Are your HR practices Agile?

If you are an HR professional and are busy creating processes for controls, for standardization, for execution, and you spend most of the time continuing to track - in following up, in sending reminders and ensuring the those complex processes are completed and files are updated, then its time to move away from just that to much more.

The journey of being Agile HR, started almost a decade ago for me, when the company that I was associated with then, went thru the transformation in the way they did Software Development. The team I was engaged with had its agile vocabulary ready. Agile almost became a synonym for collaboration, for team work, for continuous learning and evaluation and more importantly, everyone in the Engineering group, started to talk about Customer centric approach which as a big game changer. It didn’t make sense for HR to be left out and lose the game and so, the journey to becoming an Agile HR team started.

Obviously, the first step in this direction was the decision to be Agile, - to decide that an Agile HR will be the best fit for Agile Engineering teams, so we dived right in to be part of the business team, for us to see what they do and how they do it and experience it first-hand. It felt good and seemed fancy to use the agile vocabulary - sprints, retrospectives, velocity were some of the favorites and the best was the definition of done J. But the actual work to map the work to those fancy words, was a huge task, more so because it required a mindset change, understanding the method behind the madness.

The stands ups were a thing, it allowed the entire HR team to come together, discuss, understand, share ideas and new thoughts about each other’s work. Also, the very fact that the team got together every day, even if it was for a quick stand up, had post-it on the board to tell us what each one was doing, brought in more collaboration. With that every aspect of what we do in HR, needed a lot of internalizing to move to being truly agile.

With that renewed understanding, we realized that in order to truly transform, we needed to start from the selection process - right from the job description language to the interview questions, to the introduction of de-briefs – everything needed to be aligned, to fit in and to derive the true value. It was no longer about a candidate’s selection or rejection, it was about how well he fit it and what new strengths he could add. We started to talk the same language as Business and vice versa.

The annual process of performance management had to be replaced simply because the team was now used to working in sprints, it was imperative to capture feedback that the teams discuss during retrospectives, and so came the process of quarterly career conversations instead of the lengthy annual review forms. The feedback was more real time, constructive and had an important element of team collaboration as one of the major competency.

Agile also impacted the way we offered training programs, we moved to adult learning and more importantly the philosophy of continuous learning as a part of work life. A lot of initiatives that we launched were successful, more because we operated with a mind-set of “how will this benefit the employees?

How we organised our HR systems, the processes, all went thru an over-haul, business understanding grew, we had a seat at the table, we were more innovative, we were accountable, we became true partners in every aspect of an employee’s work life that we so carefully crafted. The journey continued with every organisation that I associated with later, and is still going on…

The impact, the influence, and how the team and I partnered with business changed, because it changed something fundamental in us, the thought process and alignment – the agile way!

So, get started and reap the benefits of being Agile, because you know that you end up benefiting from this as much as your employees do.