The future of work and agile hr are a global buzz, and they are here.

To develop a diverse, inclusive and sustainable workforce ecosystem,

the role of the human resources (HR) must evolve and transform. Yet,
many companies still practice the traditional and transactional HR that
fails to equip leaders and HR professionals with capabilities essential to
meet today’s business turbulence and challenges.
The HR will need to serve as change champions and take the lead to
develop a nimble and agile workforce ecosystem.
What Is Agile HR
As the name suggests, Agile HR is the application of “agility” to the
function of Human Resource Management.
Agility here means developing agile and responsive management
practices that include frequent feedback loops, and engaging teams in
short work cycles and repeated retrospectives.
The concept of “agile methodology” came into being during the 1990s in
the area of software development. The developers wanted a flexible
(agile) solution to the stumbling blocks they were facing in the process of
software development.
Over time, it has become a widely recognized management method in
various functions, departments and industries, adopting a proactive
approach rather than a reactive approach.
Agile HR is the Need of the Hour

In today’s 21st century volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous

(VUCA) world, continuous change is the only constant.
Business leaders and Human Resources (HR) practitioners need to
embrace a mindset shift.
They need to expand their abilities to navigate through the flow of
challenges (internal and external), anticipate change, and make
informed decisions to develop purpose and direction for their business.
Leaders and practitioners can make a significant impact in various
functions / departments, business units and the overall business by
blending lean, agile and design thinking principles / practices.
Companies like McKinsey, Deloitte, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, and
others have coducted extensive global research and the findings show
that organizations should be redesigned to be more agile responsive.
In today’s twenty-first century business era, adapt to change and
organizational agility are critical for business success and sustainability.
Some companies have begun to embrace an agile operating model and
emulate lean-to-agile practices to manage their projects across different
functions and industries.
This has led to user-driven approaches such as working in short cycles
called ‘iterations’ or ‘sprints’, for continuous feedback and continuous
improvement.
Agile Way of Working
To respond to the VUCA world, C-suite and business leaders need to
adopt an agile operating model and make an intentional effort to build an
agile organization. The attributes of agile organization are shown in
Exhibit 1.
Agile Human Resources

Companies are moving away from HR as an administrative and

operational function to HR as a more strategic, agile and people
engagement function, and are implementing nimbler practices in their
HR function & processes, thus transitioning to Agile.
The HR processes like recruitment, performance management, and
learning and development are being redesigned based on agile mindset
and Agile HR principles.
HR leaders and practitioners are realizing that Agile HR operating model
can help them to respond better to a business need by setting priorities
and operating as a self-organizing, cross-collaborative team driven by
common purpose and concrete goals.
Understanding Agile HR practices and applying the agile way of working
helps teams to work better in a more structured & streamlined way,
which in turn fosters work optimization and agility within the HR function.
The paradigm shift to Agile Human Resources is evolving at a global
level and is transforming work and the workplace.
To make this shift meaningful, impactful and sustainable, it is important
for the leaders, HR practitioners and teams to embrace a growth mindset
(one of the manifestos of Agile PeopleOps Framework), and use the
APF values, principles, practices and techniques to their talent
management processes to harness agility.
Traditional HR versus Agile HR

Traditional or transactional HR deals with routine employee life-cycle

management and general administration.
In order to embrace growth mindset, the APF way, leaders and HR
teams should realize that the transactional HR is outdated, and they
need to move from standardized, compliance-oriented function to a more
strategic, adaptive and personalized processes and Agile HR practices.
HR practitioners and teams should embrace the agile mindset, Agile HR
principles & values, and elicit behaviors that are conducive for building
agile teams and organizations.
They need to serve as key change champions in agile transformations.
The tabular column outlines the difference between traditional HR and
Agile HR (Exhibit 2).
Agile Human Resources Approach

HR leaders and teams need to create an integrated HR-Business

solution by focusing both on individual competence and organizational
work processes, workplace culture and climate.
In today’s Agile HR era, the HRs role should not be limited to generalists
and administrators, instead they should develop T-shaped capabilities –
having a deep knowledge in any given HR function with the capabilities
to work across different disciplines.
Leaders and HR teams must understand, learn, unlearn and
continuously scale Agile HR Fundamentals and use feedback loops for
continuous improvement.
The leadership team should let go of control, provide more autonomy to
the team, and build an environment of psychological safety so that the
organizational members get the opportunity to experiment and learn
from failures.
Traditional Hierarchies to Network of Teams

Many companies are undergoing a from-to shift – moving away from

traditional hierarchies to a network of teams’ models.
According to the Deloitte report 2017, 32% believe they are transitioning
to design their organization to be more adaptable and team centric as
they have understood the importance of team of teams.
The top Human Capital Trend of 2018, as per Deloitte, is the rise of “the
Symphonic C-suite”. 51% of the survey respondents rated C-suite
Collaboration as very important.
The C-suite executives need to step out from their functional silos and
work collaboratively across functions and departments to address
organizational challenges and serve as role models for their respective
functional or departmental network of teams.
Organizational leaders and HR practitioners / teams need to create an
integrated cross-functional collaboration experience between tasks,
projects and people.
The Agile approach mandates HG to practice Agile principles, be
accountable and agile in functional areas and collaborate with
organizational leaders to create a culture of engagement and co-creation
and ensure That this culture proceeds from the top level to the
operational level.
Agile/Lean Methodologies

Scrum and Kanban are the most common agile methods used by HR
teams. Scrum is an agile framework to manage work.
It has well-defined roles, time-boxed ceremonies, and is built on three
pillars – transparency, inspection and adaptation.
Kanban is a lean methodology that fosters workflow visualization and
helps manage the ‘flow’ of work.
To visualize the workflow, members use physical Kanban boards or
digital boards like Trello,Clickup Restya and others.
These agile methods can be used to visualize HR workflows (like
recruitment, onboarding, team training, quarterly goals and others) and
have disciplined cadences to foster constructive and meaningful
conversations.
For example, a Trello board or any other Kanban tool can be used to
chart out the workflow of new hires onboarding process.
The board can have lists/columns like pre-onboarding, during
onboarding and post onboarding.
For each list, cards can be created to describe the activities (like pre-
onboarding may entail the team to send out forms to the new hire to sign
up, set up training schedule, get his ID and badge ready).
During Scrum cadences, the cross-functional team of onboarding
specialist, IT/operations team, recruiter, and other stakeholders can refer
to the Trello board and have constructive conversations to celebrate
wins and/or ideate as a team on how to reduce delays and optimize the
workflow.
People Experience

The leaders and HR teams should understand that the organizational

members are not mere resources but are human beings who are
instrumental in leveraging the organization’s competitive advantage.
Research shows that an engaged and committed team of people can
help organizations succeed and thrive in today’s turbulent and volatile
business environment.
Therefore, Agile (or Agile PeopleOps), APF approach, is about creating
principles with a human-centered mindset and a rich agile methodology
in HR.
The customers of HR include candidates & employees (internal), and
vendors & agencies (external).
To build a better people experience at workplaces, the Agile HR mindset
requires the leaders and HR teams to use design thinking principles and
techniques (like empathy mapping, brainwriting & brainstorming,
storyboarding, journey mapping) to understand not only their customers
pains and gains, but also their needs, motivations and expectations.
A better understanding of these needs and expectations can help HR
teams to design better people-centered solutions.
For example, talent acquisition team can use design thinking approach
to understand a candidate’s experience during each stage of the hiring
process.
Design a journey map to include personalized touch points, validate the
map with new hires, incorporate the feedback and experiment on a small
scale to evaluate if the process fosters positive candidate experience.
Coaching Culture

Companies are moving away from traditional hierarchies to an agile-

centric way of operating in a network of cross-functional teams.
Research shows the importance of coaching culture (APF manifesto) as
it is highly correlated with organization’s performance and employee
engagement & enrichment.
To build this culture, managers need to be intentional facilitators and
coaches, and HRs need to roll out their sleeves to provide deep-dive
knowledge and support to the managers and collaborate with them as
partners & co-creators to create a coaching culture.
The success of HR function is evaluated in terms of employee
satisfaction & engagement levels, innovation and co-creation levels,
organizational trust and integrity.
Today’s 21st century business is not solely about maximizing
shareholder’s profits but it’s more about providing better opportunities for
more stakeholder involvement and maximizing the shareholders’ value.
To make agile transformation a reality in today’s Agile Human
Resources era, HR leaders and teams should embrace an agile mindset,
practice Agile HR operating model.
And embark on a continuous learning journey to hone their knowledge
and skills on evolving modern practices in HR.
Long-term business success mandates HR professionals and leaders to
be people centric.
To know more visit our website
https://agilepeopleopsframework.com/what-is-agile-hr/