After ten years of implementation of Agile by organisations around the world, I’m only seeing mitigated success. Agile takes its roots in the 2001 Agile Manifesto, when software development adopted the idea of “Agile” in an effort to make software development more efficient and purpose driven. The more cynical of us might say that it is just another consulting fad, destined to rise and fade as have BPR, Lean, and Six-Sigma. The more optimist among us will say that Agile has helped to bring awareness of the need to do things differently, and to think differently, to the business community.

What is the difference between Agile and agile? Implementing Agile involves following a set of specified methodologies, daily routines and practices. Agile is a process, something that you do. Implementing agile involves borrowing certain practices and concepts from Agile, shifting the patterns of behaviour in your organisation – a way of working and being.

Many organisations, especially the larger, more global ones have become increasingly complex and bureaucratic on the basis of more control, regulation, and a need to protect oneself in a tough environment. Who hasn’t been asked to produce a 50-slide pack, just in case? The need for consensus is slowing down decision-making, with perfectionism often the icing on the cake.

“Businesses need to simultaneously work on agile, on the mindsets and behaviours that will make change sustainable”

The consequences? An inability to make decisions fast, a feeling of disempowerment, and decreasing customer satisfaction. Agile was welcomed as the solution for speed and simplicity. However, working on that on its own is not enough, and businesses need to simultaneously work on agile, on the mindsets and behaviours that will make change sustainable.

4 characteristics of an agile culture
There are four characteristics, which are interdependent and need to occur together to realise the full benefits: customer-centricity, self-direction, experimentation and collaborative networks. The mindsets that sit behind each one are respectively, curiosity, personal responsibility, learning, and trust/teamwork. In an agile culture:

1. The customer sits at the heart of what people do and think. There is genuine interest and curiosity about the customer – who they are, what is important to them and how you can help them solve their problems or enhance their business/life.

2. People believe that they are responsible to deliver to others and leaders trust their employees to deliver on their promises. The contribution of all is valued and there is a belief in the power of people.

3. In an agile culture there is openness to feedback and learning. Testing and experimentation are at the heart of how work is structured – this means moving from a right/wrong view of the world to always asking ‘I wonder what this intervention will produce?’ or ‘let’s try it and then see if it works’.

4. Unlocking the potential of people in teams becomes fundamental for an agile culture to flourish. Teams are self-driven and are connected to customers and each other. They are dynamic, forming and dissipating around specific goals. Time is spent talking and forming connections creating alignment within and across groups.

“The number one challenge facing a leader in an agile culture is letting go of fears related to losing control and not being needed”

To foster an agile culture, you need to align the behaviours of your people – especially the leaders – the systems, processes, and symbols sent to employees. Leadership and structure are also necessary, even in agile cultures. The role of the leader, however, is to enable teams with the right capabilities and conditions to operate within a network, and the vision that multiple teams should be working towards spending time on the ‘dark matter’ between teams.

Letting go of control for leaders
According to our research at Walking the Talk, the number one challenge facing a leader in an agile culture is letting go of fears related to losing control and not being needed. The transition from “command-and-control” to a mindset of trusting and serving people to help them be their best is key.

To develop your agile leaders, I strongly suggest the use of a 360 tool focused on the key behaviours, and a combination of one on one coaching with intact teamwork. Systems that need to be realigned will include decentralised decision-making, clarity of roles and responsibilities, design thinking to build empathy with the customer, shared targets across teams, a solid continuous feedback process and visible shared learning from mistakes.

A truly agile culture is one where trust forms the basis of any relationship and where feedback is not only received with open arms but sought out by everyone. There is no better test to evaluate how agile a culture is than to assess these two cultural attributes. They form the healthy soil on which typical Agile initiatives can flourish.

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In Deloitte’s 2017 Global Human Capital Trends survey, an overwhelming 90 percent of the respondents – 10,400 business and HR leaders across 140 countries – told us that creating organisations of the future was “important” or “very important” to them. In fact, they identified building new organisations as their most important challenge. Agility and agile teams play a central role in the organisation of the future, and as companies race to replace structural hierarchies with networks of teams, they are looking to HR for capacity and support.

Agile teams – nimble, entrepreneurial, cross-functional groups of employees that are already becoming ubiquitous at every level of organisations – are an essential component of tomorrow’s workplace. Fast-acting and purposeful, agile teams can not only navigate the vagaries of the marketplace, including volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), but also mine them for opportunity.

Inside the makings of agile teams
What do agile teams need to achieve the empowerment necessary to operate at their maximum potential? They require a supportive culture and high levels of trust, inclusion, and accountability. When teams are imbued with trust, their members are better able to identify and act on opportunities for improvement, development, and innovation. Employee inclusion, both in teams and in the company as a whole, engenders an overall sense of belonging that helps enable employees to better connect with one another and to share their best ideas. And, high levels of accountability are necessary to help advance organisational strategies, with each successful encounter encouraging team members to seek out and accept more responsibility for their work.

“As companies race to replace structural hierarchies with networks of teams, they are looking to HR for capacity and support”

What can HR do to create agile teams
HR leaders can best support the empowerment of agile teams by thinking of employees as customers and expanding their focus on employees to include teams. This approach to enhancing the employee experience in agile teams can be accomplished by adopting a design-thinking mindset, creating personas, and mapping the employee journey.

• Design thinking helps HR leaders to more intently focus on improving the experiences of team members – a fundamental break from the function’s traditional emphasis on compliance and processes. Design thinking studies the behavior and working scenarios of employee segments and then designs solutions that enhance their work lives. Design thinking is powered by empathy. By walking the proverbial mile in employees’ shoes, HR professionals can better understand, engineer, and deliver positive experiences.
• Personas are constructed narratives that portray a typical employee’s experience on any given workday. Originally conceived by consumer marketers, personas give HR professionals a better understanding of what team members do by bringing their work to life through story. HR can use personas to identify and improve key attributes of effective teamwork that are embedded in employee attitudes, expectations, work habits, and goals.
• Journey maps provide a step-by-step graphical depiction of the different aspects of a team member’s journey. They can be used to identify key moments in the work processes in agile teams. In turn, HR can use the insights derived from mapping those key moments to create experiences that maximise the engagement of team workers.

As companies strive to transform themselves into organisations of the future, HR is uniquely positioned to help.  Through the adoption of a employee-as-customer mentality and the tools of design thinking, HR leaders can better design the programs and solutions that agile teams need to become more engaged, more empowered, more challenged, and ultimately, more successful.

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Two years ago I first wrote an article about the Future of Work, and it discussed the emerging discussion about robotics, AI, and rapidly changing skills. Since then a series of books, hundreds of articles, and entire issue of Deloitte University Press has been published, so a lot has become clearer.

In the interest of clearing through some of the clutter, let me try to simplify this over-discussed topic, and explain a few things that are now apparent:

1. The Future of Work means agile teams, networked-organisations, always-on roles, and the need to work in a fluid, adaptable way.
Some 88 per cent of the companies surveyed in our 2017 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends research cited “organisational design” as their number one topic, and I think this may be the biggest issue we face. You as an HR team have an opportunity to lead this change: so get familiar with agile, team management, and the role of followership to be able to take the lead.

2. Skills and careers are now on everyone’s mind when it comes to the future of work.
One of the fastest growing areas of HR technology today is tools to help employees learn, share information, and better improve their careers. These tools need open and transparent information about what jobs are being created in your company, and you as an HR organisation should do more research on what jobs are “ascending” and which are “descending.”

The research I published recently (Catch the wave: The 21^st Century Career) points out that the high-value jobs of the future are hybrid roles, multi-disciplinary, and social and technical in nature. Yes we need web designers and data scientists, but as you’ll see in this research that these roles in the future of work lean toward more creative, more team-oriented, and more industry savvy ones. So it’s important that the career and skills you focus on today are balanced, (STEAM vs. STEM), and soft-skills centric.

3. Robotics and AI are creating jobs as fast as they are changing them.
Companies that implement automation at a breakneck speed are increasing job roles at a fevered pitch. Why? For every new “robot” or AI-based software solution we need someone to “train the robot” and wrap it in human services. This new job, the role of “redesigning work,” falls on HR, and our research shows that 75 per cent of automation projects take place without HR’s help. You have to jump in.

4. Leadership and management are changing before our eyes.
As work becomes more dynamic and we operate in teams, the nature of leadership is changing faster than I’ve ever seen. The leadership marketplace is old and filled with books and pundits teaching what they’ve learned. Today you should look at the leaders of small, fast-moving, aggressive companies to see that modern leaders are collaborative, inclusive, experimental, risk-taking, customer-focused, and able to quickly adapt to change. If you haven’t revisited your leadership model, you should.

5. HR’s new job is “productivity” in the future of work, not “engagement”.
Yes we want highly engaged employees, but this only happens effectively when people are skilled, well organised, and taken care of at work. And the ultimate measure of this work is not “the employee experience” but rather how productive they are and how meaningful they find their jobs. Think about how you measure productivity, and you’ll suddenly be able to find the secrets to employee engagement.

The subject of the future of work is fascinating, and there’s a lot to learn. But let me reassure you that this future is here right now, and our role in HR is to take the lead and help our business leaders adapt faster than ever before to the future of work.

4 future of work action items for HR to consider

1. Examine and experiment with agile teams to help identify opportunities to improve operations in every business function.
2. Don’t over-focus on technical skills. Yes they’re important but understand that a hybrid of social, soft, and hard skills make up the jobs of the future.
3. Get involved in automation projects. Whenever a manager brings in a new tool or software system, you should be there to help rethink the jobs, work, and team.
4. Revisit your leadership model, and perhaps bring younger people into leadership faster. The old leadership models (up or out) are no longer effective, so you should enable young people to lead now – they can lead the way, and often mentor others to adapt more quickly.

Image source: iStock

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The most successful workplace solutions are bespoke ones where the engagement process has allowed the exploration and development of an appropriate workplace model for an organisation, said Stephen Minnett, founder and director of Futurespace.

“The process takes time and commitment and we see companies trying to ‘shortcut’ the process and apply a solution they have seen elsewhere,” he said.

“This can result in a workplace that doesn’t fully address people’s needs and realise the potential of a properly developed agile environment.”

Shifting to ABW and a more productive workplace depends on the alignment of people’s behaviours, the physical space and their technology, Minnett added.

“We use the analogy of a ‘tripod’ for an effective agile workplace solution – if one of the 3 legs is much shorter than the other 2 it falls over and doesn’t work,” he said.

Another failing of the implementation of ABW in some workplaces is that the space is overloaded to the point where one of the fundamental promises made to people moving to ABW is broken.

“That is the promise that if they forsake their ‘ownership’ of a desk they will be given greater choice,” said Minnett.

“But if the business pushes too many people into the space that promised choice isn’t available.

“Instead people make do with their second or third choice of space or in some extreme cases can’t even be accommodated at all at peak periods.”

“HR has a critical role in helping people transition to new ways of working – and the starting point for this is education”

To properly implement an ABW, Minnett said the conversation has to start with a good understanding of how people work now, what their patterns of behaviour are and the role of technology in their work.

People need to be then taken through an education process as to the opportunities that new ways of working can open up to make work more enjoyable and productive.

“HR has a critical role in helping people transition to new ways of working – and the starting point for this is education,” he said.

“As companies increasingly focus on the attraction and retention of talent HR can have a key role in helping define what the workplace experience should be for people and what types of new team structures may best support teams in the future.”

Minnett also said there are many trends impacting on the workplace and the rate of change is increasing.

“Organisations find it very difficult to predict their future space requirements and we will see the increasing ‘uberisation’ of space so that you only occupy and pay for what you need,” he said.

“In the past organisations were able to predict with confidence their future staffing numbers and what their workplace needs would be, often up to five to 10 years ahead.

“However, this is no longer the case.

“With lease agreements of 10, 15, 20 years or more and the rate of change we’re experiencing, making decisions around how your organisation will work and your employees’ needs is becoming more challenging.”

“Organisations find it very difficult to predict their future space requirements and we will see the increasing ‘uberisation’ of space so that you only occupy and pay for what you need”

Big data will also make fundamental changes in how information is used and people interact with their physical environment.

“The downside of this is the end of what we currently think of as privacy and that will be a hotly debated aspect of the future world of work,” he said.

Similarly, technology will play an important role in closing gaps between connections physically and connecting disparate teams.

Research by companies including Cisco and Steelcase has shown that many workers regularly collaborate across time zones and geographies.

“Rather than just infrequent use of telepresence or videoconferencing rooms we are seeing more desktop videoconferencing as an integral part of daily work,” said Minnett, who added that “the way we visualise and connect in the workplace will be impacted by technology like VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality).”

Minnett also pointed to research which links lifestyle choices with health and an increased focus on how the workplace impacts the health of employees.

“The realisation that extended sedentary office work is detrimental to our health is leading to much greater focus on health and wellbeing in the workplace with the provision of desks that allow standing work, encouraging people to use stairs between floors, providing healthier food choices and improving the overall environment,” he said.

“We also could see the focus on health and wellbeing transforming into an entitlement focus – once we know through evidence what makes a workplace healthy we can see scenarios where employers are increasingly legal responsible for their employees health.”

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