People Team vs. HR
The Livongo People Team during a team off-site in San Francisco, late Nov. 2018
As a current VP of People and Culture at Tidepool.org, and former executive member of the People Team at Livongo, I often get asked “What do you mean by People?” While I used to feel perfectly comfortable with the “HR (Human Resources)” designation for this function, over the years, I’ve become convinced that “People” is a more appropriate one. I intend to discuss why in this blog post.
First off, I conducted a survey on Twitter and LinkedIn, and demographics and number of responses aside, it is quite clear that HR is still a very strong designation, with 50-66% of respondents (N>1,000) indicating that they have an HR department in their company:
So, what’s in a name?
Isn’t this fundamentally a matter of semantics? Not really.
As so many other things these days, the origin on the evolution from HR to People has its roots in Tech (Silicon Valley at it again!) Around 2006, under the leadership of Arnnon Geshuri (whom I had the honor of working with at Livongo between 2017 and 2020), Google’s HR team recast itself as the People Operations (or People Ops) team. The story behind the change was subsequently codified in the highly recommended book “Work Rules”, written by Laszlo Bock, after he became Google’s first SVP of People Operations at Google.
Since then, a growing number of progressive companies have adopted the new name, but also the new philosophy… here are some key differences between the more traditional HR approach, to the more progressive People Team approach:
People are more than a resource: words matter… when you say Human Resources, you are inherently diminishing the crucial role that your People play. You are putting them in a similar place as your building, your computers, or your manufacturing lines. People are what makes or breaks a company… the ones that bring to life the vision and fulfill the mission. If you had any doubts about it, with this pandemic were so many people have taken to remote work, this has become even more evident.
People team is a strategic partner: you cannot ignore elements like compliance or decreasing liability, but FOCUSING on them alone is a mistake. The People Team approach acknowledges the crucial importance of Culture and Employee Experience. For example: it’s the difference between regarding benefits as an expense or a budget line item only, and thinking of benefits, like recognition or employee development, as a crucial component of making your workplace attractive to team members; it’s the difference between considering People first at the time of a merger or an acquisition vs. making them an afterthought…
Data drives decisions: at Livongo we used to do pilots ALL the time. We would try out programs, perks, etc. and survey people before and after. We learned A LOT from testing things, much like Product developers learn looking at the usage data. From the lessons learned, we’d tweak a program, reaffirm it, or even get rid of it altogether, if that was the right thing, but always guided by data. With SO many Employee Engagement tools out there, understanding your People in real-time is not only possible, but has become a foundational element to drive decisions that impact the employee experience, and THAT is a feature of the People Team approach.
For additional insights about this paradigm shift, I recommend this blog post by Greenhouse (they make a superb Applicant Tracking + Employee Onboarding System).
So what’s your experience with HR vs. People Teams?
