We were delighted to welcome Natal Dank to our recent Reset Show, where she demystified the world of ‘Agile for HR’. It was fascinating to hear how a seemingly simple question from a colleague, kick-started her journey into agile. And that question was “how do we know it’s going to work?” in response to a new performance management system Natal had designed. And the answer ‘because it’s best practice’ wasn’t good enough for her colleague – they wanted to see it tested with the people it was designed for. And so Natal’s journey with agile began (seriously check out the show, it’s a great story and one that resonated with our live audience).
Natal explained how she started to see her work as product development, and began to consider the need to delight her internal customer, in this case, employees.
So just how do we get started with agile? Natal gave us some really practical advice. She explained that agile is a way of solving complex problems, and it all starts with putting your customer at the heart of your approach. You then need to look at how you deliver value to your customer incrementally (this is the key phrase here). And then use feedback every step of the way to answer the question ‘does it work?’. The insights you gather will then inform and drive the next piece of work. Taking this incremental approach is a way of releasing value early and often.
Natal warned against getting too caught up in one methodology or approach, she stressed that it’s all about finding out what works for you. First and foremost, agile is a mindset. And in HR, our mindset should always be about our people and how we deliver value to them.
Agile clearly overlaps with design-thinking, and in our new book Employee Experience by Design, Belinda Gannaway explains how they are complimentary approaches:
AGILE AND EX DESIGN – COMPLEMENTARY APPROACHES
If it hasn’t already, agile is coming to an HR team near you soon. That might mean a number of things, because agility, a concept born in software development, is used to describe a wide range of concepts, systems and processes. In her 2017 book, Agile People: A Radical Approach for HR & Managers, Pia-Maria Thoren describes agile as a way of moving forward and creating value. For HR, this means improving processes and driving efficiency. It can also mean embracing a bottom-up approach and empowering team members to make decisions faster, reducing bureaucratic structures, simplifying operations and culling unnecessary processes, systems, reports and checklists.
But HR transformation is only part of the picture. An agile transformation is about organisational culture as much as it is about any one function. Thoren describes agile as a “mentality that allows people and groups to meet challenges, learn quickly, and respond to change.” so agile clearly has consequences for employee experience.
An agile organisation where individuals are empowered, and supported to do the right thing, and at pace, has a big impact on people’s experience of work. There are also implications for how an organisation approaches EX design. There are many overlapping principles between EX design and agile – not least the focus on the end user, on experimentation, rapid prototyping, and making incremental improvements. Both also rely on collaborative, cross-functional teams.
Developing EX design capability is often easier where agile is already established. On the other hand, agile transformations which are incomplete, or implemented ineffectively, may have a detrimental impact on employee experience and the organisation’s ability to design EX. The consequences of a failed agile transformation can be disastrous, with systemic complexity leading to confusion, depressed engagement, declining performance and high turnover of people.
In the book, there are some examples of EX and agile in practice, outlining how the two approaches worked together from Roche and River Island, kindly contributed by Nebel Crowhurst, who led agile transformation in both organisations.
And finally Natal shared a top tip to try using the Kanban board for personal use – give it a go and let us know how you get on.
You can now order a copy of Emma and Belinda’s book ‘EX by Design’ and as a follower of People Lab, we can offer you a 20% discount on the RRP, when ordering directly from Kogan Page. Simply use the code AHR20 at the checkout.
