Agile HR – is your company really agile?

What does it mean to be agile? Agile is not new and in reality, the global community through 2020, the COVID-19 year, proved that we can be agile and adaptable. But are we truly agile, or are we merely responding to the situations of the day forced upon us?

In the highly competitive world of work, being agile, responding to change and giving value is essential to survive and flourish. This is a contemporary approach as we must be flexible, focussed, fast and digitally-enabled to solve the problems of a modern world and then to succeed. Isn’t COVID-19 a problem of a modern world? Well, we could say it is a kind of modern world problem. However, it is one that we are responding to and one that does not necessarily change our behaviours and thoughts permanently.

I have been on an agile journey for many years, I just did not know that I was on it until I did a General Assembly short course on product management and design thinking bootcamp. Continuing the journey, I was introduced to agile coaching and rounded out my journey by completing the Agile HR Community Agile HR Certification course.

With an agile mindset, I have been helped to navigate and respond to COVID-19. Throughout 2020 I rapidly found that adaptability was an essential trait, and with more change coming I needed to be deliberate in navigating through I saw that it required more than one agilest responding to cope with it.

My teams are also adaptable, resilient, and simply amazingly talented people who have now joined me on the agile learning journey. We kicked off 2021 by engaging in a full HR Shared Services team offsite facilitated by the fabulous Jane Weir of Vigeo HR, focusing on human-centred design creating personas and customer journey mapping. The HR teams then came together to really lean into Agile HR and unlearning years of traditional behaviour’s and therefore learning new ways of working. 

A Kanban board is a visual way of managing and processing workloads. Our team with an employee centred mindset built our Kanban board and planned out our first two sprints (a time-boxed period when the team works to complete a set amount of work without interruption). This process will help to remove the most famed yet annoying question “what are you working on?” Anyone can see who is working on what, and whom we can help if we finish our tasks. Watch this space as I share our learning journey using an agile way of working over 2021.

ELMO HR Team Sprint Planning and Kanban Board

What is Agile?

In Utah 2001, 17 brilliant, likeminded software leaders created and signed the Agile Manifesto. It was agreed that being Agile consists of four values and twelve principles that are meant to provide guidance for any agile methodology.

Table 1 Four Values of the Agile Manifesto

At its core, agility is the aim for the development and delivery of high quality, working software and provides a rapid and flexible response to change. Agility has changed the way many organisations do business and has been implemented not only in the software teams but embraced by product development, marketing, and sales teams, and in fact, just about everyone within the business. It aims to put people in the forefront, hold them accountable and remove the often-restrictive policies and procedures placed on organisations.

Josh Bersin world-known industry analyst, educator, and thought leader wrote about HR practice, “HR’s job is not just to implement controls and standards, and drive execution—but rather to facilitate and improve organisational agility”. This is what the Agile Manifesto and the management methodology stands for. It is not just to improve organisational agility but remove the barriers & silos that prevent functions of the business from collaborating. Therefore, it can be used to improve output, staff morale and overall productivity across the organisation.

For Bersin, Agile principles are the key to supporting the kind of continuous learning, continuous talent acquisition, and transparent processes that enable organisations to attract, develop, and engage talent in the 21st century.

For business, complete agility is to respond to change and creates values for customers and stakeholders. HR is responsible for people, experiences and operations are, therefore, the key to business agility. As HR moves away from traditional annual performance reviews, stepped or linear career maps and positions descriptions, we are personalising experiences at work and enabling businesses to adapt and respond to changing operating models.

So, what is Agile HR?

Agile HR embraces several key principals such as continuous learning environment, continuous talent acquisition, transparent access to talent information, unified mission and values, piloting small initiatives and viewing HR as a system of engagement rather than merely a function of hiring, firing and record keeping.

Dave Ulrich, the grandfather of HR encourages HR as a profession to look ‘outside the company’ to work on how businesses can do better. He asked the question “how can we do HR from the outside in”.  This line of thinking further takes Agile HR from inside the company to the outside, and questions, how can we better engage with customers. We can do this by creating customer-led workgroups undertaking partnerships in product and service development for the collective betterment of business, not simply as one-upmanship over each other.

When applied to HR, Agile principles change the focus from imposing controls and standards to empowering collaboration and innovation.

Let us look at the Agile Manifesto with a people lens

Table 2 Agile manifesto with a people view

How can you best apply the agile methodology to your organisation?

Bersin and Ulrich have both identified that by applying methodologies, that was created by a small group of software developers, to the world of HR and by thinking outside traditional paradigms, that more could be gained.

It starts with a mindset shift and by unlearning traditional habits and through experimenting. In experimenting and delivering slices of value we can help our business to solve modern challenges. The aim is to start small by working on removing the controls and standards on your employees and by embracing empowerment, collaboration, and innovation in your organisation.

You may think that this underpins your everyday work in the office now. But does it really? How are you setting up cross-functional work teams to break down the traditional business silos – such as sales/marketing/accounting/IT/procurement? How are you creating systems of engagement between staff, customers, investors, and other outside stakeholders to get the best results? Is your talent acquisition program robust and transparent allowing you to really get the best people for the job?

Agile is not merely a methodology. It is a mindset, and it is a way of doing business. Every other business leader is talking agile and with the adoption of agile by software teams over the last 20 years, it is about time business, and HR caught up and embraced it wholeheartedly.

Where can you find Agile HR resources and communities to learn with and from?

This is just a taste of Agile HR out there if you come across any that should be added, write them in the comments and I will update.

Books

• Agile HR Deliver Value in a Changing World of Work By Natal Dank, Riina Hellstr?m
• HBR Must 10 reads on Reinventing HR
• Agile People: A Radical Approach for HR & Managers (That Leads to Motivated Employees)
• HR And The Agile Organization Arlen Bankston
• The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
• Team of Teams New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal

Web

• https://www.agilehrcommunity.com/
• https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/agilehrcommunity/
• https://hrtrendinstitute.com/
• https://joshbersin.com/2019/05/agile-in-hr-has-arrived-and-its-growing-fast/
• https://resources.hrsg.ca/blog/what-is-agile-hr-and-is-it-right-for-you
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57PmDk73u7I
• https://www.agileadvice.com/author/frank-leong/

Online Learning

• https://www.udemy.com/course/agile-hr-an-introduction/
• https://www.agilehrcommunity.com/agile-hr-training-certification
• https://online.rmit.edu.au/business-finance/agile-delivery?\

Advocates of Agile HR to follow on LinkedIn

• Tom Haak https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/tomhaak/
• Natal Dank https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/nataldank/
• Riina Hellstrom https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/hellstromriina/
• Jane Weir https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/jane-weir-sydney/
• Josh Bersin https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/bersin/