If the term (and framework of) Agile isn't on your radar yet, it should be. 'Agile' enables organisations to master continuous change, which makes it perfect for the times we live in. It is essentially THE change management process we all need right about now. It enables organisations to flourish by building resilience in a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Agile is also something that can be applied in the context of HR. Agile HR is a fascinating topic but it can be a challenge to change an entire organisational perspective on 'how we do things around here.' So, in this week's HR Blog, we examine what Agile HR is and how it can be applied in your business, and how important it is to the future of work.
What is Agile HR?
Agile HR aims to build a shared value between your customers, business and employees in an environment that is becoming increasingly digital and networked. According to the 'Agile HR community' there are two distinct aspects to Agile HR , which are 'Agile for HR' and 'HR for Agile.' Let’s delve into the details of each, starting with Agile for HR.
Agile for HR
Agile for HR relates to how HR Professionals and the the HR team can apply an Agile mindset and various working methods across teams and projects. Agile for HR creates an opportunity for businesses to reinvent the operational model as well as helping HR modernise as a profession. The good thing is, you don’t need to work in an 'Agile' organisation (or software development, which is where Agile originated) to implement Agile for HR. Any organisation can realise the benefits very quickly by applying a few basic steps in your everyday operations and workflows.
HR for Agile
HR for Agile, on the other hand, looks at the role of HR in helping your organisation as a whole to transform and meet the challenges of an increasingly complex business environment. HR for Agile explores how to design modern workplaces by combining historical ways of doing organisational development with new Agile ways of working. HR for Agile also focuses on the need to redesign existing HR and people practices so as to enrich the employee experience to cultivate business flexibility, resilience and a culture of change throughout an organisation.
The Agile Manifesto
Essentially, 'Agile' is all about the value you deliver to your customers and your business. In HR the need to ‘add value’ is obvious, but it can be difficult to quantify and define what this value is. This is where it pays to understand the Agile Manifesto in its original context and to understand how it can be applied. The original manifesto is comprised of four foundational values and twelve supporting principles which lead the Agile approach to software development (where Agile first evolved as a framework). Each Agile methodology applies the four values in different ways, but all of them rely on these values to guide the development and delivery of high-quality outcomes.
The four foundational values are:
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Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools: Valuing people more highly than processes or tools is easy to understand because it is the people who respond to business needs and drive the development process. If the process or the tools drive development, the team is less responsive to change and less likely to meet customer needs. Communication is an example of the difference between valuing individuals versus process. In the case of individuals, communication is fluid and happens when a need arises. In the case of process, communication is scheduled and requires specific content.
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Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation: Historically (in a software environment), enormous amounts of time were spent on documenting the product for development and ultimate delivery. Technical specifications, technical requirements, technical prospectus, interface design documents, test plans, documentation plans, and approvals were required for each. The list was extensive and was a cause for the long delays in development. Agile does not eliminate documentation, but it streamlines it in a form that gives the developer what is needed to do the work without getting bogged down in minutiae. Agile documents requirements as 'user stories,' which are sufficient for a software developer to begin the task of building a new function. The 'Agile Manifesto' values documentation, but it values working software (products or organisations) more.
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Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation: Negotiation is the period when the customer and the product manager work out the details of a delivery, with points along the way where the details may be renegotiated. Collaboration is a different creature entirely. With development models such as Waterfall, customers negotiate the requirements for the product, often in great detail, prior to any work starting. This meant the customer was involved in the process of development before development began and after it was completed, but not during the process. The Agile Manifesto describes a customer who is engaged and collaborates throughout the development process. This makes it far easier for development to meet the needs of the customer. Agile methods may include the customer at intervals for periodic demos, but a project could just as easily have an end-user as a daily part of the team who attends all meetings and ensures the product meets the business needs of the customer.
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Responding to Change Over Following a Plan: Traditional software development regarded change as an expense, so it was to be avoided. The intention was to develop detailed, elaborate plans, with a defined set of features and with everything, generally, having as high a priority as everything else, and with a large number of many dependencies on delivering in a certain order so that the team can work on the next piece of the puzzle. Agile turns this on its head.
The twelve principles of Agile development include:
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Customer satisfaction through early and continuous software delivery: Customers are happier when they receive working software at regular intervals, rather than waiting extended periods of time between releases.
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Accommodate changing requirements throughout the development process: The ability to avoid delays when a requirement or feature request changes.
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Frequent delivery of working software: Scrum accommodates this principle since the team operates in software sprints or iterations that ensure regular delivery of working software.
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Collaboration between the business stakeholders and developers throughout the project: Better decisions are made when the business and technical team are aligned.
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Support, trust, and motivate the people involved: Motivated teams are more likely to deliver their best work than unhappy teams.
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Enable face-to-face interactions: Communication is more successful when development teams are co-located.
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Working software is the primary measure of progress: Delivering functional software to the customer is the ultimate factor that measures progress.
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Agile processes to support a consistent development pace: Teams establish a repeatable and maintainable speed at which they can deliver working software, and they repeat it with each release.
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Attention to technical detail and design enhances agility: The right skills and good design ensures the team can maintain the pace, constantly improve the product, and sustain change.
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Simplicity: Develop just enough to get the job done for right now.
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Self-organising teams encourage great architectures, requirements, and designs: Skilled and motivated team members who have decision-making power, take ownership, communicate regularly with other team members, and share ideas that deliver quality products.
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Regular reflections on how to become more effective: Self-improvement, process improvement, advancing skills, and techniques help team members work more efficiently.
The intention of Agile when applied in a broader context than software development, is to align any/all development with business needs, and the success of Agile will become self-evident if this process is followed. Essentially, Agile projects are customer focused and encourage customer guidance and participation.
The diagram below provides an outline of how the Agile values and principles are applied in an HR context. An organisation’s most important goal is to satisfy the customer. In the HR world, this translates into co-creating people practices with employees. Using an employee-experience approach, HR teams should aim to build seamless solutions driven by the users, their needs and their ongoing feedback.
How Agile Applies To HR
As organisations seek to become more flexible and adapt to a world of unpredictability, they struggle with the consequences of their own internal consensus reality or status quo - that is, the ways things have always been done. Things like hierarchy, bureaucracy and functional silos are just a few examples of how companies were organised historically. Agile emerged as a trend for businesses that want to structure teams and work in ways that enable individuals and groups to better adapt to a perpetually disrupted and changeable world, both inside and outside work.
It is important to recognise that Agile is not a method to be followed, but rather a mindset that ultimately leads to a new working culture. Problems arise when this is misunderstood and people go looking for a new framework or methodology to learn and apply. You need look no further than what's going on in the world right now to recognise how challenging it can be to transform the mindsets of an entire organisation compared to simply changing a methodology. Change is challenging. The Agile perspective has implications for people, processes and culture which go beyond the relatively simple task of re-designing organisational structures, systems and procedures.
This means that if you want to take full advantage of agile benefits, both HR and organisations as whole need a radical shift in their approach to how work should be organised and led. Harvard Business’s Review case study of ING’s Agile transformation highlights three core characteristics of Agile that made all the difference:
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An organisation’s most important goal is to satisfy the customer.
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Work should be broken down into smaller tasks and performed in short cycles by a cross-disciplinary group of empowered people.
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The organisation is a network and it should operate that way.
These three characteristics have a profound impact on how management and HR will operate and provide the opportunity to address HR’s evolving role. This is especially true in areas where it can focus on value creation for the organisation and on sustaining a great work experience. Businesses already undertaking an Agile transformation rely on their HR teams to modernise their people practices by building new workforce behaviours that enable the flow of Agile values and in a way that generates positive business performance.
Start Small, Experiment and Discover What Works For Your Organisation
Agile HR has the potential to transform HR into the profession that artfully co-creates the future of work. It also enables organisations to develop the capacity to meet the challenges of a volatile, uncertain and complex business world.
Don't forget that Agile is all about mindset. HR’s ability to define and articulate the value delivered to employees as individuals and the organisation as a whole. By incrementally developing solutions in partnership with your people and embracing a 'test and learn' approach in short sprints, HR Professionals can enrich their employee experience. This then flows on the the customer experience.
When learning how to do Agile HR, the key is to be flexible in your own approach. Start small. Treat it as an experiment, (which you might fail at times) but from which you will ultimately learn.
Agile for HR and Agile HR are both massive topics. If you would like to learn more, there are a wealth of resources and a more expansive explanation than this over on the Agile HR Community page, which can be found here.
The other point to consider is that if you want to introduce Agile HR, you need HR software that is just as flexible to support such transformation. Whatever changes you make in mindset and operations needs the right #HRtech that enables you to deliver your new ways of being and working. That means you need the type of HR software that you can bend to your will to suit the unique needs of your organisation. In addition to that, it would be wise to use the type of #HRtech that gives you as much of what you need under one roof as you can possibly get. This combination provides maximum efficiency and therefore generates increased productivity, no matter how you operate and how many times you have to change.
Looking for inspiration to find other ways to support a flexible workforce and deliver efficiencies in times of change? Every year a selection of well-researched people management reports are published by the likes of KPMG, Edelman, PWC, Deloitte (and more). They cover the changing nature of work and the latest HR statistics, metrics and trends. We've curated the most relevant HR statistics, metrics and trends from the reports published during the last 12 months.
