Today, more and more organizations and business branches, including HR, are turning to be Agile in order to respond to rapidly changing business needs and to prosper in an increasingly uncertain, ambiguous, and complex world to bring value to clients.
Human Resources trends and processes have been moving towards agility for a long time. Is that necessary?
What exactly Agile mean?
Agile is a well-known iterative approach to project management and software development. Initially, Agile was seen as a set of management practices relevant only to software development. It was a response to the Waterfall model of software development that didn’t deal well with sudden changes. It works by breaking projects down into little bits, prioritizing them, and then continuously delivering them in short cycles (iterations). Today we might say it’s not only a methodology but also a mindset, based on trust, cooperation, openness, transparency, and quick adaptation. Here we have 6 rules defining the Agile mindset:
- Collaborative networks over hierarchical structures
- Transparency over secrecy
- Adaptability over prescriptiveness
- Inspiration and engagement over management and retention
- Intrinsic motivation over extrinsic rewards
- Ambition over obligation
Agile in HR focus on how HR can apply the Agile mindset and various working methods within our teams and projects.
Where it’s possible to implement Agile HR?
Complex topics
As we knew HR activities including not only running recruitment processes but also taking care of big and complex topics. Building employee experience, professional development, employee appraisals, onboarding/offboarding process, or employer branding strategies are challenging. The Agile approach helps to break these big complex topics down into achievable slices of value and to understand what exactly the value is. In addition, It helps us to prioritize our work and clearly articulate what we’re delivering and why we’re doing it.
Fast-changing plans
The agile approach to recruitment project management is especially important. In industries where recruitment plans change rapidly and HR solutions and methods used so far no longer provide the desired effectiveness. Dynamically changing employment plans throughout the year have become a standard, and we should be able to easily adapt to changes.
Challenging recruitment processes
The employee market, especially in IT doesn’t allow for complacency, especially in the recruitment process. It forces us to constantly search for new solutions, sources, or strategies for acquiring candidates. When attracting talents, we should bear in mind the changing needs of the next generations entering the labor market. We should implement the necessary changes, which help us to shorten time-to-hire and time-to-fill.
It’s not the buzzword, it’s a necessity
Quick and efficient response to changes is becoming more and more important, while HR silos make it tougher. A well-managed agile transformation results in HR effectiveness and productivity. The time required to close successfully the recruitment process is faster, and HR teams are more engaged (McKisney, 2019).
Not only we need to quickly understand what Agile means to guide wider organizational transformation, but also begin to apply the mindset ourselves however, we have to remember, there is no one perfect solution and do not use it as a frame. Let us try to be agile and adjust changes to the specifications of our organization’s needs. Let’s experiment, check, learn from mistakes, and draw conclusions so that the next iteration is better than the previous one.
