Human Resource Strategy for an Agile environment
On the sidelines of his participation as a speaker at the PPM2017 international conference (www.PPMconferences.com), Cyril Awere delivers his reflections on Human Resource Strategy for an Agile environment. Cyril is currently an agility and change senior consultant at Trusted Advisors, and was previously holding several management positions at CostCo WholeSale, British Airways, Nokia, Atos, & HP in the United Kingdom during his 25 years of professional experience.
It is generally considered that the most important aspect for an organisation is its people and they happen to be the organisation’s most valuable asset. This would then lead us to conclude that if we want our organisations to become high performing businesses then our focus ought to be on investing in the nurturing and development of the people within the organisation.
We remember one of Sir Richard Branson’s famous quotes. “Clients do not come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients”. On reflection, this appears to hold true.
The following are some of the key reasons how we demonstrate the above notion;
- The effective use of an organisation’s human resource is what determines its success
- The key elements of an organisation’s employees are talent, teamwork and passion. Without these an organisation will struggle to remain competitive.
- Employees need to be given sufficient autonomy to enable them to learn and thrive, while helping the organisation respond to the various forms of rapid change.
This is where Agile HR which consists of Lean-Agile culture and principles come in. Agile HR enables organisations to adapt to the rapid transformation that’s occurring across all industries and helps to bring people operations into the 21st century.
Organisations that would like to reap the benefits of Agile HR, will need to be prepared to take a critical look at its current HR operational model and be willing to embrace an entirely different way of working with a view to improving employee engagement and developing talent, which is then likely to ultimately lead to successful business results.
For an organisation, while the embracement of the Agile HR mindset comes with many organisational rewards, it is also worth noting that indeed such change initiatives are typically not easy to implement and therefore will need a strong leadership who are really committed to lead the change. Such a transformation will enable the organisation to move from a process-oriented HR function to one that will be looking to empowering Lean Agile Operations.
The following are the 6 key aspects of the Lean-Agile HR Operations model;
- Embrace the New Talent Contract
- Foster Continuous Engagement
- Hire for Attitude and Cultural Fit
- Move to Performance Iterative Flow
- Take the Issue of Money of the table
- Support Impactful Learning and Growth
We are all too aware of the increasing change around us and its impact on our organisation. Therefore, leaders should seize this opportunity to embrace the Lean-Agile development framework to leverage on the talent of its workforce thereby transforming itself into a high performing organisation that is able to respond to any kind of change and consequently be in a position to deliver positive business results.
Article By Cyril Awere
Do not miss the presentation of Cyril Awere during PPM2017 international conference. If you are not able to attend the face to face sessions of this conference on the 26th October in Marrakech, you can register for recorded video streaming at only 125$ for dozens of premium speaking slots. More than 600 participants attended the 5 past editions of more than 100 companies in Africa and the Middle East.