Five years on since I transitioned to People Ops, here is what I have learned about navigating People Ops in remote companies and making sure people are their best at work.
When we started Boundless, we wanted to make it easy for companies to employ anyone, anywhere. It's such a short phrase: employ anyone, anywhere. It rolls off the tongue, and like a lot of things in life, it is much easier said than done. While it may be some time before we at Boundless can say that we make it easy to employ people literally anywhere (there are a lot of countries, after all), we have been busy over the past year working on making this a reality.
Today, Boundless can support the compliant employment of workers in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore and the U.K (...and many more to come this year!). What that means is that workers can now access new remote job opportunities, without sacrificing their right to be treated as an employee in their home country, which is often the case when workers are asked to be independent contractors.
Through this process, we've come to realise that our job is not just to make it easy for companies to employ anyone, anywhere, but to also help those who need to solve this problem for their organisations. In the time before Covid-19, those in PeopleOps / HR roles would often spend their time making the work lives of their teammates better.
Under normal circumstances, they would:
But the kinds of restrictions that Covid-19 has brought on the world means that PeopleOps professionals now have to grapple with things like:
While talking to new customers over the past few months we have often been asked "have you seen how other companies are doing X" or "what have you heard is the best way to solve Y". It occurred to us that since we have a level of visibility with PeopleOps professionals in growing companies, we should probably think about how we could bring those people together, to help them meet other PeopleOps professionals, share and learn from each other.
So in May we started organising regular community events, two per month. So far we've run three small, (invite-only) round tables, and two larger, open to all, meetups. Online, of course.
Participants in this community include COO's, Heads of PeopleOps, HR Managers, Directors of People & Culture (and more generally, anyone with "People" or "HR" in their title), from over 100 companies. Some as small as 10 people, others with thousands of people; from bootstrapped startups, to later-stage unicorns and public tech companies. But regardless of where they are coming from, this is a community interested in one thing: "how can we best support our people?".
Today we are very excited to announce that we are creating a dedicated space for this community to continue to grow, share and learn from each other. PeopleOps.net is primarily a forum for exchanging ideas, knowledge, experience, and networks. It's a place to ask questions of your #PeopleOps peers, to research new approaches to people operations in a changing world, and to hopefully make some new friends along the way.
If your job involves creating better working environments for your teammates, then this is a community for you. If you have been to or registered for one of our community events over the past few months, then you'll shortly be given access to this forum on PeopleOps.net.
While this is a community forum that is open to anyone who works in HR / PeopleOps to join and participate in, the Internet isn't always a friendly place, so for now you'll need to be invited to create an account so that you can view, comment on and create posts. If you'd like to join, please send an email to community@stagingwebsite.boundlesshq.com, letting us know a little bit about yourself and your work, and we'll invite you in. You can also follow @PeopleOpsNet on Twitter.
As for our regular community events, we'll be announcing them on social, our mailing list and in the PeopleOps.net community forum.
Five years on since I transitioned to People Ops, here is what I have learned about navigating People Ops in remote companies and making sure people are their best at work.
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