What is Agile HR?
Agile HR
How to apply the agile methodology to HR might not be directly apparent. It is rather an agile mindset that HR can adopt and learn from. This is essential to deal with a workplace that is ever-changing and continuously in need of fast solutions. Agile HR thus is:?
Agile HR also challenges the traditional approach to HR practices in the following ways:?
Agile principles in HR
More than just a different approach to the various HR processes, the agile methodology forces HR professionals to adopt a different mindset:?
Far too often, HR has operated in departments (e.g., recruitment, HR admin, talent management, HR generalists, etc.) without any effort to collaborate. Furthermore, HR is so often removed from the business.
An agile approach to HR necessitates that teams should be multi-skilled. As an example of this, an HR professional could be sitting in the same room as a business manager, investment banker, and marketing director to work on people management needs.
Imagine a team made of these individuals to work on a matter such as organizational culture. It would yield far more effective and holistic solutions than a traditional approach where only HR professionals would work on this. This encourages co-creation, which has shown to deliver far more innovative solutions than a clustered approach.?
One of the most powerful aspects of an agile approach to HR is the speed at which it enables process development. This means an increase in potential failure, which is not a bad thing. It only implies that processes are being deployed faster, and a solution to a problem can be developed much more effectively. A traditional HR approach would have a fixed approach, where change is not welcomed, and a system has to be set to 110% effectiveness before it can be deployed.?
This mindset shift also encourages prototyping – which means that HR professionals experiment, map, and research the best methods of delivery. A simple example of this would be a team consisting of IT professionals, an HR manager, recruitment, marketing, etc. This team would build a performance management app in two weeks and roll it out to 20 people. It means they would test the app on a small group of people, and the consequences of failure are basically inconsequential.?
HR in many organizations has often followed a traditional yearly cycle, which places the various processes on a calendar. Remuneration, performance management, talent management, and other HR processes are typically reviewed on an annual basis.
However, an agile approach to HR assesses circumstances every day and then follows the appropriate methods to develop solutions in the moment. This allows for HR to receive information from the immediate environment and enact upon it.
Benefits of agile HR approach
There is a method behind the madness of an agile HR approach. The benefits for an agile HR approach include, but are not limited to the following:?
How to apply agile to HR
Your team doesn’t have to adopt the full agile methodology for it to be effective. You can select specific features to suit your needs.
Below are general steps that you can pick and choose from when applying the agile methodology to HR. We will use ‘new joiner onboarding’ as a process to demonstrate the agile methodology in practice:?
1. Define the problem
Before you can use any methodology to improve an HR process, you first need to identify the exact issue you are trying to improve. The best way to find out is by consulting with all the relevant stakeholders involved.
Example:?It currently takes 10 days for a new joiner to complete the relevant paperwork to be properly onboarded.?The organization wants to shorten this to three days.
2. Decide on your resources and define roles and responsibilities
Once you know the problem, the next step is to put together a team that can tackle it. Agile teams are usually small and have complementary skills.
This team will be using one of the agile methodologies to design and execute the desired solution. You may choose to use Scrum, Kanban, Lean Startups, XP, Dev. Ops and Continuous Delivery, all of which are agile methodologies. Each methodology comes with its own way of managing the project.
But simply put, the work will be carried out in sprints – this is a 2- to 4-week period, at the end of which the team delivers an initial version of the solution. In the following sprints, the team iterates on their previous work.
Whichever approach you follow, you will need to take into account the human resources you will need, as well as the physical resources (e.g., dashboards, visualizations, etc.)
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Example:?In order to shorten the time it takes to fill in the relevant onboarding paperwork, you need a system that can streamline all the necessary documents and eliminate duplicate information. Assemble a team consisting of HR generalists, recruiters, and?IT personnel to develop dashboards.
You now need to deploy each member of the team into smaller teams that produce high-end results. Each team is responsible for providing feedback to the broader team during standup meetings. Ideally, you will also choose a?Scrum master who is primarily responsible for guiding the entire process and team. In our example, it could be the HR generalist.
3. Develop your goals
In the agile approach, goals are what needs to be delivered by the end of each sprint. These can be broken down into activities that create a ‘backlog.’ You need to develop this backlog to decide what you need to do and how long it will take. The entire team needs to contribute to this process.
Activities are then prioritized and assigned to different team members. During standup meetings the team members update each other on the progress they’ve made.
Example:?Gather all documentation for onboarding and place it into an electronic database to automate it within two weeks.?
This would be a larger objective, and your backlog would break down this task into smaller sub-tasks. Example:?
4. Start with your first sprint
As we’ve mentioned before, a sprint is a specified and usually short period of time that a team tries to complete a certain amount of work. This helps teams get things done faster, and the maximum time for a sprint is usually four weeks.
During the regular (daily or weekly) standup meetings, the team should discuss progress on the sprints. Areas where teams are collaborating on sprints should also be addressed in these daily meetings.
Example:?Has the HR generalist compiled the folder with all the forms? If not, where is the problem and who can help them with it?
5. Take note of feedback
After completing your sprint, you’ll go into a sprint review.
Here you need to consider the feedback, both from the team and from clients or end-users. Understand what some issues that arose were, identify barriers to success and frustration points. Analyze if there’s a fair workload and if collaboration has taken place. If there are notable successes from the first sprint, be sure to celebrate this. This will help the team to be more motivated for upcoming sprints.
Example:?After testing the new process, the team found out that the process still took six days. The new employee forgot to sign one form. The team decides to iterate the process and include an email reminder sent on days 2 and 3 to remind the employee to sign the forms.
You may need to choose the parts of this process that works for you. Or you may need to run several sprints until you complete the final product. There is not a one-size-fits-all approach.?
Agile HR practices examples
The outcome of the above process means that HR is working faster and producing much more dynamic solutions than before. Below are some examples of how an agile way of working can have a net positive effect on HR practices:?
Recruitment
One of the most expensive costs for organizations is the time it takes to hire talent. There is a constant demand for vacancies to be filled, and an?agile recruitment methodolgy can aid in this. A traditional recruitment process would include screening, an interview, a second interview, an assessment, perhaps a final interview, and then an offer. This, however, is really against the agile methodology. An agile approach is to provide candidates with transparency, a clear understanding of the organization, and provide enough information for both the candidate and employer to make faster decisions.?
For instance, Uber created a gamification element to the recruitment process with an app called?Uber . The game guided applicants through San Francisco and awarded points for drivers taking the shortest route and information on how to provide tips of things to do in the city to customers.
The app offers candidates a transparent perspective of the job they would be doing, how much money they can earn and how it is to work for the company. This increases the decision-making processes for everyone involved in the recruitment processes and provides a faster?and efficient solution as opposed to a traditional recruitment process.?
Onboarding
Organizations are constantly trying to improve the experience of new joiners, as it is one of the most crucial moments of a good employee experience.?Along onboarding is an agile methodology approach to?Employee Onboarding. It aims to make the experience more dynamic and relevant for new joiners.?
An onboarding experience should include the basics, which is introducing the new team member to the broader organization, roles, and responsibilities, values, goals, missions, etc. The agile methodology comes to fruition by co-creating the onboarding experience with the new joiner. The experiences have to be done in sprints (such as two or four weeks).?
Performance management
One of the HR areas that has come into the spotlight in recent years is performance management. There has been consistent feedback about the efficacy of an annual performance review and whether or not it is still a relevant approach to evaluating an employee’s performance.
An agile approach to performance management encourages frequent conversations and regular performance discussions instead of an annual or bi-annual performance discussion. This type of regular feedback enables employees and managers to make changes more often and faster, and iterate the work processes.
As an example of this,?Gitlab?refocused its performance management approach to focus on managing remote teams. They applied iteration to everything and embraced total transparency. In their handbook, they specifically focused on ‘measure results not hours.’
This shift focused specifically on the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and an agile approach allowed them to make this shift. Then, they focused on performance and productivity as their cornerstone of evaluating employees, and not ‘number of hours worked’. To support this, Gitlab developed a performance matrix, which they have subsequently iterated as well. The outcome of this was to provide an opportunity for employees to receive continuous feedback for their development more often than not.