Agile in Human Resource

While agile development is still a trending topic in the IT sector, the use of the methodology itself has a significant increase of popularity in other departments like finance or HR within the organisations.
Agile can be translated into a way of thinking about how businesses should respond and adapt to the complex and constantly changing world and its challenges. The 4 main values to agile development are adaptability, simplicity, unity and transparency.

The basic principles are:

There is a growing number of organisations who started to apply an agile mindset in the HR department.

Applying this methodology and creating an agile environment means that HR will have to help manage changes within the businesses and improve agility across the organisation. Agility means being able to respond to change. Change in competitive environments, customer needs, workplace performance and learning. The agile approach enables a business and its workforce to continuously learn and improve, develop their skills, think critically and be innovative. It requires flexible and adaptable talent, appropriate training and performance management.

Here is a list of examples of agile HR strategies by Bersin:

• Training leaders at all levels of the company to act as hands-on coaches, not "managers"
• Designing the organization into small, high-performance teams that set their own targets
• Creating customer interactions within all groups and functions in the company
• Delivering a strong, focused mission and values to keep everyone aligned
• Creating systems with lots of transparent information, i.e., what are our goals, who is working on what project, who are our experts
• Implementing "systems of engagement" not just "systems of record," i.e., collaboration, information-sharing, project management
• Building a focus on continuous learning and learning culture at all levels
• Implementing a strong external employment brand that attracts "the right type" of people
• Hiring and promoting experts, not general managers
• Encouraging and teaching people to give each other direct feedback
• Creating programs for peer-to-peer rewards and recognition
• Developing programs to foster diversity in teams

The world around us constantly changes and it is becoming more "instant" every day. Being able to respond to the changes can put organisations into a leading position by moving faster and outperforming the competition. To become an agile organisation all departments need to be involved to help complete a successful transformation. Agile HR can be very well the driver of the change steering every department into success.