‐term job loss. But they also brought fresh opportunities. New jobs creating the machines and algorithms. New jobs overseeing and maintaining the machines. New jobs managing the additional output from the machines. New jobs to handle unforeseen impacts of the machines. New jobs to manage the new jobs. In the end, the innovations usually created more jobs than they displaced.

The transformation usually follows one of—and in many cases, a sequence of—the fol...