Being at the intersection of impacting business returns and transforming culture and talent, the approach, strategy, and operating principles of People Operations must be rooted in thought leadership

People Operations organization plays a vital role in taking a business from being a high growth company to becoming a world-class organization. A study by Josh Bersin says – “Companies with World-class HR skills are 4.5 times more likely to be “significantly outperformers” in revenue growth and 1.5 times more likely to be “outperformers” in growth”. I could not agree more.

What, then, is at the heart of building world-class people operations? It is important to break this down into three aspects:

1) The need for thought leadership in people operations

Being at the intersection of impacting business returns and transforming culture and talent, the approach, strategy, and operating principles of People Operations must be rooted in thought leadership.

Thought leadership anchored in the context of the ecosystem, labour markets, organizational capabilities and functional expertise is the only way to maximize the impact of people operations in an organization.

2) Skills and Capabilities of the People Operations organization. 

Gartner has laid out that building skills and capacities is the top priority for 68% of People Operations leaders. In my opinion, there are three core capabilities that all people operations organizations need to build:

a. Business Acumen – In my two-decade-long career in Human Resources, this skill has been spoken about a lot but practised the least. A keen interest in and an understanding of our business, our customers, the financials, how the different pieces of the organization come together to enable outcomes, are vital. This enables us to understand what drives talent acquisition, what constitutes onboarding, the importance and significance of skill-building and the impact of certain skillset on the future of the business, suitable reward programs and so on.

b. HR Functional Width – David Epstein in his iconic book, Range, says beautifully – “Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains”. A wide set of experiences within people operations, cutting across functions, geographies, ranging in scope and impact is significantly underrated.A rapidly changing business context combined with differing asks from People operations is best served when the practitioners have had diverse experiences. These converge beautifully to serve the varied contexts in which we find ourselves.

c. Data and Technology – Comfort of People Operations Team with data and technology is the key to future of employee experiences as well as the ability to offer solutions in a laser focussed manner. According to NASSCOM, 79% of HR leaders say keeping pace with rapidly evolving technology to enhance workforce productivity and performance will be a challenge and research from People Matters stated that 20 % of organizations are planning to invest more than 1 crore in HR Technology. Technology can be used as a critical tool for people operations practitioners to solve for challenges of an increasingly remote workforce, build and drive engagement in a global context, drive the fabric of culture, and deliver incredible micro experiences to employees.

3) A few Core Attributes that distinguish Great People Operations Teams: 

It is the 3E’s within People Operations teams that enable us to be great –

a. Empathy – Not only for people, but also for our customers and their unique enterprise.

b. Enterprise – Intrapreneurial skills are not just limited to our business leaders. People Operations team must think differently, optimize limited resources, think out of the box etc.

c. Eagerness to learn – the ability and the willingness to learn and constantly be curious about new facets of the function, of talent, of enabling people operations to contribute to the businesses is vital.

(The given article is attributed to Ramya Sampath Sharma, Chief People Officer, GreyOrange  and solely created for BW People)