Agile HR In Today's Workplace!!!

Agility is the ability to rapidly respond to change by adapting its initial stable configuration”.
The differences between a traditional culture and the intended agile culture are often significant. Research has proven that there is a direct relation between addressing organizational culture and the success of an agile transformation.

Lately we’ve been hearing quite a bit about the concept of agile HR. While it seems to be an increasingly popular idea, I don’t think many HR practitioners completely understand what it means.

The agile HR states that human resources' job is not just to implement controls and standards, and drive execution—but also rather to facilitate and improve organizational agility. This changes HR's mission and focus. Driving agility means driving programs that create adaptability, innovation, collaboration, and speed.
Incorporating an element of agility into the HR function allows it to be nimbler and helps create an organizational culture that’s more responsive to the needs of customers.

Agile approaches to HR management

So what does all of this have to do with human resources?

For one thing the four values of agile development can be easily applied to the practice of HR. Incorporating adaptability, transparency, simplicity and unity can help improve HR service delivery.
Adaptability is important in the face of ever changing business needs, while simplicity is important when designing HR programs and practices that don’t cause confusion, alienate managers and employees or try to accomplish too much. Unity applies with respect to HR working together and ensuring it isn’t working in silos or at cross-purposes with the business. Transparency is important in gaining the trust of managers and employees and explaining why things have to be done in a certain manner.
An agile model incorporates feedback into any new project or program so changes can be made incrementally and early in the process. From an HR perspective, it’s important to work closely with other stakeholders and obtain their input very early on.

Agile versus strategic HR

At first glance, the concept of agile HR would seem to contradict the whole notion of strategic HR. After all, isn’t strategy about looking at the bigger picture and the longer term, as opposed to being reactive and working on incremental changes?

From that perspective, agile HR sounds like it might not fit in with the desire to make HR more strategic. However, an important aspect of strategic HR is understanding and being responsive to the needs of the business. An agile approach takes HR to a whole new level of responsiveness.

In an agile environment, it’s also important for HR to be able to help manage change within the organization. HR needs to be responsive in its approaches to staffing the organization and planning, developing and rolling out HR policies, procedures, systems and programs.

Agility requires a culture of empowerment where employees have the authority and independence to respond to the needs of customers. HR can help to create such a culture.

An agile organizational culture requires staffing the organization with flexible and adaptable people who embrace change. Agility also requires appropriate training, performance management and compensation structures.

Examples of agile HR strategies include:

• Training leaders at all levels of the company to act as hands-on coaches, not "managers"
• Designing the organization into small, high-performance teams that set their own targets
• Creating customer interactions within all groups and functions in the company
• Delivering a strong, focused mission and values to keep everyone aligned
• Creating systems with lots of transparent information, i.e., what are our goals, who is working on what project, who are our experts

• Implementing "systems of engagement" not just "systems of record," i.e., collaboration, information-sharing, project management
• Building a focus on continuous learning and learning culture at all levels
• Implementing a strong external employment brand that attracts "the right type" of people
• Hiring and promoting experts, not general managers
• Encouraging and teaching people to give each other direct feedback
• Creating programs for peer-to-peer rewards and recognition
• Developing programs to foster diversity in teams

 

As the world becomes increasingly volatile and unpredictable, organizations that are agile will outpace their competitors. To become a critical driver of agility, HR must fundamentally reshape itself to enable a new type of organization—one designed around highly nimble and responsive talent.

HR professionals of the future will be dedicated to helping their organizations fluidly find and mobilize resources around business issues—wherever those resources may be—and motivate people to adapt to change and perform at their best. To achieve this, HR organizations will need to restructure their mission and mandate, reshape roles and responsibilities within HR, redefine business and talent management practices, and support enabling technology platforms.

Once organizations develop agility and entrepreneurial behaviors, they will be able to more flexibly respond to rapidly changing market conditions or customer demands to outperform the competition.