Agility and preparing for the unexpected!

Certain hot words pop up in the workplace, in meetings and in client conversations, as much as they do in popular culture. The one I hear and read most often these days is agility. From how individuals work to how businesses strategize, it’s becoming a byword for forward-thinking flexibility. Thrown into conversation, it hints at innovation, but is easily blown past and forgotten. One has to ask – when an idea is repeated so often, does it actually have meaning? What does it take to really be agile?

I mean, I can understand why agility – literally, the able to move quickly and easily – would appeal to businesses, across their operations. Customer demands, from consumer products to business services, are continually changing. In the UK, we’re waiting for the axe to fall on the unknown impact of Brexit (the biggest ever game of Deal or No Deal) and its aftermath. Technology development is accelerating, we’re accumulating and attempting to decipher growing stocks of data on almost every subject, everyone is trying to work out how not to permanently damage the planet, and conversations on how we address gender, race, disability, and mental health are moving quicker than ever before. Trying to build a plan that accounts for such an unknowable future would be madness.

That applies directly to recruitment, too. Especially when it comes to workforces, skills shortages are only becoming more prominent. There’s also no easy answer: we just don’t know what skills we’re going to need, especially in IT roles. The wrong investment in training staff, for skills that might not be half as relevant in five years as they are now, could be catastrophic. Building and following through on a detailed workforce plan, that turns out not to be worth the screen it’s projected on, could be equally disastrous. Without knowing what the future holds, it’s hard to move forward.

Restructuring how we go to work, toward great agility, has to be the way forward. After all, some of the greatest business failures of recent years can clearly be attributed to an inability to move with the times (the collapse of Thomas Cook has to be the most recent). But using the word in a glossy document or presentation to your shareholders, board or boss won’t cut it. It needs to be fixed to actual change and action. When so many organisations revolve around yearly targets that demand longer term investment, this is still a challenge.

The place to begin, as in so many cases, is how you bring in talent. After all, you can set the most intelligent objectives and goals in the world, but without the people who are capable of delivering them, it’s all for nought. In fact, agile at a more ‘local’ level can be clearly seen, with 74% more people mainly working at home in 2018 than in 2019. Embracing remote and project-based workers is a great first step toward workforce agility, even if it doesn’t address longer term needs. Even the NHS – an organisation known for its staff shortages, and probably less so for its innovative staffing – announced a plan this summer to become more agile, inclusive and modern, particularly focussing on flexible working.

What I think is needed by many organisations is a distinct change in attitudes when it comes to planning. There’s a definite argument to be made that conventional workforce planning undermines agility completely. This will definitely send some colleagues – probably your accountants – into spasms of horror. And there are also some businesses and organisations that can’t work that way at all: for instance, it takes ten years for a pharmaceutical company to go from discovering to finally licensing a drug. Not knowing you’ll have scientists available consistently for the next twelve months is probably a turn off for investors.

Still, for some, this can be a game changer – and even those with the strongest leanings toward planning can take learn something from approaches that are based around the expectation of change. Planning without ‘creating a plan’ sounds like a contradiction in terms – but that’s exactly what agile workforce planning means.

At Capita, we know that fashionable phrases don’t mean much unless we can actually meaningfully deliver outcomes to our clients. Moving away from traditional, strategic workforce planning to agile workforce planning, to enable a truly sustainable workforce, has to mean abandoning the comfortable notion of deciding what you’re going to need a decade in advance and then doing it. Instead, as our Director of Workforce Planning Adam Gibson outlines in the video above, it’s about continually monitoring and revising, adapting as you go so that the plan ‘remains current and fresh’, while keeping a clear eye on your goals.

Ultimately, it’s the difference between flying a Boeing 717 from London to Las Vegas, and flying an unmanned spacecraft to Venus. The pilot of the former is taking a route flown thousands of times before; the latter knows where he’s going, has a reasonable idea of what may be ahead, but has to be prepared for the unexpected. Gathering every possible bit of information is as essential as understanding that it might not be enough: accepting that you’ll never find the fool proof solution, and will have to adjust as you go alone, is the only way you’ll get there.