- As you know, we live in a hyper competitive,
fast moving world,
and our organizations are always asking us to do more,
better, faster, just everything more.
Feeling stressed out about that already?
I know I am.
So how do we think about this as HR?
How do we get more out of our organization?
How do we speed things up?
And in particular, how do we get culture to change faster?
And I think digital, and in particular,
one way of thinking about agile
as an important way to approach this problem.
Now agile is kind of a buzzword right now,
but I want to break it down to two components.
The first component is that work is broken down
into much smaller pieces
that you can really see the impact on.
We've all been asked to go onto some sort of project
and somebody will come up and say,
hey, I need you to work on a project
for the next six to nine months.
And your eyes are just rolling to the back of your head
going, no, please, no more weekly check-ins
and at the end nothing really gets down.
In agile what happens is we have a really clear objective,
but we break them down to something called sprints.
Like one or two weeks.
And we finish that part and then we move onto the next part
and then we move onto the next part.
And it's very clear how all of these build up
to the final decision.
Now this may feel like it's just project management,
but there's one other key part
of this that's very important.
Inside of an agile project
everybody is clear on what everyone else is doing
during those two week,
so there's radical transparency.
And what transparency does
is that it creates accountability.
And everybody says, are you doing the work?
So when come back in two weeks all the work is done,
it's not a mystery about what's happening,
but you're doing it all the way along those two weeks.
Why do I bring this up?
The reason I bring this up is that HR needs to understand
this new way of working,
because instead of thinking about work
as this big monolithic space,
how do we think about it in an agile way?
Small, identifiable ways of doing work,
but also building in transparency.
These are not technologies,
but technologies and digital channels
can help us create that transparency.
Because in the past you didn't know who was working on what
and what they were getting done.
Now in this digital space we can set the expectations
and know exactly what everyone is working on
and how it's contributing to us achieving this big,
strategic objective that we have.
So this is not just about speeding up work
or working in an agile work process way,
this is about changing the expectations
of how an entire organization is going to come together
and be able to share information and more importantly,
to be able to make decisions together.
HR needs to be part of this process,
because this isn't just about a technology or work process,
this is about mindset and culture change.
And HR needs to be right in the middle of that,
making sure that digital tools are being used
to the best ability to support this new way of working.