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April 2024
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Over the past two decades, agile methodologies have fundamentally transformed the tech community, enabling organizations to increase solution speed to market, customer satisfaction, and profitability. These same methodologies are now being seen as enablers not just for IT and Digital organizations, but also for operations, marketing, and, yes, even HR practices. As a Director of Talent Development for a Fortune 4 organization, my team has successfully leveraged these principles to transform our delivery of talent programs to our employees and leaders. So how can the same agile principles that took the tech world by storm be applied to the human resources function? In this article, I’ll cover:Let’s dive in. What Does Agile HR Mean Exactly?Agile HR is a solution delivery methodology that uses iterative development principles to prioritize speed of delivery, experimentation, and customer satisfaction. Agile HR is more than just processes. It starts with a mindset and culture that you’re trying to develop. Many large/established organizations are plagued by bureaucracy, clunky processes, and red tape. This leads to stagnation, declines in employee engagement, and, ultimately, poor customer satisfaction. An agile HR mindset and culture is all about tearing down these barriers in order to embrace agile values like customer satisfaction (whether your customer is internal or external), simplicity, speed, and innovation. Why HR should Be AgileIn order to understand the agile future of human resources, it helps to look at its origins. In 1901, as a product of the Industrial Revolution, rapid innovation, and the pressures of wide-scale unionization and worker strife, the National Cash Register founded what was thought to be the first HR department called ‘Personnel.’ Primarily an administrative arm of the business, Personnel focused on tasks associated with recruitment, hiring, employee grievances, and even employee wellbeing. Over the next century, fueled by legislature strengthening employee rights, HR teams would become increasingly administrative and compliance heavy in nature. Rapid globalization and technological enhancements like HR information systems eventually led to human resources functions being gutted, offshored, and even more admin-focused. However, in many instances, the pendulum had swung too far and National Cash Register’s Personnel team’s focus on employee wellbeing had been left in the dust. As Namely describes, “The HR departments of yesteryear have been characterized as backward, stodgy, and glorified complaint departments. There’s a reason why organizers can sell out entire conferences about the need to ‘redefine HR.’” Today, HR responsibilities extend beyond employee relations. People are demanding more from their employers, and HR professionals’ roles have evolved into strategic partners in accelerating business results. With the increased scope and strategic accountability, however, comes a need for human resources to adapt and rise to the challenge. This is where agile HR comes in. Traditional HR delivery models lack the speed, customer attention, and innovation needed to meet your employee’s wants and needs. Agile enables HR teams to rapidly spin up products/product teams and take a human-centered approach when designing new initiatives.
How To Become AgileSo how do you become an agile HR function? Agile is often thought of as a process or methodology, but, in reality, it’s much more than that. I like to think of agile HR as being comprised of three primary compliments:
Agile mindset and cultureEmployee satisfaction firstAgile processes are all about putting people first and ensuring customer satisfaction. In this case, your customers are the employees and leaders at your organization who will leverage the products (i.e., benefits, talent development tools, learning, and development, etc.) that your HR team is delivering to them. Taking a human-centric approach, for example co-creating, your solutions as a collaboration between the HR team and business leaders is a great way to ensure you meet the needs of your customers/end users. Beyond co-creation, you can also leverage surveys, focus groups, or interviews to collect feedback. The key is that your feedback process must be timely to inform the iterative development of your HR solutions. Create simplicity, increase speed
One of the major tenets of an agile culture is a propensity for simplicity to enable speed of delivery. While it’s common corporate lingo for us to say not to “boil the ocean”, the reality is this is a trap that HR organizations continually fall into. Too often, processes are over-engineered or designed for the simplicity of the HR team members rather than the end user. Simple processes for both the HR and the end user increase not just the speed at which you can deliver new services to your colleague, but also the likelihood that your employees will adopt and leverage your new HR solutions. Minimum viable products (MVP)At some point in your career, you’ve no doubt heard “don’t let perfection get in the way of progress.” It’s natural for us to be perfectionists, especially about work we’re passionate about and have ownership over. The concept of the MVP throws perfectionism out the window. The focus here should be on creating solutions that meet the minimum necessary requirements established to begin to add value to your organization as quickly as possible. From there you can garner employees’ continuous feedback and iterate. Agile processesLeverage feedback for iterative developmentThe beauty of leveraging the MVP approach we discussed above for your HR solution delivery is that you’ve accelerated getting a usable product to your leaders, bypassed accidentally over-engineering the solution, and collected meaningful real-time feedback to refine the process. Iteratively developing your products simply means that you’ll continue to refine and re-release over time based on employee and leader feedback. This might happen more upfront when your HR processes are net new to your organization, but it’s essential that over time you continue to collect feedback and make refinements to ensure their efficacy and effectiveness in the future. Design thinkingAs I mentioned above, putting your end user first is one of the penultimate principles of agile HR. One of the easiest ways you can ensure you’re meeting this principle is to formalize design thinking practices within your HR function. Design thinking is simply “a process for solving problems by prioritizing the consumer’s needs above all else.” In the HR space, this means applying these same human-centered principles to solve complex problems and create the best possible employee experiences. All new challenges, problems, and solutions that you’re trying to implement as an HR function should begin with a formal, human-centered design step. Deconstruct complex processesAgile in the tech space masterfully deconstructs complex solutions into smaller, more manageable pieces that can be developed and implemented over time. This allows agile product teams to incrementally improve products at a much quicker rate rather than building one large, complex solution all at once. Agile HR is no different. You have the ability to dramatically improve the speed at which you can enhance your employee’s experiences by taking a similar approach. As part of your project planning efforts, segment complex HR challenges into simpler, easier-to-implement components. Each component should stack back to the big picture/end goal of what you are trying to accomplish. An easy example of this would be implementing a new hybrid return-to-work program. Rather than trying to build a holistic approach to bring all of your employees back into the office, break your approach into logical steps. For instance, you might first look to bring your executive population back into the office as a mechanism to have them set the example. Or, if you have multiple offices, you might consider bringing employees back into a key hub location first. This affords you the added benefit of course-correcting along the way by using a real-time feedback loop to continue to iterate on your approach as you bring your end vision to fruition. Communication ritualsCommunication is an art in an agile world. The speed at which teams are working requires increased levels of communication, but it’s also essential that you ensure your delivery teams aren’t bogged down in meetings that prevent them from executing. Agile has this figured out. Meetings are reduced and key ‘rituals’ are leveraged to tear down barriers and keep teams focused on what’s in front of them. A couple of rituals I recommend considering are ‘stand-ups’ and ‘retrospectives.’ Stand-ups are designed to be rapid-fire working team meetings that address progress updates, any challenges, and remove barriers. The simplest approach for this is to have everyone on the team cover: (1) What they’ve accomplished since you last met Any barriers identified during the meeting should be assigned to someone to address to ensure progress continues. Stand-ups are traditionally done on a daily basis, but you can adjust the cadence to your needs. Retrospectives are less about progress updates and more about lessons learned. The intention of a retrospective is to create a safe space to align on what went well, and what didn’t go so well, and use this as a feedback loop for continual improvement. This would happen traditionally on a weekly basis, but, again, you can adjust based on what makes sense for your solution delivery teams. Agile org design and deliveryAgile org designYour organizational design is an imperative input into your agile journey. However, the makeup of your agile HR team can vary dramatically depending on the scale of your organization, the maturity of your agile processes, and the scope of what you’re delivering. Regardless of your organization’s specific needs, there are a couple of principles that are inherent to any agile HR team: clear purpose, customer focus, autonomy/decision-making pushed to the lowest possible levels, and data-driven decisions based on feedback. ![]() Based upon the scale of your agile organization, you may also need to implement new agile roles such as Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, and Product Owners. Cross-functional agile product teamsRegardless of the org design you align on, agile delivery is predicated upon your organization’s ability to spin up agile product teams that are flexible and cross-functional. This means bringing together a diverse team of individuals from various HR/business functions who each have unique and complementary skill sets needed to bring your HR product forward. Product teams coalesce around specific products or projects and take ownership of the project from its inception all the way through its delivery/implementation. Cross-functionality is key in an agile HR product team. Diversity of thought, expertise, and specialization built directly into the team ensures that the product team is self-sufficient and has the internal subject matter expertise to take full ownership and accountability for driving the product forward. SprintsAgile teams usually leverage sprints as mechanisms to drive rapid momentum through the design, development, and delivery of new solutions. Sprints are short, dedicated, and time-boxed periods of time in which specific deliverables will be completed within an agile product. This is where the concept of iterative development meets the reality of agile delivery. Each sprint focuses on a specific set of deliverables, allowing the team to deliver value in a quicker manner, collect feedback, and continue to make progress toward the larger HR solution delivery goals. Bringing It All Together—A Case Study In Agile Talent DevelopmentGetting started with agile HR can be much simpler than you might guess. I want to provide you with a real-life case study of how I’ve used agile HR principles to deliver high-quality talent development solutions. My team oversees a high-potential leadership development program that we deliver to one of our business units. We developed it via the same agile principles I discussed above:
As you can see, this didn’t require us to transform our entire HR organization. All we had to do was coalesce around the principles I laid out above, pull together an empowered product team, and organize our project management in a way that enabled simplicity, speed, and continuous improvement. The results spoke for themselves: we created the single highest-rated development program per employee satisfaction scores that I’ve been a part of. Jump-Starting Your Agile HR TransformationDon’t be afraid to take an agile approach to your agile HR implementation. Take baby steps towards implementing your larger agile vision, collect feedback, iterate, and experiment. Let your colleagues co-develop the agile approach that will work best for your organization, and be sure to break down your approach into easy-to-implement chunks that you can release over time as you work to move your HR function fully into the agile realm. Once you know what works for your team, you can scale what works and create a true agile transformation. My recommendation is to first start with the culture and mindset you’re trying to establish before moving onto formal agile processes. As Agile HR Community states, agile HR “is about truly stepping out of the tradition of following HR best practice and embracing a test and learn approach to deliver value, the value that is validated by our people and their experience of work. Only once HR embraces this mindset can the profession successfully adopt Agile tools and practices within our own teams and projects.” Some further resources: Subscribe to the People Managing People newsletter and receive regular content to help you progress in your career and build healthy, productive organizations. The post Agile HR: Why It Makes Sense And How To Get There appeared first on People Managing People. via People Managing People https://ift.tt/dfKpFcN
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As any HR leader can tell you, crises are an inevitable part of the job. Tough situations pop up, and often they’re out of our control. How can companies weather a crisis and turn it into an advantage in the long run? As Chief People Officer of The NSLS, Asia Wellington combines her background in cognitive behavioral therapy and her passion for human-centered business strategy to achieve positive results. She worked as a social worker before transitioning into human resources in the healthcare and education industries where her talent development initiatives have impacted thousands of employees. Born and raised in London, England she brings a global perspective to human resources, leadership development, and organizational success. Hi Asia! Welcome to the series. Can you tell us your “backstory”, what brought you to this specific career path?I’ve always been interested in helping people. That’s why I started my career in social work. Incidentally, social work taught me how to use cognitive behavioral therapy to create change. As I worked with clients, I kept seeing patterns and themes around performance struggles and success at work—people trying to make the world better in whatever role they were in. I wanted to help them, which inspired me to move to human resources, first in the healthcare sector, and now in education at The National Society of Leadership and Success (The NSLS). But even in my current role as chief people officer, I still approach my job precisely as I did as a social worker. I’m here to help people thrive. Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?So my number one goal for 2023 is setting up employees at The NSLS for success. During COVID, our organization led the way in building a supportive and effective remote-first culture. Internally, we call this The Great Clarification, where we realize the full breadth of what the organization could become. In 2022, we focused on retention, closing the hiring gap, and building a team aligned with the organization’s new goals. This year, we’re implementing a performance management program focused on taking these efforts to the next level: optimizing work processes, keeping people engaged, and ensuring they have everything they need to accomplish professional priorities and business goals. We are ambitious, but we are prioritizing taking care of our people. None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?I’m lucky to have a great support system around me. My husband is truly my life partner in every way and has been an excellent sounding board for the daily challenges I encounter. He was the one who inspired me to make the career pivot to HR in the first place. As well as my husband, most of my female friends are executives in their own right; we spend a lot of time informally mentoring each other. Just hearing about the challenges at their organizations inspires me to come up with better ways to handle challenges in my role. It was my friends who encouraged me to pursue a C-suite position. They encouraged me to dream bigger and helped me figure out how to balance my career with my responsibilities as a daughter, a mom, and a wife. I don’t have it all figured out; far from it. However, I have a support network that keeps me pointed in the right direction most of the time. Fantastic. Thank you for that. Let’s shift to the main focus of our interview about HR strategies for turning a crisis into an opportunity. Can you share your story of when an organization you’ve worked at entered into a crisis? What happened? What did you do?During COVID and The Great Clarification, we experienced both growth and increasing turnover. This indicated that we needed to dig deeper to discover and rethink who we are as an organization. We also needed to question our employer value proposition and shape it to address what matters to prospective hires and our people. We’ve recruited top talent and want to ensure we hold on to that talent to help them continue to be part of our journey. To do this, we’re investing in two key related efforts: First, we’re prioritizing performance management initiatives. Second, we’re strengthening engagement and retention through ongoing leadership development. This looks like moving from traditional bi-annual reviews to a format with more intentional, informal touchpoints and standardizing our onboarding process. These interactions enable management and employees to build close rapport and establish a culture of continuous feedback. By having managers coach and support through a lens of situational leadership, we’re creating an environment where there’s a meaningful ability to stay agile and adapt in proactive and responsive ways. What was your mindset during such a challenging time? Where did you get the drive to keep going when things were so hard?They say “pressure is a privilege” and “pressure makes diamonds.” So, first, I acknowledge the privilege I have as part of the team developing solutions. I then remind myself and my team to view such events as an opportunity to build better. We ground ourselves by remembering who we are serving, what’s at stake, and what a true privilege it is to be of service. Can you please tell us how you were able to overcome such adversity and how the company ultimately turned the crisis into an opportunity or advantage? What did the next chapter look like?We overcame this adversity by bringing the right people together, being honest about our current situation, and collaboratively ideating on plausible solutions. We then moved fast in deploying the agreed solutions incrementally. Lastly, we established means of tracking results and positioned the team to be ready to course-correct when needed. Even though The NSLS has seen tremendous growth during the pandemic, we’ve had to think strategically due to much change in the higher education industry. However, being able to react in such an agile way has meant that we’ve had to deviate from and redefine our standard operating processes. The next chapter is about integrating change management in all our projects and ensuring we use the correct methodology and processes. All too often, projects fail to meet desired goals because we underestimate the importance or significance of the people dimension of that change. So, any time a significant change or new project is underway, we ensure we’ve invested the time to think through the people impacts and implications and have adequate remedial strategies in place to ensure success. All the changes that have occurred in the past few years have helped make our standard operating procedures more agile and flexible, thus enabling our teams to respond to future crises with less friction. ![]() Here is the main question of our interview: Based on your experience, can you share five actionable pieces of advice for HR leaders about how companies can turn a crisis into an opportunity or advantage? (please share a story or example for each.)Organizational crises typically fall within one or a number of these risk categories: security, reputational, financial, brand, compliance, or health and safety (whether to our people, customers, or the communities in which we operate). Regardless of the appropriate category, it has a people impact. Therefore, I believe we as HR leaders can and should play a pivotal role in averting the adverse effect of the risk to our organization. My five actionable pieces of advice to my colleagues are the following: 1. Be prepared, step up, and leadThe presence of a crisis often implies operating outside the business-as-usual mode. This state of uncertainty, when the general question around the leaders’ table is “what should we do?” is the perfect opportunity for us as HR leaders to step up, lean in, and take the reins. Notwithstanding the severity or criticality of the crisis, stepping up and offering leadership builds your confidence as a practitioner and your brand within your leadership team. 2. Don’t bury your head in the sandMost crises invariably have a people impact. In the age of social media, news and views travel fast. It is vital to get out in front of the crisis and control the narrative of events, particularly on how the organization is addressing the situation. Burying heads in the sand and hoping for calmer seas is often a recipe for failure. 3. Assemble the right teamAssembling the right people to huddle and address any organizational crisis is crucial. As the HR leader, you have first-hand knowledge of the skills, competencies, behavioral traits, and social styles of the leaders and managers in your organization. You’ve played the role of a trusted sounding board or even a coach for most of these leaders. You are, therefore, uniquely positioned to pick the right team. Capitalize on this. 4. Find the lemons and make lemonadeAs they say, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. In the eye of every storming crisis lies the opportunity to make an impactful change for good. Challenge yourself and your team to find these potential opportunities. For example, COVID-19 forced many organizations to reimagine how they collaborated as teams. For us, the search for answers has resulted in an improved working environment, which has improved employee morale and loyalty to their employers 5. Communicate with authenticity and empathyBe intentional, purposeful, and thorough, no matter the size of the crisis. Define the universe of impacted stakeholders, understand what matters to each group, and keep them informed with the right level of detail utilizing the proper channels or modes of communication. For example, during a product recall crisis, product users will be interested in information that addresses their fears or how the organization plans to make them whole. Equally, prospective users will indirectly monitor how the organization deals with the situation to determine if they want to do business with the company in the future. At the same time, employees will have concerns about how the crisis impacts their jobs. Current and prospective investors will also be paying attention. What are a few of the most common mistakes you see leaders make when their company hits a crisis? What should be done to avoid them?The biggest mistake I’ve seen is putting significant decisions in the hands of too few people. Suppose you only involve leaders like the CEO and COO. In that case, details will inevitably get overlooked, both in terms of obstacles you might encounter in a plan of action and other opportunities for growth and success. Bring other stakeholders into the discussions to broaden the view and address every angle. Another mistake I see organizations make is pretending that what is happening is not happening and believing the situation will dissipate if ignored. Accepting reality is the first step to resolving the crisis. Acknowledge the problem and formulate a response. What advice would you give to HR leaders and organizations who have yet to hit their first real crisis?Crises are inevitable. Every organization will have to deal with them at some point. HR leaders can assess their preparedness by simulating scenarios and testing their responses. For example, a disgruntled employee posts disparaging views about the organization on Twitter and the story goes viral. An inaccurate narrative about the production practices of one of your organization’s top products appears to be gaining traction and views on social media. Proactively work to address the gaps identified as an outcome of the simulation. Another great approach is evaluating your organization’s response to situations in the news. Ask your team, “What would we do if this happened to us”? If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger!If I could inspire a movement, it would be for everyone to understand the positive impact they can have on the people around them. We each can be mentors or leaders to some degree. Whether it’s someone at a place of worship, a neighbor, or a coworker, it will have an exponential impact if we all reach out and touch someone. Don’t miss out on any opportunity to do that. Thank you, Asia! Some great insights in there. How can our readers continue to follow your work online?You can follow The NSLS at NSLS.org and on LinkedIn. The post <strong>Overcome And Build On A Crisis By Bringing The Right People Together</strong> appeared first on People Managing People. via People Managing People https://ift.tt/wZhW71i |