Agile HR is disrupting HR - it’s already here and it is here to stay…

The challenge that today’s organizations and leadership face is that employees expect more than just a payslip at the end of each month. They seek workplaces where they can contribute, learn and feel engaged in, where they can be part of something meaningful. And organizations seek the same from their employees: contribution, growth, engagement and loyalty. So far so good, so why does it seem so hard to achieve?

There are many reasons as to why this could be, however, have you noticed that HR has the power to design the structures that either support great people work and bring user experience alive or make it difficult for employees to contribute in creative and innovative ways?

Agile HR will help HR professionals and teams build the future of work.

So what can we do about it? One thing is certain, sitting in a meeting room in long process meetings with other HR professionals is not always the right solution. We need to “co-develop” solutions with the business, and then roll them out in an experimental and iterative way so that they can be relevant to people’s daily work lives. This means they need to be localized too. So rather than design solutions in a conference room, we need to design them with customers, experiment and observe how well they work, and quickly improve them every day.

How can you get started? All you need is to put together a multi-functional COE (focused on solutions not HR silos) and a multi-functional support group (like IT, Marketing, Finance etc). Then choose a process which involves multi-functional boundaries such as on-boarding. The thing with on-boarding is that one size or solution does not fit all yet we insist on providing a generic on-boarding experience to all regardless of role, location, business unit etc.

To add real value, we need to co-design it with the business and employees to understand what are the moments that matter most to all those involved in the on-boarding journey, from employee, to manager to IT, and pay particular attention to those moments. What the journey looks like and what goes in it is co-created with these cross-functional teams.

This way of facilitating the on-boarding process and strategy means that the emphasis is on the customer. It is in understanding that the customer is at the heart of everything we do and it’s all about delivering value to that customer incrementally using the test and learn approach to continuously improve.

So, give it a try! If you need inspiration check out how Tracey Waters from Sky (https://youtu.be/uNjStiTETE4) has evolved their HR team to be more Agile in how they are structured but also how they support the business.