HUMAN RESOURCES
AGILE HR
Goals that deliver untold gains
BY Jayashantha Jayawardhana
Agile means nimble; it can be used in reference to software development, project management, scrum management and so on. The common denominator of agility in the tech world is an iterative and collaborative approach to achieve end goals with optimal efficiency.
This description has moved beyond the tech world, and transformed product development, manufacturing and marketing with its magic touch. And it is impacting how organisations are hiring, developing and managing their people.
In an article titled HR Goes Agile, published in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis say that “you could say HR is going ‘agile lite’ [by] applying the general principles without adopting all the tools and protocols from the tech world.”
“It’s a move away from a rules and planning based approach, towards a simpler and faster model driven by feedback from participants. This new paradigm has really taken off in the area of performance management … but other HR processes are starting to change too,” they note.
In many companies, this is happening gradually – almost organically – as a spillover from IT where over 90 percent of businesses have agile practices. The authors cite the Bank of Montreal (BMO) as a prime example where the major shift to agility began as tech employees joined cross functional product development teams to make the bank more customer focussed.
As a result, the business side picked up agile principles from colleagues in information technology, and IT learned about customer needs from the business. One consequence is that BMO now regards performance management in context of teams rather than individuals.
After World War II, when manufacturing dominated the industrial landscape, planning was at the heart of human resources. Companies would hire lifers, offer them rotational assignments to bolster their development, groom them to assume larger roles with greater responsibilities and tie their increments directly to each career move.
By the 1990s, business grew less predictable and companies needed to come by new skills fast – so the customary approach began to bend but it didn’t break. During this period, lateral hiring from outside began replacing much of the internal development and promotions. But the old HR model persisted and annual appraisals continued.
Today, there are more sweeping shifts in the HR landscape.
As Cappelli and Tavis note, “rapid innovation has become a strategic imperative for most companies and not simply a subset.” They add that businesses have looked to Silicon Valley and software companies in particular, and are emulating their agile practices for managing projects.
So top-down planning models are giving way to nimbler, user driven methods that are better suited for adapting in the near term – such as rapid prototyping, iterative feedback, team based decisions and task centred sprints.
As HR concerns every aspect and employee of an organisation, its agile transformation may be even more extensive than the changes in other organisational functions. Here are three pointers…
PERFORMANCE Annual performance appraisals never made much sense. But they continued for want of better alternatives. Under agile HR transformation however, many organisations have switched to frequent performance assessments, often conducted on a project basis.
This change has permeated across several sectors and industries including retail (GAP), big pharma (Pfizer), insurance (Cigna), investing (OppenheimerFunds, acquired by Invesco in 2019), consumer products (P&G) and accounting (the ‘Big Four’ firms).
Overall, the focus is on providing more immediate feedback throughout the year so that teams can grow nimbler, course correct mistakes, ameliorate performance and learn through iteration – all are key agile principles.
COACHING Companies that adopt agile HR practices most effectively invest in sharpening managers’ coaching skills. For instance, supervisors at Cigna undertake training that’s designed for busy managers. It’s broken into weekly 90 minute videos that can be watched as time permits.
SHIFTING FOCUS The shift in focus from individuals to teams is central to agile talent practices. Teams are now creating, executing and revising their goals and tasks with scrums at the team level to adapt quickly to new information as it comes in.
They also track their progress, identify obstacles, assess their leadership and generate insights about how to enhance performance. Organisations must learn to contend with multidirectional feedback, frontline decision rights and complex team dynamics.
Agile HR transformation also focusses on improving the policies and practices concerning compensation, recruitment, learning and development.
