Forward I: Building An Agile and Innovative Business Strategy for Times of Disruption (Part 1 of 10)
For the last two years, being stuck in the pandemic, there have been numerous adversities and challenges that the workforce continues to face. Every aspect of an organization has had to either change or redesign their systems in order to go along with the new normal. Our teams have had to deal with several abrupt changes. As a result, many companies have begun to embed an agile mindset towards their employees with an intention of overcoming business disruption.
Indeed, top organizations have now started to realize the importance of agility and innovation - especially when the pandemic caused chaos and disruption in nearly every business sector in the world. It is clear that an agile and innovative organization is more inclined and prepared to deal with change, easily adapt to new environments, and constantly develop much improved products and services for their consumers.?
Although we are now slowly getting back to the old ways in the workforce, it is still important that companies are able to build that agile and innovative business model. Because of this, for this panel we have invited two distinguished individuals to share their knowledge and experience regarding this matter: Soumyasanto Sen, the Founder of People Conscience and Gary A. Bolles, the author of The Next Rules of Work. In this session, they discussed the need of having an agile and innovative business strategy especially in this disruptive era.
We asked the speakers to briefly introduce themselves, and to? share their own ideal vision of a workplace five years from now.?
Gary started the discussion and mentioned that nowadays, we are highly focused on the workplace because we all had some level of choice before the pandemic came along. And for a period of time, many of us didn't have a choice. With that, we are now in this window of trying to figure out how many choices we have. He also added that the workforce is still in the middle of the Great Reset. Therefore, he envisages a workplace as a combination of a very flexible physical location that will often be as much as possible more modular again. It will also have a wide array of different intermediate work opportunities, co-working facilities, and flash working facilities.
Following this, Soumya agreed with Gary’s sentiments. Five years from now, people will still be looking for flexibility not just in terms of the workplace, but more on the better work-life experience. The issues would not be solely revolving about where you are working; it's about how fair you are working to provide a better experience to your health, your work itself, and lastly, to your family and friends as well.
Moving on to the second question, we asked the speakers to give some recommendations or advice for those individuals who see a big disconnection between the future that we're painting and how we're actually making it happen.?
According to Gary, it should always start with YOU first. As years go by, we keep adding more and more responsibilities to the role of HR professionals; hence, it is really important that we learn how to communicate with your team. We can talk about wanting to have workers who are highly activated that they feel the need to be doing and solving the problems of the organization stakeholders. We can talk about having flexible work and flexible teams that are continually adaptive. It starts with you. It starts with HR. It starts with your work.?
As for Soumya, he mentioned the importance of understating the definition of productivity at least in today's world. Productivity doesn't necessarily mean the working hours you spend; rather, it points out to the outcome you're getting for your target purpose and results which can be achieved by better health price and better involvement with the team.
The speakers also shared their insights pertaining to instilling agility and innovation in order to overcome business disruption. For Soumya, being agile and innovative is something that we need to sustain. We really have to understand the ins and outs of our business, particularly its needs and priorities. By embedding agility and innovation in our mindsets, we continue to be sustainable and competitive forward.
Gary, meanwhile, encourages people to think in terms of alignment. He also stated that agility is needed today because we realize that exponential change can happen to us in our lives 一 including work, organizations, and industries 一 and these changes could even happen overnight.
As we are nearing the end of the discussion, we asked the question: What is the obstacle for us to finally stop talking about aligning extra strategy with business strategy and making it happen?
Gary once again opened the floor. He stated that one of the roles of HR is to help aim the strategic goals of the organization. In order to do so, there is a need to stop asking: Can you have a seat at the table? Instead of constantly asking this question, build a new table. We have been given a wide range of opportunities that are waiting for us to be explored. The so-called Great Reset of the pandemic has given us a new start date to establish a new table. A new table that will focus on human-centric organization channeling human energies to be able to create value for the organization's stakeholders.?
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Furthermore, Soumya added that most of the organizations are too function-specific. Hence, when people work in an agile environment they do not define them into functions. Rather, they define their target product and what they want to build and define a team. More so, he also stated that there are so many companies today struggling to find great talent outside of the company. And with that, they should try looking inside of their organization instead in which they will realize the amount of incredible talents being sometimes underutilized.
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