🖤 Open Works #028 How To Scale Your People Team As Your Company Grows

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 440+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🎯 Edition 26: How to co-create values so they don’t just end up as “words on a wall” – a principle driven framework to design and embed target behaviours.

🚥 Edition 19: Building a culture integration roadmap for your next merger – a tangible diagnostic, guided tour and framework to support you.

🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve This

🏃 TL;DR:

✔ Your People team should grow in response to business needs, not headcount alone.
✔ Start with generalists, then layer in specialists when demand justifies it.
✔ Distributed HR? Think local compliance + centralised culture and operations.
✔ Invest in tooling and automation early—don’t just scale by adding headcount.

⚡️ The Problem

Scaling the People function isn’t as simple as hiring ‘an HRBP for every 100 employees.’ Some companies can hit 500+ employees with a People team of 3-5. Others need 20+ because of the complexity of their…everything!

So instead of thinking "we’re at X employees, time to hire Y role," ask:

👉 What problems are we solving?
👉 What’s breaking?
👉 What do we need to proactively get ahead of?

Here’s how to think about who to hire, when.

💡 How to Scale Your People Team (Without Over-hiring)

1️⃣ The First 100 Employees: Build Good Fundamentals

🏗 You Probably Need: A strong generalist (Head of People and/or People Partner with dedicated Talent Partner if you are hiring aggressively into next phase of growth)

At this stage, the focus is building the fundamentals 😀 

✔ Hiring processes
✔ Onboarding & culture-building
✔ Performance management
✔ Basic compliance & People Ops fundamentals

💡 Trap to Avoid: Hiring specialists too early before the fundamentals are solid.

2️⃣ 100-250 Employees: Time for Specialists

🏗 You Probably Need:
✔ Dedicated People Operations (to handle compliance, payroll, HR systems and lite-weight self-serve process design)
✔ Talent Partner (especially hiring >20 people per year)
✔ People Experience Design (designing the end-to-end experience, reducing friction, and scaling culture intentionally)
✔ People Partner (to coach and support managers as teams grow)

🎨 PX Design Consideration:

• Early-stage People Experience (PX) is all about clarity—making it easy to join, perform, and stay engaged.

• Build a "Just Enough HR" approach → Simple, high-impact processes with minimal admin friction.

💡 If distributed: A dedicated People Ops hire with strong compliance chops to stay ahead of employment law across locations is a godsend.

3️⃣ 250-500 Employees: Scale Enablement Functions

🏗 You Probably Need:
✔ Comp & Benefits Lead (to handle pay equity and scaling perks)
✔ L&D Lead (to build leadership & manager development)
✔ Talent Leadership +3-5 Talent Partners (1 x TP per 15-20 annual hires as a rough rule of thumb. Also worth considering embedded to help on Talent to remain flexible to flux in demand

📌 Priorities:

• More structured manager enablement → Coaching managers on hiring, feedback, and performance.

• Scaling onboarding & employee experience → Ensuring consistency across new hires.

• Compliance risk management → Especially for remote/distributed teams.

At this point, your People team shifts from reactive support to proactive enablement.

⚠️ Trap to Avoid: Scaling purely by hiring more HRBPs instead of better self-serve systems and enablement.

4️⃣ 500+ Employees: Your People Team Operating Model Reflects The Business Operating Model

At 500+ employees, your People operating model mirrors how the business itself operates. This is honestly a bit of an ‘it depends’ situation but let’s get into what we mean by that.

🏗 Your People Team Operating model should reflect:
✔ How decisions are made (centralised vs. decentralised)
✔ The speed of change (stable vs. fast-scaling)
✔ Business complexity (single vs. multi-business units, regional expansion, remote-first, etc.)

📌 Which People Team Operating Model Works Best?

Depending on your company's growth and structure, here are five People Team models to consider:

1️⃣ Traditional Centralised HR Model

✔ Best for: Stable, single-business organisations with a slower rate of change.
✔ Structure: A centralised HR function managing everything from HQ with strong policies and compliance oversight.

💡 Trap: Can feel bureaucratic and slow in fast-scaling companies.

2️⃣ Ulrich Model (HRBPs + COEs + Shared Services)

✔ Best for: Larger, functionally diverse organizations that need both strategic HRBPs and specialized expertise.
✔ Structure:

• HRBPs embedded in business units

• COEs (Centres of Excellence) handling areas like L&D, Talent, and Total Rewards

• HR Shared Services for scalable admin processes (payroll, compliance, HR tech)

💡 Trap: If not well-integrated, COEs may feel disconnected from business needs.

3️⃣ ‘Agile HR’ Model

✔ Best for: Fast-scaling, high-growth startups where adaptability is key.
✔ Structure:

• Cross-functional, project-based squads instead of fixed HR verticals

• HR and PX teams work in iterative cycles, solving problems as they arise

💡 Trap: Ownership and accountability lines across BAU vs strategic work can be difficult to draw. 

4️⃣ Decentralised People Team Model

✔ Best for: Multi-region, multi-business unit orgs where local autonomy matters.
✔ Structure:

• Local People teams for each business unit or geography

• Core People team at HQ provides high-level guidelines

💡 Trap: Risk of fragmentation—HR across regions may develop wildly different policies and employee experiences.

5️⃣ PX-Driven Model (People Experience at the Core)

✔ Best for: Employee-first organisations that focus on retention, engagement, and long-term growth.
✔ Structure:

• PX Design team sits at the centre → Focused on employee journey mapping & continuous experience improvement

• HRBPs + COEs remain, but with a stronger EX focus

💡Trap: Risk of fragmentation—HR across regions may develop wildly different policies and employee experiences.

📊 Open Org Community Benchmark: How Big Should Your People Team Be?

We don’t love the idea of scaling your People team purely by headcount—but if you want a benchmark from a curiosity pov, we asked the Open Org Community (450 People leaders) what’s happening in the wild. Here’s a summary:

🛠 People Team Sizes at Different Growth Stages

📍 80 employees → People Teams of 6-8 (2 Talent, 1 Partnering, 2 People Ops, 2 People Design)
📍 250 employees → People Teams of 15-30 (12 Talent, 6 Partnering, 5 People Ops, 5 People Design)
📍 450 employees → People Team of 20 (6 Talent, 5 Partnering, 4 People Ops, 4 People Design)

💡 Key insight: The company with 30 People team members had built the entire employee lifecycle infrastructure and automated many processes while doubling their headcount in a year.

📊 People Team % Benchmark: What’s the rest of the market doing?

People Team Percentage measures the size of your People team as a % of the total headcount in your organisation. It is calculated as a percentage, by dividing the size of the people team by total employee count and multiplying by 100.

📈 Market Data: What’s the Typical People Team Size?

According to the data sample from peoplemetrics.fyi (a sample of 600 Series A-C scale-ups between Q2 2024-Q1 2025) the People Team* % median was 4.1% (*including Talent, PEX, HRBPs, and People Ops).

Benchmarks from Index Ventures and Anne Caron’s Zero to 1,000 suggest a 1 People Partner per 75-100 employees ratio is common.

💡Remember: These benchmarks should be directional, not prescriptive. The best way to scale your People team is by solving for real bottlenecks—whether that’s hiring, manager enablement, or HR operations.

📌 Next Steps

1️⃣ Map out your company’s biggest People challenges right now.
2️⃣ Hire for what’s breaking that you can’t automate—not just by headcount benchmarks.
3️⃣ For distributed teams, centralise culture & systems but localise compliance.
4️⃣ Invest in automation early to avoid scaling problems later.

💡 Want a second opinion on your People team design? Hit reply—I’d be happy to soundboard. 

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

📖 Learnerbly PX Open-Source

📔 Anne Caron’s book From Zero to 1000

📘 5 Types Of Operating Models [AIHR]

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

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With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

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