What's the Difference Between HR and "People"?

I once worked with a senior HR executive who wanted to shift their company’s nomenclature away from “Human Resources'' and toward “People”. Other executives weren’t so sure about the value of that change and, frankly, seemed a bit skeptical of it. 

You’ve likely heard of or even adopted the shift from the reference of “HR” to “People” but what does it actually mean and what’s the value of it? 

First, it’s important to note that the executive referenced above was not planning to host an employee handbook burning or end the use of job descriptions (which is a whole other blog post…). Rather, what the leader was doing was aiming to set a new standard for the HR department as an internal customer service organization whose strategic focus was the employee experience as much as the company’s integrity to legal compliance. Both -- employee experience and company compliance -- are critical to a company’s success. When their strategies are constructed simultaneously, you’ll have one heck of an employer brand to work with, and -- spoiler alert -- you’ll need an experienced People / HR pro to build those strategies. You don’t want to default to it as a side project for the executive team.

So, what is HR exactly and how is a People Team different? Human resources as we know it today is somewhat of an evolution of the legal protection of a company from it’s unionized workers. Of course, the number of companies with HR departments that actually have unionized workers these days is extremely low so it’s become a function of protecting the employer and the employee from each other by way of the labor laws that have been established over the past century and a half, more or less. In recent years, human resource departments are thinking about things like employee experience, company culture, and employer brand to attract the best possible talent in highly competitive labor markets. It’s in this slightly more progressive part of the spectrum that you might hear the term “People” used in place of HR or alongside it. 

The term “People'' gradually started replacing “HR” as companies wanted to express a culture of innovation and fun. Desiring to be the next unicorn or “Uber of…”, startups began adopting this language, installing “People'' Teams that (over-generalization alert) scoffed at human resources without the first idea of their legal obligations to the employees they were working so hard to impress with their happy hours and unlimited paid time off. 

The outcome  of adopting a sexy concept without first building the function’s substance can be, in a word, messy. Cool cultures without boundaries will eventually go off the rails in various ways. Humans just don’t function sustainably well as a group without clear boundaries and expectations; however, they need to feel trusted and valued within the context of those boundaries and expectations. 

And when it comes to language, whether you want to call the department “HR” or “People” depends on your employer brand. It doesn’t matter as much how these two sides of the coin work together to build your workplace experience on a foundation of standard HR practices that are experienced by your employee through the unique lens of your culture. There is no dichotomy between these two concepts, there is a lot of harmony but you have to work to establish it.

BuildRise can help you put this concept to work at your company. Set up a time to meet with us HERE.