Because it sprang out of long-standing collaborative practises fostered by software development teams, the concept of agility as a means to manage a corporation is gaining favour across the corporate world today.
In agile project management, teams define short-term goals and generate deliverables on a continuous basis, taking into account user feedback and reacting to shifting priorities as they develop larger products. Businesses, too, are adhering to these principles.
As businesses across a wide range of industries embrace these lean, flexible, and decentralised techniques, Human Resources is projected to play an increasingly important role.
What Exactly Is Agile?
Agility refers to an organization’s ability to respond to change in a timely manner. Over the past few years, business units have begun to implement agile practices across the whole value stream of business operations, including legal, marketing, sales, and human resources.
Becoming agile requires transitioning from “a compartmentalised, hierarchical organisation to a flatter, flexible structure.”
In an iterative and incremental approach, leaders will “work more closely with their employees and customers on small, collaborative teams to provide value in a more iterative and incremental fashion”.
In other words, solutions are produced jointly and incrementally, with close customer interaction throughout. Employees are overjoyed to know that their efforts are making a difference and to have a stronger sense of meaning and purpose in their life as a result of closer bonds with their coworkers and clearer contributions to their businesses.
However, while there is no single, globally acknowledged definition of an agile business, agile-embracing firms such as Ericsson, Fidelity Investments, Barclays, and Microsoft—met in 2016 in order to try to explain what is meant by the term. They identified four major themes in agile development:
- Creating a positive experience for customers.
- Work on de-scaling.
- Enterprise-wide adaptability is important.
- Culture needs to be nurtured.
Accenture defines agility as “a company’s ability to anticipate, sense, and respond to volatility in markets in ways that create competitive advantage,” or, in Accenture’s shorthand, “Agility = adaptability + speed + execution.” Accenture defines speed as “the ability of a company to react quickly to changes in market conditions.”
When It Comes to Work, Being Agile is a Must
Agile firms, rather than relying on a small number of high-level decision-makers to strictly regulate activities, rely on their entire staff to adjust quickly to change, according to a 2015 report by Accenture.
agile teams require a “product owner” who is empowered to make choices regarding scope, scheduling, and budget without consulting a steering group or governing body. In more complex organisations, two or three persons may assume the role of a product owner.
Agile techniques can be defined as a collection of values, behaviours, and ideas that serve as a “radical alternative to command and control-style management.” Several organisations had transferred 25 per cent or more of their leaders’ time from “functional silos” to agile, interdisciplinary teams to improve productivity. Joined an agile executive team that prioritised company initiatives based on their value and collaboration potential.
Human Resources Has a New Role
Human Resources will be required to take on new tasks and responsibilities as firms strive to become more agile, and this will necessitate HR reshaping its own structure and operations in order to foster flexibility.
Human Resources professionals will be required to encourage worker mobility, assist in the discovery of unknown talent, assist in the development of “an adaptive, ethical, and empowered culture,” emphasise rapid skills development, and redesign work to allow for “on-the-fly problem-solving and experimentation and less conformance to rigidly prescribed job tasks\”.
Human resource companies of the future will need to reinvent themselves—as well as the HR and talent management practices that they support—in order to create organisational agility. Individuals and organisations who fail to do so may find themselves in a state of obsolescence.
Human Resources may help to support agile cultures by recruiting the right people, employing performance reviews that don’t discourage cooperation, and adopting work norms that allow for suitable flexibility.
The concept of choosing self-managing groups over hierarchy and wholeness overwork focus alone—that is, supporting employees’ well-being, motivation, and growth through “organic, human work environments,” “flexible hours,” “flexible workspaces,” “tools,” and “connection to a resonating purpose”—principles for organisational agility.
Collaboration with C-level executives to enable middle managers and front-line leaders to form small, nimble, talented, cross-functional teams that have the ability to make decisions on their own:
- Internal transformation at a large scale. “Agile transformation” stated that the modifications resulted in improved speed to market, employee engagement, and productivity. The selection process placed a greater emphasis on culture and mindset than it did on experience or prior knowledge. The company lost a large number of workers who had good expertise but lacked the correct mindset, and many older employees were able to adjust more quickly and readily than their younger colleagues.
- Recruit adaptable “change agents” who are open to new ideas and ways of thinking and who will not rely on doing things the same way they have always been done. In order for agile to become an organisational discipline, human resource professionals must first gain support from the C-suite. The promise of enhanced productivity and efficiency will not be achieved unless there is strong support from the top of the organisation. First and foremost, they must educate front-line managers on the benefits of the strategy and the underlying concepts of the method.
- Third, they must include agile practices in the onboarding process for new employees. New employees are reminded that agile is a key organisational practice, and new team members are equipped with the skills and mentality necessary to execute, all of which helps the organisation grow.
