“When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is in sight,” Jack Welch, the former CEO and chairman of General Electric once said. Undoubtedly, we are now live in the age of “VUCA” — Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity — where new products and services are being developed at a lightning pace, natural disasters are multiplying, markets fluctuating, and customers constantly changing expectations, to name just a few examples.
The VUCA era poses both an opportunity and a threat for businesses. Many feel a pressing need for agility and know that the “business-as-usual” approach is no longer effective. In this sense, agility refers to an organisation’s capability to anticipate and respond to any uncertainty in the market to its advantage. In other words, if you can manage risk and respond to it more effectively than your competitor, then you could certainly reap the benefits. On the other hand, if you fail to outperform the others, the end definitely is in sight.
When the business landscape changes, the strategy that worked in the past will not work today and only organisations that can adapt to changing conditions will survive. This is the trend that will persist in the year ahead, and change certainly will be required — but who will make the change happen in organisations? Aside from the obvious fact that leaders will need to lead the change, it is the Human Resources function that will need to reshape itself so that it becomes the critical driver of agility. Given their unique skills and insights, HR practitioners can develop a meaningful strategy that meets a company’s ever-evolving needs.
Although agility isn’t a high-profile feature of any organisation, it is rapidly becoming clear that it is going to be a required feature for future success. It is essentially the ability to adapt to surprises, survive them, and flourish in the ever-changing present at all levels of a company.
At the higher levels, detailed strategic planning for plausible future risks and obstacles will help a company build plans that will survive and help it bounce back from adversity. At the individual levels, agility is the ability to use one’s experience and skills to avoid or survive setbacks, and to focus on a better future even if the present looks difficult.
The question is, how exactly can HR drive the agile organisation?
For a start, it is vital for a business to shift from predefined roles to allow employees to help where their skills can be used best, and to create an environment where collaboration is encouraged. For example, here at APMGroup, all of our employees basically have no job titles. Their company name cards simply say “Whatever it takes”, which enables everyone to do what they can, to collaborate, and to make their own decisions. This is because the highly scripted or top-down process that has long been used to forecast and foresee needs and design systems to respond accordingly to avoid surprises is too rigid. It will only lead to the erection of silos into which people will disappear, cut off from each other and not collaborating and innovating.
Rather, an agile workplace can be achieved by ensuring that communication between managers and employees is always occurring and that leaders within an organisation are being developed to empower their team members to become nimble and innovate faster. Moreover, the performance management strategy should also move toward a focus on improvement with flexible performance objectives that can easily change and enable an environment where adaptability is welcome.
Furthermore, to help people to grow and operate in a volatile environment, continuous learning is indispensable. HR should accentuate efforts to help employees to constantly acquire or build new skills more quickly. Given the highly developed technology platforms available nowadays, HR should be able to take advantage of these advances that make it easier for people to learn quickly and thus become more agile.
On a similar note, HR might have to restructure feedback systems so that employees can obtain ongoing inputs on their current tasks. As a result, promotions and rewards may need to hinge on individual results or be based on skills rather than on job titles or tenure and seniority.
Most importantly, however, for organisations to become truly change-capable, HR must become agile first. Practitioners must evolve and adapt to be able to create significant value for their businesses, be it efficiency, consistency or risk reduction derived from being nimble.
The bottom line is, do you think your organisation’s current HR models will work? Can they really lead your organisation to become agile enough to deal with any uncertainties there might be? These are good questions to ask and answer.
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Arinya Talerngsri is Group Managing Director at APMGroup, Thailand’s leading Organisational and People Development Consultancy. For more information, write an e-mail to arinya_t@apm.co.th or visit www.apm.co.th