A key factor in a company’s success, agility is now essential to control risks, improve performance and strengthen the competitiveness of your organization. Faced with the change in working methods and the evolution of HR challenges, it is particularly important to develop the agility of your human resources. According to a study by the American consulting firm Gartner, 3 out of 4 HR managers consider agile management to be a priority, but 78% of them do not have a clear strategy and vision for agile HR management.
Here are our 7 tips for implementing an agile HR transformation in your company.
-
Take stock of the company’s HR
First of all, it is necessary to take stock of the situation and to question the relevance and feasibility of this agile transformation. What are the biggest challenges facing corporate HR today? What are the areas for improvement? What human and financial resources are available? Are employees ready and sufficiently acculturated to drive this transformation? Does the company have the internal resources and sufficient hindsight to drive this transformation? Or will it be necessary to call on an external consultant? … These are all questions that must be asked before the agile HR transformation plan.
-
Defining the meaning of agile HR transformation
It is also important to understand what the notion of agility means, in concrete terms and to define the reason and meaning of this transformation. Agility refers to the ability of a company, team, or individual to adapting, quickly and continuously, to a changing world and current and future challenges and requirements. Agility is accompanied by a desire for innovation, creativity, proactivity, flexibility and responsiveness.
Developing agility within the HR function is now a prerequisite for staying in line with the new needs and expectations of employees and candidates.
In the long term, HR agility can help retain employees, attract talent, enhance the employer brand, accelerate recruitment processes and develop individual and collective performance, among other things.
It is therefore important to make your HR team aware of the challenges related to this agile transformation, to enable them to grasp the interest and benefits in the long term.
-
Implement an action plan for agile HR transformation
It will then be necessary to draw up an appropriate action plan to the needs and challenges defined upstream. This plan should include SMART objectives and time-bound actions. It is essential to question the expectations of this agile transformation and its short-, medium- and long-term objective: to strengthen employee engagement, reduce turnover, attract talent, promote the employer brand, promote skills development, improve HR performance overall, strengthen the ability to managing an HR crisis…
-
Define the agile tools and methods to be implemented
Here are some examples of agile tools and methods that are particularly suitable for an HR transformation:
- Visual management tools to promote interaction, transparency and the sharing of ideas: the Kanban method, mind mapping…
- Agile project management tools : Scrum, Lean method, Six Sigma…
- Tools to promote collective intelligence and co-creation: design thinking; participative management ; weekly 15-minute stand-up meetings to take stock of challenges, obstacles and improvements…
The choice of tools to adopt depends on the company’s culture, its sector of activity and its size, among others, but also on its strategic objectives.
Above all, it is necessary to promote the tools and means that will allow for close and immediate communication within the HR department and between the different business units of the company. Indeed, transparency and responsiveness are the watchwords during an agile transformation.
-
Keeping up with the evolution of agile HR transformation
It is also essential to set up monitoring tools to gradually analyze the progress of the transformation. Here are some key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to evaluate the success of agile HR transformation: absenteeism rate, average time to hire, turnover rate, number of hires over a given period, etc.
It will then be necessary to define, according to the results obtained, appropriate corrective actions. It should also be remembered that an agile transformation is intended to implement actions in a flexible and scalable way over short, iterative and learning cycles.
-
Training and onboarding your HR teams
To ensure the success of agile transformation, it is essential to acculturate your teams to HR agility. To do this, training, workshops and individual and collective coaching around the agile methodology can be set up, for employees and HR managers.
In order to get employees on board with this transformation, it will also be necessary to ensure that agility is at the heart of the company’s culture. It will also be necessary to encourage innovation, initiative, collective intelligence, exchange, mutual aid, empowerment and autonomy of its HR teams on a daily basis.
-
Call on an interim HR director
Implementing an agile HR transformation requires questioning methods, operating methods and managerial postures that have been firmly anchored for many years. It can therefore be particularly complex to carry out this transformation internally, without having the necessary hindsight.
To be supported in the agile transformation of HR, it is possible to mobilize the expertise of an interim HR director.
At WAYDEN, we are able to appoint an HR interim manager, an expert in agile management and with more than 15-20 years of experience. Thanks to his know-how, his interpersonal skills and his outside perspective, this expert will be able to support your company’s HR function in a tangible, efficient and sustainable agile transformation.
