People Operations for Remote Teams
People operations consulting for remote and hybrid teams
We build people systems you can use.
From onboarding, to pay bands and performance review processes we can build them and then hand them over.
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People operations is how a company works for its people
In practice, it is the full set of people systems that guide how work gets done, measure success, build connection and help a company attract and keep good people. Done well, they add up to an exceptional employee experience.
- How work gets done: processes, SOPs, policies and a handbook people can actually find
- How success is measured: clear roles, goals and performance conversations
- How people connect: onboarding, communication and the habits that keep a team close
- Why people join and stay: hiring, pay, benefits and room to grow
Every company has these systems, whether anyone designed them or not. Without an office, the ones nobody designed are the first to break.
There is no hallway where the unwritten rule gets passed along, no desk neighbor to lean over to, no manager who can tell from across the room that someone is quietly drowning. Everything a building used to carry has to be designed on purpose, written down, and kept current.
Every people system we build takes four kinds of work
Most people expect a handbook. That's one of the four.
The longer answers
- What is a people operations consultant? Article by Kaleem Clarkson
- What is the difference between HR and people operations? Article by Jennifer Cameron
Eight signs your company outgrew its people systems
Six things we build
SOPs, handbooks and process documentation for remote teams
Fee range: $2,900 to $18,000
- SOPs and process documentation
- The employee handbook and policy set
- Meeting and async norms
- The intranet or knowledge hub it all lives in
We write down how your company actually works, then structure it so both a new hire and an AI assistant can use it.
There is a crowded market selling use AI to write your SOPs. Ours is the inverse: write your SOPs so AI can use them. A model answering questions about your company is only as good as what you fed it, and most companies feed it three contradictory versions of the PTO policy.
HR workflow automation and HRIS implementation
Fee range: $2,900 to $40,000
- Onboarding and offboarding automation
- Approval and request routing
- System-to-system data sync
- Form-to-system pipelines
- HR tech stack audits
- HRIS selection and implementation
- Data cleanup
- Reporting and dashboards
Search for HR workflow automation help and you get tool vendors, generic automation agencies and freelance listings. You do not get HR consultancies, because the firms that understand the employee lifecycle usually outsource the build. We do it in house, in n8n, Supabase and Zoho, which means the person designing the process is the person wiring it up.
Job descriptions, leveling and pay bands for remote roles
Fee range: $1,400 to $18,000
- Job descriptions
- Job architecture and leveling
- Compensation philosophy
- Salary bands
- Pay equity review
- Geographic pay strategy
- Career ladders
Most job description projects are a tidy-up. Ours tend not to be, because the useful version is comparative. For one client we wrote 26 job descriptions covering 13 roles, each one paired: the role as it is performed today, next to the role as it needs to be. Put those side by side and you have named the gap between the team you have and the team you are hiring toward. That document does double duty as a hiring brief and a development plan.
The widest range on the page, because one job description and a fully banded architecture are the same offering at different sizes. It is also the cheapest way to find out whether you like working with us.
Performance systems, reviews and manager enablement
Fee range: $4,500 to $18,000
- System design, rollout and tool configuration
- Review cycles and calibration
- Continuous feedback
- Goals and OKRs
- 360 feedback
- Manager one-to-one frameworks
- Promotion process
- Manager enablement
Reviews built for an office assume a manager who can see the work. Remote managers cannot, so the system has to carry the evidence instead of the memory.
One-to-one executive development is Leadership Coaching. We build the manager program.
Remote onboarding program design
Fee range: $3,500 to $12,000
A remote new hire can spend three weeks not knowing what they don't know. Nobody sees them struggle, so nobody helps, and by the time it shows up in the work everyone has quietly formed an opinion.
We build the program that prevents that:
- Preboarding before day one
- A module structure
- The first 30 days
- Peer-pal pairing
- Manager guides
- The checklists underneath
- The measurement loop that tells you whether any of it landed
Video production is priced separately.
Remote offboarding and knowledge transfer
Fee range: $2,900 to $12,000
- Offboarding program design
- Exit interview instrument and recurring analysis
- Knowledge transfer before a departure rather than after
- Separation checklists
- Access deprovisioning
- Alumni and rehire
Most companies spend months designing onboarding and about twenty minutes on the way out. The exit interview is the cheapest research you will ever run, and almost nobody reads the results twice. Access deprovisioning connects straight back to the first offering: the account of someone who left two years ago, still resolving in a permissions check, is exactly what an internal AI assistant surfaces first.
We do not do layoff or reduction-in-force planning.
How a project runs
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A scoping call, about an hour.
What is broken, who it touches, what "done" looks like. Bring whoever knows where the bodies are buried.
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A written scope, within 48 hours.
Every deliverable named, with an owner beside it and acceptance criteria attached. We split your tasks from ours before anyone starts, because the fastest way to blow a project is to discover in week three that nobody was assigned to gather the existing files.
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Discovery, then the build.
Interviews, a look at the current system, whatever data exists. This comes first and it is the part we protect. You cannot design how a company should work by reading its Google Drive.
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Handover.
Files, configuration, templates, and a walkthrough with whoever owns this after we go. Everything is yours: no licensing, no platform you have to keep paying us for.
What a project costs
| Offering | Fee range |
|---|---|
| Documentation and AI data preparation | $2,900 to $18,000 |
| Workflow automation and HR systems | $2,900 to $40,000 |
| Roles and compensation | $1,400 to $18,000 |
| Performance and manager systems | $4,500 to $18,000 |
| Onboarding design | $3,500 to $12,000 |
| Offboarding and knowledge continuity | $2,900 to $12,000 |
The smallest project we take on starts at $1,400. Anything above the top of a range is quoted from the scope rather than guessed at here.
About those numbers
The ranges above are a rough guide to scope. They are not a timesheet, and we don't bill by the hour. If the work runs long, we absorb it and you pay the same. If it runs short, the price is still the price. One number, agreed before we start, and it doesn't move.
Buying more than one
Most clients don't buy one. They start with job descriptions and end up rebuilding performance around them, or they fix the handbook and discover the real problem is that employee data lives in three places.
When several run together the work compresses. Same interviews, same people in the room, same underlying data, so the second and third project cost less than they would alone. That is not a discount we are offering. It is what happens when you stop pretending these are unrelated jobs.
Past a certain size, a single fixed fee stops being the right instrument and we move to monthly blocks with checkpoints, the same way every other engagement here is bought. That holds whether the work sits beside something else we are running for you or stands on its own. See how engagements are priced.
If this keeps happening, you may not need another project
If you have bought three of these in eighteen months, the pattern is telling you something.
Fractional HR Leadership
- The signal
- Sometimes what you need is not another system but someone to own the ones you have, week to week.
Change Management
- The signal
- Sometimes the systems are fine and the problem is that nobody adopted the last three.
Often it is neither and the honest answer is that the next project is just bigger than the last one.
We will tell you which on the call. One client ran phased project work with us for two years before moving to a monthly engagement that is still running.
Questions about people operations projects
People operations is how a company works for its people: the full set of people systems that guide how work gets done, measure success, build connection and help the company attract and keep good people. Done well, those systems add up to an exceptional employee experience. Every company has them, whether anyone designed them or not, and without an office the ones nobody designed are the first to break.
Traditional HR is usually framed around compliance and risk. People operations is framed around the employee's experience of working there, and it owns the systems and data that shape it. For a distributed company the sharper distinction is that HR can run on institutional memory, and people operations cannot, because there is no institution to remember in.
Start with what exists and who can see it. Inventory the documents, resolve the versions that contradict each other, label each document with the roles and locations it applies to, name an owner and a review date, retire what is obsolete but still indexed, and fix permissions before you turn anything on. Then test real questions against the content before and after, so the improvement is measurable rather than assumed.
IT can tell you that a file is overshared. Deciding who should see compensation bands, performance documentation, investigation files and termination rationale is a people decision with legal and relational consequences, and it is the step where most AI rollouts stall.
Yes, and that is most of what this page is. Every project has a defined scope, a price agreed up front and a handover. No monthly commitment, no auto-renewal, and you own everything we build. If you are already working with us on something else, the same work can run inside that engagement instead.
Ours range from $1,400 for a short set of job descriptions to $40,000 for a full HRIS implementation with the data work underneath it. Most land between $3,000 and $18,000. You get an exact figure in the written scope before work starts, and we bill a flat fee, never by the hour.
No. Every project is quoted as one number in the written scope, and that number is what you pay. If the work takes longer than estimated we absorb it. If it takes less, the price is unchanged. Larger work moves to monthly blocks, which are also flat, and never to an hourly rate.
Companies of 3 to 300 employees. Below that, most of this work is still small enough to do yourself. Above it, you typically have an internal people operations team and need a different kind of help.
A project if you can name the deliverable: a performance system, an onboarding program, a set of pay bands. A fractional leader if the thing you can't name is who owns it afterward. Scoping a fourth project inside a year is usually the answer.
Yes. Offboarding programs, exit interview instruments and recurring analysis, knowledge transfer before someone leaves rather than after, separation checklists and access deprovisioning. Most companies spend months on onboarding and almost nothing on the way out, which is backwards.
Tell us what's broken and we'll scope it
One call, about an hour. You'll have a written scope with a real number in it within two days, and no obligation to do anything with it.
Not sure which project you need? Say so on the call. Half of them start that way.
