Increase agility by improving ability

Busines agility. We’ve all heard the term, but what does it really mean?

Only recruit people that are incredibly flexible; like surfers, yoga experts or gymnasts? An interesting concept perhaps, but maybe that’s a social experiment for another day.

When we talk about business agility, we’re talking about how well a business adapts to change. But why do we hear about this so often these days?

Businesses today are faced with a myriad of challenges to even just survive, never mind thrive.

This makes organisational agility one of the biggest concerns for many senior leaders.

There are many factors driving this; changes in legislation, external market pressures and of course, new technology. With better applications and devices being launched daily it’s more important than ever that businesses can adapt quickly, leveraging new technology to overcome the barriers to growth and stay ahead of the competition.

So what does business agility have to do with your learning and development or performance improvement strategy? Let me explain.

Old habits die hard

Many organizations are still deploying old-fashioned, academic-style approaches to employee development, in the hope of improving performance. It’s usually very reminiscent of what we all experienced at school.

Teach everything about a subject, then test that people can remember it.

In the business world, it usually goes something like this:

“My team needs a course on A, they need to know X, Y, and Z.”

The L&D team will happily take the order. As an expensive function to run, they’re usually keen to justify their existence and will jump on any opportunity to design another mandatory information dump course.

And naturally they throw a quiz in at the end; because the best measure of success is that someone can remember something for a few minutes, right?

Sound familiar?

The issue with this is that the focus is on information and not the tasks people have to perform. You can read more about the problems with this approach and how to overcome them here.

The ‘teach everything’ approach only works well in schools because children, unlike adults, have no prior knowledge or experience to build on. This means that everything they may ever need to pass the exam has to be covered. It’s good to remember that the whole school experience is designed for this sole purpose only; to pass exams.

But passing exams doesn’t always mean people can actually apply what they know to a real-world challenge.

Sadly, the ‘teach and test’ approach just isn’t effective for professional adults and will very rarely help them to get better at their jobs. And yet, a lot of organizations still insist on a test at the end of every course. Even if they never intend to run a single report.

Why bother? The answer is simple; people leave school with the belief that the only way to learn is the ‘teach then test’ method they have grown up with. They just don’t know any different.

But why is this so bad? Let’s think about this for a moment.

A high performing employee has had to stop working to complete a mandatory 1-hour course on improving productivity. Ironically, the second they stop working they instantly reduce their own.

They waste the full hour completing every section of the course, as navigation and progress are locked and gated. Why wouldn’t it be? It would be crazy to just let people decide for themselves what they need and skip straight to those bits. Surely they need to know everything; that’s what the course requester said.

So that’s an hour lost, on a course with no relevance to a high achiever, that probably won’t actually help them perform any better in their role.

In fact, the worrying reality is the employee will probably not even make up the lost productivity, never mind make any improvement in their performance.

Is it just me, or does this approach sound fundamentally flawed?

Why is this such a big problem?

When organizations are not agile enough, the business will eventually suffer. Then, when it hits a certain trigger point, the senior leadership team will inevitably step in, taking whatever brutal measures are needed to survive.

If you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment, you’ll know the one word that strikes fear into the heart of even the most loyal and consistently high performing people; restructure.

Many of us have been there and probably more than once, I know I have.

None of the options are particularly tempting. Mass redundancies, reapplying for the role you already have. Or even worse, being mapped into a role that you have no interest in and losing out on the only thing that has kept you going for so long; the chance of getting the redundancy package you’ve built up over many years of loyal service.

I know many organizations that go through this kind of mass disruption as often as every 12–24 months; all in the name of becoming agiler.

But all this change and uncertainty has had a massive impact on employee morale, as job security and professional development become nothing more than urban myths.

As a result, more and more people are pro-actively seeking their next position, before they even get settled in their current role. The fear of standing still for too long and becoming a victim of the next restructure is just too much. I have a friend that even updated their CV on their first day in a new job and then checked Glass Door that same evening to look for their next potential move. Employee experience is becoming a very real and hugely important factor. If people aren’t getting what they want from a role, they have no concerns about moving on.

It’s quite scary, but studies have claimed that millennials are likely to have no less than four different jobs by the time they’re just 30 years old. And it won’t be uncommon for them to have three completely different careers in their working life either.

Something has to change in order to break this cycle.

So how can you create and retain high performing talent and increase organizational agility at the same time?

Here are 8 things to consider that may help:

1. Develop a framework that supports the creation of a continuous performance improvement culture as this can greatly aid business agility. Values, behaviours and reward structures should all be aligned.
2. Reward people who show continued improvement and nurture this behaviour. Highlight to those not improving that those that do get rewarded.
3. Ensure self-development is part of someone’s role, rather than something they have to stop working to do. Job descriptions should factor this in, so it’s clear from day one what is expected.
4. Embed the support tools people need to succeed directly into the workflow, so they can find what they need at the point of need.
5. Challenge those with the mindset that independent, information-based courses are the answer to every performance problem; the reality is they will rarely help. When departments request courses, ask the requester to focus on the problem they are trying to solve and what their teams need to be able to do, not what they need to know; the two are very different.
6. Provide short learning experiences that people can fit into their daily role and ensure they focus on tasks rather than just dumping information.
7. Provide people with the skills they need, to recognise areas that could be improved. Make innovation and business efficiency a key part of everyone’s role and include this in the onboarding process. Consider including some basic Lean training (or similar) as part of induction.
8. Create processes and tools that enable and encourage people to share ideas for improvement and highlight any issues or barriers to performance improvement.

Why will this help?

Here are a few reasons why the above approach works:

• If the business focus is on helping people to continuously improve, it’s more likely that the business will continue to grow.
• If employees get the development they need, they feel like the business is investing in them,
• If employees are empowered to shape betters ways of working to improve efficiency, they feel more invested in the business.
• If employees are rewarded for improving business performance they feel valued and can see how their contribution fits into the bigger picture.
• If a business can continuously adapt to small issues as they crop up, it stops them growing into the bigger issues that normally result in the business-wide disruption mentioned earlier.

I hope this article has been useful and given you some practical ways to create and nurture a continuous improvement culture.

By improving the performance of your people, you inherently improve the performance of the business. It’s also easier to retain a motivated employee that can see the business supporting their development; which helps to break the churn cycle too.

By continuously looking for ways to improve, issues are identified and overcome sooner, reducing the risk of drastic measures further down the line.