How HR Can Become Agile (and Why It Needs To)

Agile, while initially developed to improve the responsiveness of software teams, has become the default model for companies big and small across industries with the promise of substantial improvements in team productivity and efficiency.

There is a tremendous amount of information about how agile should be implemented across various team sizes - big or small. Once the teams have gained competence overusing agile for their work, they find that their pace of work is hindered by a lack of agility in HR.

Surprisingly there is very little published knowledge about how to integrate HR and other support functions and improve their agility in their work.

Agile is all about short cycles, regular reflection and course corrections based on the data whereas HR typically works with an annual plan. HR is expected to provide its services in ways that are responsive to the ongoing changes in the culture and work style.

Agile promotes collaboration, team-based culture, customer orientation and continuous improvements. yet most of the HR evaluation still is based on the traditional metrics of individual performance, meeting deadlines etc., Agile HR also requires having the right people in place to practice and refine these processes. They should be able to identify people who can embrace uncertainty while seeking out new, better ways to deliver service. They should be able to identify which staff members possess it and who could be trained and who should be allowed to go.

Go and see:

To do this the HR teams should go out and see the teams at work. They should get a sense of collaborative environment and style of agile teams. They should visit other companies and understand what makes their culture nimble, responsive and attract top talent. Talk to the teams, understand what they like about the work, what they find frustrating, what they look for in their colleagues, how they collaborate. The hard skills can be taught, trained but the soft skills - humility, curiosity can only be encouraged and modelled.

Try HR retrospectives:

A retrospective is a regularly orchestrated meeting with a team involved in a particular project o review how things have progressed since the previous meeting. The time between the reviews is short to allow for new ideas to be tested and review its efficacy.

Retros can be held with hiring managers to review job requisition languages that seem to attract better candidates so these can be taken up and practised to check if it yields better results. They help assess the impact of small changes over short periods.

Agile offers many benefits to the organisation but to get the full benefits to the organisation it should become the mindset of the organisation. When everyone buys into the value of organisational agility, the promise of increased efficiency, productivity and higher quality products and services can be fully realised.

A short video on the introduction to agile development

https://hbr.org/video/4846148015001/a-quick-introduction-to-agile-management

How HR Can Become Agile (and Why It

Needs To) by Jeff Gothelf