Hr Operations Glossary

The 9-box grid is a 3x3 matrix plotting employees on two axes — performance (low/medium/high) and potential (low/medium/high) —...

Absenteeism is the pattern of employees being absent from scheduled work — usually distinguishing unplanned or unexpected...

ACA reporting refers to the annual IRS filings required of Applicable Large Employers (ALEs) under the Affordable Care Act....

Benchmarking is the practice of comparing an organization's metrics — compensation, engagement, turnover, time-to-hire,...

Benefits administration ("ben admin") is the operational work of running employee benefits — health plans, retirement, life,...

Career pathing is the structured documentation of roles, growth trajectories, and required skills that lets an employee see how...

Change management is the structured discipline for moving people, processes, and organizations through transitions — new...

A competency framework is the structured definition of the behaviors, skills, and capabilities the organization values and...

Compliance is the practice of ensuring employee behavior meets regulatory, contractual, and internal-policy requirements — and...

Compliance training automation is the software-driven process for assigning, tracking, and evidencing required training (HIPAA,...

Corporate social responsibility is a company's voluntary commitments around social, environmental, community, and ethical...

Cost per hire (CPH) is the total cost of recruiting divided by the number of hires in a period. The SHRM/ANSI formula includes...

A cross-functional team brings together people from different functional disciplines — engineering, design, product, marketing,...

A digital employee journey is the employee-experience design expressed through the company's software — the preboarding email,...

The EEO-1 Component 1 report is the annual filing to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that requires most...

Employee self-service (ESS) is the capability that lets employees directly view and update their HR data — pay stubs, tax...

Employee turnover rate is the percentage of employees who leave an organization over a defined period, typically annualized....

An exit interview is the structured conversation, survey, or both conducted with an employee who has resigned or is otherwise...

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is the 1938 US federal law that establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and...

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is the 1993 US federal law that provides eligible employees of covered employers with...

HR case management is a structured system for handling employee questions, requests, and issues — with routing, SLAs, an...

Human capital management (HCM) is the integrated category of systems and practices that run the full employee lifecycle: hire,...

Human resources (HR) — increasingly called people operations, people ops, or simply "people" — is the organizational function...

Hybrid work is the practice of employees splitting time between a physical employer office and remote locations — usually home....

Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, is the US federal form every employer must complete for every new hire to verify...

Internal mobility is the movement of employees across roles within the company — promotions, lateral moves, project...

Learning management is the software category that delivers, tracks, measures, and reports organizational learning — courses,...

Manager self-service (MSS) is the set of capabilities that give people managers direct access to HR actions and team data —...

Onboarding is the 90-day stretch between "accepted offer" and "fully contributing team member." It is the single...

Onboarding automation is the practice of replacing the manual scheduling, paperwork, and handoff steps of a new hire's...

Open enrollment (or annual enrollment) is the defined window — usually two to four weeks each fall in the US — during which...

Organizational development (OD) is the discipline of designing, changing, and developing organizations as systems — structure,...

Pay equity is the practice of compensating employees comparably for comparable work, controlling for legitimate factors (role,...

Pay transparency is the practice of disclosing compensation information — pay ranges in job postings, internal comp bands,...

A performance management platform is the software that supports how a company sets goals, gives feedback, conducts reviews,...

Quality of hire (QoH) is the measure of how well new hires perform and retain after they join the organization. Unlike...

Remote work is the practice of employees performing their job from locations other than a central employer office — usually...

A skills-based organization (SBO) plans work, staffing, development, and compensation around skills rather than job...

An SOP (standard operating procedure) hub is the single, owned place where a company's step-by-step procedures live — how...

A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a documented, step-by-step procedure for a repeatable task — the written version of...

Succession planning is the practice of identifying, developing, and tracking potential successors for critical roles across...

Talent acquisition (TA) is the organizational function responsible for attracting, evaluating, and hiring employees — what was...

Total rewards is the complete economic and experiential package a company offers an employee: base pay, variable pay (bonus,...

Training is the practice of building the skills and knowledge employees need to do their jobs — onboarding,...

A workflow is a defined sequence of steps that turns an input into a desired output, usually involving multiple people,...

Workflow automation is the category of software that orchestrates multi-step processes across people and systems — approvals,...