Agile HR

Part 1 — The backstory

Our Agile experience has been evolving for two years now. We’ve learnt and shared many stories along the way. If you’ve not read our previous blogs, we will catch you up here. In this 4-part blog series, our goal is to summarise our journey so far and to give you some very practical ideas about Agile in HR.

We started by applying Agile to our Learning and Development (L&D) team. After the first year, we extended it to include our Employee Engagement team. As a whole, the People Engagement and Development team is responsible for companywide initiatives such as leader development, manager development, the engagement survey, recognition, values, career development, professional skills, HR comms, and so on.

First things first, we were and in many respects still are, a regular team. We are organised within HR, inside a large, fast, demanding, ever-changing FTSE30 (London Stock Exchange) business. Our team structure on paper looks “normal”, but the way we work is not.

At the beginning of 2016, we found ourselves with a set of problems that weren’t going away. These problems are typical for L&D teams and, as we have discovered, many other corporate function teams. Our goal was to remain relevant and add value to a fast-complex business — and we were starting to fail at that.

We identified four key problems:

1. Pace — we were too slow. By the time we responded to a need, it was not uncommon for the business to have moved on to a new problem. Sometimes the business had even fixed the original problem itself. We weren’t responsive enough. One of our leadership programmes took 12 months to get to pilot stage, and our waitlist for one manager programme was 6 months long. Long roll-outs, tightly managed cohorts, linear training modules, scheduled dates. Slow, slow. slow. It’s not surprising when the business starts questioning your budget and headcount.
2. Opinion — or more specifically a lack of data to have an informed debate. We were an experienced team. We knew the “best practice guidelines”. Cumulatively, we had defined, designed and delivered solutions for decades. It could therefore be quite frustrating when a senior stakeholder told you the solution to their problem, because they felt their opinion was so important. It’s hard to deliver a great outcome, when you don’t believe in the value of the mission. We needed data and evidence. Where was our real data? The real-time data? The real user data? Without this, it was always going to be the battle of the opinions.
3. Waste — effort vs.value. When we started asking people what they actually valued from our development programmes that had been lovingly designed to meet a multitude of needs, we were shocked to find how little it was. From a 3-day programme, they could recall a single morning session as having the most impact. No one could remember where their beautiful workbook was. From a 3-month programme, they told us they most valued the network. Could the rest, in effect, be considered waste? Have you ever got to the end of a 1, 2, 5 day workshop and asked (or been asked): “so, what’s the one thing you are going to do differently?”. One thing?! This is a sign of waste.
4. Silos — a team of individuals. We were organised in a classic way: individual people owning individual things, like leadership development or manager development. Each individual was separated by reporting line and responsibility. This created single points of failure and single thinking solutions. You can encourage people to collaborate all you like, but if the ownership sits with an individual, they will prioritise their own work over others. It’s quite common to find a silo within an L&D team within its own silo in HR which itself can be a silo in the business. The work becomes increasingly isolated from the end user — the leader, the manager, the employee — and that is a big problem when you’re trying to deliver value.

We knew we couldn’t solve these problems by doing the same thing (or a slightly different thing!) over and over. We needed to crack this with something very different. We just didn’t know what.

Read about our epiphany in Part 2