Agile HR

Part 4— How we do Agile HR

Hopefully, you’re following the thread here from Parts 1–3, which talk about our Agile experience. This final section focuses on how we’ve operationalised Agile, and some examples of output and mindset shift.

As you will remember from Part 1, our Agile HR example is based around the People Engagement and Development (PED) team. We cover topics like learning and development, recognition and employee engagement.

Within PED, we’ve organised ourselves into 3 groups, with 4 or 5 people in each. Each group is focused on an end user type: Leader, Manager or Employee. We call these teams “squads”. This current structure is the latest iteration, built upon trial, error and adaption over the last two years. The key here is having a group of people aligned to team priorities who have the freedom to work together quickly and make magic happen.

We’ve adopted two Agile approaches in our day-to-day. Use Google to find out about these in more detail:

1. The first is Scrum: this is where one of our squads ‘Sprint’ for 1–2 weeks on a single PE product, like the MVP example for helping managers through the redundancy issue. The key here is that you get the benefit from lots of brains on the single biggest priority so you can quickly produce value. We also do one-day Hackathons to crack something fast. We also do 2–3 day Swarms. You’d be amazed what four people can crack when they are working together on a single outcome.
2. Then there’s Kanban: for us, this is like an organised to-do list that’s constantly being prioritised, with WIP (Work In Progress) limits to keep the team focused and speedy. The squads use this to focus on multiple products at once — so keeping various manager solution running day to day.

For both Kanban and Scrum approaches we use the traditional Scrum practices, like:

• Planning sessions: held every couple of weeks to help the squad decide and focus on priorities (often with input from stakeholders).
• Daily Standups: 15 min video calls each morning at a set time. These are a revelation in themselves. The squad updates each other on their focus and contribution towards the priorities. Our teams are located in different places, so we can’t meet face to face.
• Showcases: monthly presentations to share progress and achievements with the wider team and stakeholders. This is a celebration.
• Retrospectives: weekly reflections on the ‘what and how’ to make sure we are removing blockers, issues, and constantly improving.

And we now run all this using Office365. Microsoft Teams and Planner fit our needs. They are our one-stop shop for communication, planning, and file storage. Super simple — and behind our company’s firewall for good ol’ data protection and information security (and no cost to us).

Fast forward to 2018 …

Our manager development product (or “ManDev”, as it’s affectionately known) has grown rapidly by applying an Agile mindset.

Our current product is what we call guided manager development. It uses nudges via email on a single topic over one month. Managers get carefully selected and limited choices, including a small group coaching workshop. Digital content is both handpicked for maximum fit and value, and crafted from scratch to be rich in our company’s context. This product is scalable, repeatable, and uses the automation in Looop (our chosen digital platform), so it’s admin-lite. We broke every single L&D rule to create it and stuck to all our design principles. In doing so, we have created a continuous development experience for all managers.

So on the surface, this looks like an ordinary HR team. Under the bonnet, it is not. In addition to the hallmarks of Agile methods, the team are now super close to the end-user and speak directly to many of them, regularly. They are comfortable with a variety of digital tools and pride themselves on creating simple, seamless user experiences. They will talk naturally about their “hypotheses” and “experiments”, and have grown to respect the power of the real-time analytics within the digital platforms. They have rapidly grown their skills for writing for the web. They are now co-creating the product roadmap and debating which iteration will add the most value to the end user. One team member even made the move into a software development team as their full-time Scrum master (with no technical skills to speak of). Our new reality is that we feel closer to the worlds of technology and marketing, than HR.