Agility is the new workplace currency

More than ever human-resources professionals can play a key role in helping employees become future ready. The industry can help people get equipped for the changing environment and develop the right capabilities to be able to thrive.

Agility is becoming a new workplace currency. It’s about embracing change, being curious and approaching problems in a novel way. It’s about connecting with empathy to gain insights, demonstrating resilience and turning ideas into reality.

It’s about rapidly iterating, failing fast and reflecting to get to a better outcome. It’s about making a deliberate choice on how you want to be engaged - are you going to be a spectator or will you be part of the play?

This also means taking a risk of feeling really uncomfortable – but it’s not by feeling comfortable one learns.

Fast-changing

As leaders of a people function, one of the common challenges HR functions face is responding to changes quickly and innovatively and supporting people to adapt to a fast-changing environment.

Moreover it also forces us to rethink how we support our leaders and employees, and get the best out of them.

Getting the best out of staff requires building a workforce which is adaptable, resilient and responsive to different demands while delivering seamlessly to customers.

This involves changing how you work with customers, how you work across teams and building the skills and capabilities of people to enable them to move with the changes.

People practices

People practices are key to the success of new ways of working. As early as 2012, Josh Bersin from Deloitte focused specifically on how HR could contribute towards building an agile workplace.

HR, he believed, was a function with a significant contribution to make towards an organisation’s agility. For Bersin, Agile principles are vital to supporting the kind of continuous learning, continuous talent acquisition, as well as transparent processes which enable organisations to attract, develop and engage talent in the twenty-first century.

Too often in the past businesses have developed processes on what has been viable and feasible and have not always spent enough time on what has been desirable (see visual).

Therefore, for HR professionals to better serve our customers and employees, we should gain a deeper understanding of three key elements of the customer/employee experience: employee personas, moments that matter, and the employee journey.

Future ready

To be future-ready organisations also need to change the way they recruit. Once the best candidate is identified, the talent acquisition process is complete.

Traditional methods and channels being used such as CVs, face-to-face interviews, focused very much on the experience and technical fit.

Now we see organisations moving more towards continuous talent acquisition. Organisations invest in their employer brand and cultivate ongoing relationships with talent across multiple channels, including social.