Agile HR: Fad or Future?
How can HR evolve from an operational and transactional focus to being a true strategic partner that enables delivery of business outcomes?
by Angela Goodwin and Justin Williams
HR’s perpetual challenge
The HR Business Partner model envisioned by Dave Ulrich in the 1990s created the three-legged stool of Business Partners, Centers of Excellence, and Shared Services to strike the perfect balance of understanding the business and its strategic objectives, providing deep HR subject matter expertise, and delivering consistent, efficient, and scalable, transactional HR support.
Most HR functions have adopted this model or a flavor of it. However, we’re seeing many organizations with mature, balanced, and effective HRBP models struggle to create the desired capacity to focus on truly strategic work needed by the business. An additional challenge has emerged for HR teams in recent years: the need to proactively anticipate and evolve services to support a rapidly changing business environment.
Enter the need for a more agile HR model.
The need for Agile HR
HR exists to support the employees, people managers, and leaders (i.e., HR’s customers) that run that business. HR is not just a cost center. It is a critical service that creates value by ensuring workers have the capabilities and support needed to enable them to deliver the organization’s strategic objectives. Therefore, HR and the services that it provides must remain aligned to the needs of the business and its customers if it is to deliver value.
HR must be prepared to respond to the changing needs of the business whether it is due to challenges such as a pandemic, recession, talent shortage, or surge in opportunity driven by growth acceleration and digital transformation. As the business adopts agile practices and an agile mindset to respond to these rapid changes, HR must become better prepared and more responsive to support and even drive these changes.
The rise in Agile impacting HR
In most industries, the pace of change has dramatically increased over the past decade. Technological advancements have empowered organizations to quickly leverage vast amounts of data to inform business decisions and automate many historically resource-intensive and time-consuming activities. As a result, multi-year business strategies are becoming less prevalent and are being replaced by agile business practices that emphasize more frequent, rapid, and iterative planning cycles. This requires a shift in how organizations operate as well as a shift in culture.
The rise of Agile culture changes how we develop and support people:
- People leaders as coaches: The purpose of people leaders has evolved. No longer is the role a task manager nor is success defined purely by the view of senior leaders. The leader of the future is a coach. They are there to support their team, ensuring they get the development and resources they need while leading with humility and modeling a growth mindset. This requires very different behaviors and skillsets than the old role of a task manager. Therefore, if the role of the leader has changed, how we develop leaders and how we define and measure their success must also change.
- How our teams look and behave: To ensure the customer is at the center of what companies deliver, organizations are reforming their teams to organize around the flow of value to deliver better services and products for the customer. This means more cross-functional teams making sure everyone across the value chain is working together. Enabling organizations to do this requires reexamining roles, team structures, and the depth and breadth of skill sets of individuals on the team. With a greater focus on the team, it also requires ensuring teams are more effective in how they collaborate, innovate, deliver, and measure success.
- Growth and the learning mindset: For an organization to continue to grow and adapt, it must embrace a learning mindset. This could mean both the willingness to accept feedback and data that conflicts with what the team thought was the best solution as well as an individual’s willingness to learn new skillsets to meet the new needs for the role. This means not only do individuals need access to learning opportunities, but also behaviors of teams and leaders need to shift to reward and model the growth mindset behavior.
Each one of these shifts represents a different way HR needs to support the learning, development, and growth of employees, teams, and leaders.
Workforce expectation trends
At the same time market dynamics are requiring the embrace of the Agile mindset and ways of working, the expectations of employees are evolving. To attract, retain, grow, and engage workers, companies need to strive to meet these expectations. Just as cross-industry trends are driving the need for increased HR agility, workforce expectations are also shifting to demand greater agile HR offerings.
- Ease of use of technology and services: Through their experience with companies like Amazon, Google, and others, employees have come to expect that their employers offer the same easily accessible, seamless, efficient, and reliable services that they experience outside of the workplace. They know it’s possible because they see it every day.
- Seamless experience: When workers need support, they don’t think about the separate departments needed to resolve their specific issue. From their point of view, they are having one conversation with the company focused on trying to solve the problem that’s in front of them. In other words, they do not care who is responsible for getting their equipment to start their new job on day one or to ensure their benefits remain seamless during their leave period. They have an issue they expect the company to solve with minimal disruption to their day job.
- Flexibility and access to opportunities: Workers of today want to be continually challenged and provided opportunities to learn and grow. In addition, the demand for workers changes as customer needs, markets, and company opportunities shift. The ability to move between teams, groups, and departments is essential to meet the needs of workers and the business.
- Continual growth: We have become accustomed to more immediate recognition and rewards through schooling and social structures. To grow and develop, more immediate feedback on performance is needed. HR practices need to be more responsive to support continual engagement, recognition, rewards, performance, and development of employees.
It is against this backdrop that many organizations have realized that their internal ways of working and services need to change to create the same customer-centered experiences that their employees experience outside of their work environment. Just like the business, HR practices need to evolve to work at the speed of business if they are to survive. More and more, HR agility appears to be about the future of work, not a passing fad.
Ready for more? Continue to part two: Agile HR Practices
Does your organization have an agile HR function that is capable of rapidly adapting to the needs of the business as those needs change? To learn more, reach out to Slalom Orange County Business Advisory Services at slalomocbas@slalom.com
Slalom is a global consulting firm focused on strategy, technology and business transformation. Learn more and reach out today.
