User-friendly Organisations
If you ever go on LinkedIn, and are vaguely interested in questions around organisational culture and management, then you will almost certainly have encountered the concept of 'People Ops'.
People Ops is the new version of HR, one that is heavily influenced by product management thinking. Instead of building an ever-growing HR team to solve individual problems one by one, we now build small People Ops team to build systems where people can solve more of their problems for themselves.
My favourite summary of this approach is:
🚀 Start with rapid research and hypothesis. Use engagement data, company financials, speak with leaders and team members to test your ideas. Think about what will keep your users subscribing to your employee experience.
This isn't just happening in the People/HR space. As well as People Ops we're now seeing all kinds of other new 'Ops' functions (like RevOps in commercial teams) all of which are trying to bring this user-centric design and product management mindset to different parts of the organisations.
But what about Operations itself? Isn't it time we brought those approaches into operations as a whole - that is, the function that attends to the organisation's way of working? Operations is often expected to build and maintain the systems, tools and processes for the delivery of products and services - but is this the right approach? In other words, do we need an OpsOps?
I think OpsOps would imply two things:
1. Instead of Operations solving individual problems (building specific systems and processes) they should focus instead on building meta-systems - that is, systems that make it easier for teams to build and maintain their own systems and processes.
2. Those systems and processes should have that same user-centric approach behind them as in PeopleOps. They should make people want to continually re-subscribe to doing their jobs!
We all know what bad UX feels like. It feels confusing, full of twists and turns, like a diabolical maze. It's the form that won't allow you to paste a strong password from your Password Manager, or that won't let you fill in the month of your birth until you've put in the day. But a lot of organisational UX is like this. It constrains people unnecessarily. It forces them, and their work, into rigid pre-defined patterns. This is not the right way.
As organisation’s scale, they have to become more ‘locked down’ - because more people doing more stuff = more risk. As risk grows, the case for taking counter-measures grow. Early stage organisations can be the Wild West: nothing is defined, everything is possible. Medium sized organisations need both to control risk, but also to capture what they have learned. So some constraints will be necessary - but in return, build organisations that work.