See Why Teams Decided They Needed a PEO (People Experience Operations) Instead!
More and more companies are turning to Professional Employer Organizations to handle their HR duties. However, there’s another method of managing your employees that can provide even more benefit, both for them and for your company: People Experience Operations. Here’s why teams are choosing this option, and how it can benefit your organization.
PEO Vs. HR
Traditional HR like the kind espoused by most Professional Employer Organizations is concerned with ensuring compliance and protecting the company from liability. The good of the company is their priority in any situation. As such, they spend a lot of their time putting out fires. Whereas with People Experience Operations, the priority is the employees and their wellbeing. The goal is to prevent those fires before they start.
For instance, an HR department will seek out and hire a replacement for an employee when they leave. PEO works to understand the root causes of employee departure and ultimately reduce turnover. Likewise, when hiring a new employee, a good HR team has a set onboarding process to acclimate them to the job and to company culture. But PEO goes a step beyond that, taking an active interest both in the employee as an individual and in the team that they’re on, to ensure they’re fitting in properly, and that everyone’s needs are being met.
HR often feels impersonal. Employees are treated as cogs in a machine—literally as resources. Professional Employer Organizations can feel even more so. Since the HR duties are outsourced, there’s no real sense of connection or caring for what’s going on within the company. But People Experience Operations is different. Employees are treated not as resources, but as human beings with needs to be met and goals to be striven for. The underlying philosophy behind PEO is that prioritizing employees and helping on their journey will ultimately help the company as well.
Engagement and Development
Whereas HR treats the symptoms of a problem, the goal of PEO is to get to the root causes. They engage employees regularly to understand what’s going on within the company. This enables them to spot the early signs that can lead to employee turnover, such as reduced productivity and higher absenteeism.
And rather than scolding the employee for the decline in their performance, or threatening them with termination, it’s PEO’s job to understand their pain points and address them. The goal is not just to improve their performance in the short term, but to help them be happier, more motivated, and with better overall job satisfaction, so they’ll stick around and become more valuable employees in the long term.
As such, it’s important that employees be able to trust the company’s PEO department. They know that traditional HR is ultimately working for the company’s best interest, not theirs. But with PEO, the way to serve the company’s interests is to prioritize the employees’ interests. Unfortunately, this can be a difficult pill to swallow, particularly for employees who have had bad experiences with HR in the past.
Communication Is Key
In order to establish trust, it’s important to foster good communication from both sides. A good PEO department talks with their employees regularly about what’s going on with them, and about what’s going on in the company. By making it a matter of course, rather than in response to a specific situation, it helps destroy the “We need to talk” vibe that makes employees nervous and instead helps them to be more open.
Transparency is important as well. For instance, HR departments will often (illegally) discourage employees from discussing their salaries and benefits. As such, no one knows if the person next to them is making more money for the same job, or if there’s a disparity between pay and things like experience and qualifications. People Experience Operations make all of that information freely available to all employees, so that if there’s a problem or a discrepancy, the employee can bring it to them directly and have it resolved, rather than letting suspicion grow and fester.
By prioritizing employees and their needs, People Experience Operations goes above and beyond what a regular Professional Employer Organization can do. They can improve motivation, reduce turnover, increase productivity, and ultimately create a better, more positive work environment for everyone. When employees benefit, the entire company benefits.