Agility — a superpower for Human Resource Professionals

A few years ago during an HR Summit in Vancouver, I heard the term Agile in HR for the first time and it piqued my curiosity. Until then Agile to me was a technology followed by software engineers, essentially people on the Delivery side of things in my organization, proven to increase value to customers and the default team approach we had followed for a long time.

Agility is all about being adaptive, innovative, resilient, continuous learning, and foresight.

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It has made an even bigger impact now as a lot of these functionalities have been embraced during the remote working norms the pandemic has created for us. HR leaders across the world became crisis managers at the onset of this pandemic trying to decipher ways to transition to a remote workspace and thus embracing agile ways of working even though it may have been thrust upon them. HR folks across big and small organizations started incorporating what our Tech peers have been following for decades and bring agility in our functions. We have adopted our ways to be quick, nimble, innovative, and have a customer focusses, entrepreneurial mindset.

Speaking to HR peers in organizations across India, I could see that a vast majority of them have fully embraced Agile in the ways they work post the COVID lockdown in India. Very few companies had remote working options before the pandemic and working from home was something the majority of the Indian workforce was not used to for a longer period of time. And now, 8 months into the lockdown, India Inc has fully embraced the new norm of working from home, amidst the difficulties of living in larger families, poorer internet connection, power outages, and so forth.

However, people have experienced this new way of working, managing the way they work in their own time and knowing it’s manageable, hence making it difficult for businesses to go back to their old ways. COVID has redefined how people work together and how success can be achieved even in the most unforeseen of scenarios. Tools like Slack, MS Teams, GMeet, and ZOOM made all the difference enhancing the agility quotient of all teams.

Few items that have helped us incorporate an agile methodology into our teams were:

• Understanding the business and the workforce: Understand your workforce strength inside out, how many permanent, contractors, consultants work for you, who can you reskill/upskill, how can your redeploy the workforce in a moment, encourage role flexibility, knowing the talent pipeline, recruiting and onboarding faster.
• Over-communicating: Having frequent connects, town halls, breakout sessions, 1:1 to motivate people, hear suggestions, and bring them together to do their best. Being transparent.
• Planning and forecasting: Laying out everything before the start of any project or task. Understanding what is and what cannot be achieved and having succession plans for your key talent. Encourage a bootstrapped, entrepreneurial way of looking at things and managing with limited resources.
• Being people-centered: Address anxiety and stress. Assure. Reassure. Having employee assistance programs, wellness sessions, meditation, and yoga session s help. Value people’s times and the fact that we are now working in an environment and family and work needs are entwined. Be humane and considerate of the difficulties they face. Encourage employees to destress outside of work. Create a culture of empathy, sharing, and being human.
• Embrace the new: Look for new ways to work together, embrace new tools. With practice, we learn to juggle work easily using the tools easily available in the market. Embrace Digital. Have a digitally enhanced hiring and recruitment process, being agile on having information about your teammates at the tips of your fingers, using AI to enhance the employee engagement experience.

Transforming the HR workforce into being fully agile is critically needed to survive the changes that this pandemic has brought upon us and to make sure that the HR function is considered to be more than just recruiting, onboarding, and retaining employees.

The shift into agile ways that COVID has thrust upon us will make sure we have a compelling reason to look outside the box, redesign our minds, and focus on things that matter most.

Author: Neethu J