Agile HR

“Because HR touches every aspect—and every employee—of an organisation, its agile transformation may be even more extensive (and more difficult) than the changes in other functions.” – Harvard Business Review

We will guide your leaders and HR teams in ensuring that they are ready and able to deliver real value within the people pillar of the agile journey.

About Us

The greatest challenge that organisations will face in implementing and embedding agile will be in ensuring that outdated and misaligned HR strategies and tactics are totally overhauled to enable an agile people journey.

To compete and/ or be relevant in today’s fast-paced and ever-changing world, organizations must discover and implement new ways of working.

The Agile movement began in 2001 and has largely been an IT driven intervention but this is not sustainable.

They need to develop products/services that their customers desire and they need to decrease the time it takes to get these products/services delivered. The way that most organizations are achieving this is by becoming more agile

When you look at the various Agile frameworks, it is very evident that the greatest contributor ( or barrier ) to Agile transformation will be educating and enabling the people and leaders within these organizations. This requires a shift to a Lean-Agile Mindset and culture throughout the organization.

The Human Resources departments in these organizations are accountable for the people agenda and will play a key and central role in transforming and enabling the organization to embrace agility.

The traditional HR strategies, tactics, policies and practices are outdated and mainly transactional. The HR fraternity has an opportunity to become truly strategic though investigating, understanding and implementing an Agile HR and Talent framework.

HR’s Role in Agile Transformation

The changing dynamics with an Agile approach require Human Resources to re-examine the way they support and enable the organisation – many of these changes will require real paradigm shifts e.g.:

Moving from a support department to an enabler of the Agile transformation roadmap in collaboration with executives
Moving from being on the fringes of change and transformation to crafting and driving a culture and environment that enables agility
Moving towards creating Agile competence and capability in the organization through attracting and retaining qualified Ailists
Moving from focussing on individuals to focussing on teams
Moving from attracting and retaining functional talent to attracting and retaining t-shaped talent
Moving from hierachical, fixed organisation structures to team-based, networked and flexible organisation structures
Moving from task-based role profiles to creating adaptable role desciptors that focus on Agile capabilities and cultural fit.
Moving from a siloed skills framework to a cross-functional framework
Moving from motivating mployees extrinsicallt to leaning more towards intrinsic motivators
Moving from rewarding employees individually to reqarding teams
Moving from annual individual performance appraisals to continous team-based feedback
Moving from organisation driven career paths to employee driven career mosaics
Moving from one-size-fits-all employee development plans to employee and team driven development paths that embed and sustain the transformation to Agile

HR has continuously demanded a seat at the executive table; through embracing and enabling Agile ways of working in their organizations, HR can actually “set the table”. We are well placed to advise you on your Agile HR journey.

As a footnote, the HR department can apply and embed Agile in their department even if the rest of the organization is not ready for or even thinking about Agile yet. This will ensure that you can service your leaders, managers and employees in a quicker way with solutions that are focussed on the challenges that they face daily.