Remote Company 101: What is People Operations? - Toggl Blog

Traditional HR:

• Narrowly focuses on traditional HR topics such as pay, benefits, and recruitment.
• Ensures employees work in a way that reduces the ‘people’ risk for the company.
• Tells employees about key decisions and policy changes.

People Operations:

• Takes a strategic and holistic view of the needs and performance of People.
• Focused on making people happy, more productive, and more connected with the whole company.
• Consults employees, co-creating key decisions and changes.

By taking a holistic people-focused approach, remote People Operations specialists help distributed teams overcome the following key challenges:

• Collaborating and coordinating work across time zones. 
• Providing clear and consistent guidance on communication, processes, and habits.
• Fostering best-practice sharing between colleagues.
• Polishing remote hiring processes to hire faster and more confidently.
• Levelling the playing field for pay and benefits across different countries.
• Enabling remote employees with the right technology. 
• Maintaining engagement with organizational objectives. 

For remote companies, People Operations become the heartbeat of the business. By focusing on the people, their needs, and ultimately their satisfaction, remote People Operations teams have to create an amazing culture. 

We all know that feeling truly part of an organization is hard when you’re remote, as nothing quite helps you connect with your team like being in a room with them.

From a recruitment perspective, adopting a People Ops model inevitably leads to a much reduced time to hire. Bring together a fantastic employer brand (focused on putting people first), slick and efficient recruitment processes, and innovative hiring technology, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for rapid, high-quality recruitment. 

That helps optimize one of the critical recruitment KPIs, time-to-hire, slicing the time it takes to fill a vacancy when one becomes available.

All of this comes together to improve employee effectiveness. People Ops teams listen to the challenges employees face and put their needs first when it comes to developing solutions. 

Feeling valued, prioritized, and cared for improves employee satisfaction and, ultimately, employee performance. People Ops managers focus all of their energy on ensuring key metrics such as employee satisfaction, churn rate, and workforce engagement are optimized. 

Whether you’re hiring a People Ops specialist or looking to make the transition yourself, here are some of the skills and qualities needed to become a People Ops superstar!

Collaboration: People Ops is all about co-creating a better way of working, so you need to be able to work well with others. Not only is this important to keep your people happy, but it’s also important to collaborate upward too. This ensures your strategic People Operations work aligns with the organization’s goals and objectives.

People Ops specialists need to be able to understand what makes people tick. They need compassion and empathy to understand the challenges employees face to accurately come up with solutions.

People Ops isn’t as reactive as traditional HR. Instead, People Ops leaders have to be able to tackle situations and come up with problems proactively. Especially for new and exciting remote companies, you may need to think outside the box, harnessing creativity and confidence to try something new.

People Ops is a results-driven business with success decided by key metrics such as employee satisfaction and churn rate. However your organization collects their data, you need to be an expert at analysis to fully understand it and turn it into actionable outputs.

Data shows that 85% of employees experience workplace conflict in their lifetime. As a People Ops specialist, that conflict will come to your door, so you need to be able to manage and diffuse it as effectively as possible. 

Fundamentally, People Ops jobs are no different from any other jobs – there are loads out there, you just need to know where to find them.

But if you’re explicitly fishing in the remote market, you need to take your search to some particular places.

AngelList – What began as a startup funding brand is now a leader in promoting jobs for newly formed companies, many of which have a remote-first mindset.

VentureLoop – Closely linked with venture-backed companies, VentureLoop is a great place to find roles with newly funded and exciting companies.

Other options: WeWorkRemotely, and Startupers.