I think HR teams should be leading the charge. If we want to enable agility throughout an organisation, we need empowered and highly efficient teams, who have knowledge and competencies to take over different projects. 

As the people function in the business, HR teams are best placed to lead and help create more agile structures. It’s time for HR teams to change the way they work, because if we continue to work the way we have always worked, we can’t drive change in the rest of the organisation.

If you look at some of the key areas of a business - recruitment, change management, people development, learning, and mentorship - HR plays a crucial role. We’ve got the opportunity to make a big difference to the way businesses operate in the future.

For HR teams looking to adopt agile working, where do they start?

Agile working requires a change of mindset. It starts with reviewing and removing structures and practices that don’t work within your organisation...

To enable an organization where we operate in a more agile way, it is necessary to establish psychological safety in working environment.

What I mean by PS - is creating a safe environment where everybody dares to be them self, express their opinion and try new things, learn.

In a psychologically safe workplace, people can be their true selves, accepting themselves and respecting others. In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.”

One of 4 cornerstone of Modern Agile by Joshua Karievsky is Make safety a prerequisite and that concerns not only physical safety, but mainly psychological safety. Making safety a prerequisite means creating a culture of psychological safety in order to unlock high-performance behavior. The idea is to cultivate an environment where people are...

The ultimate goal of an AGILE transformation is being able to rapidly respond to change while establishing a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

So, The biggest organizational changes are made when a company’s culture changes.

The culture of a company is like a shadow of an organization, it exists, but you can’t touch it.

Culture is in our heads and is reflected through all the interactions and habits and behaviors that happen every day.

If you want to change a culture, you need to motivate people to change their habits and behaviors.

 If we change our environment in organizations (the way we work, with what processes, tools), we can change our behavior. And in organizations, when behavior changes, mindset - organizational culture also changes and we are actually entering the transformation of the company.

 This is why HR really has a big role in organizational transformations, as it has a role in defining modern and AGILE mindset, processes,...

Performance Development is an important aspect of the employee experience that is being increasingly re-defined now. And when redesigning it – we can take in take into consideration agile principles of working, to create performance development concept in more agile way that can suit employee organizational needs these days.

Agile approach in redefining performance development could look as:

• We are moving to continuous coaching and feedback through regular conversations not only through yearly appraisals and so on.

 We can split these conversations up into several smaller sessions through the year instead of one big one at the end.

• Also we are moving to quarterly or monthly goals settings with regular check ins
• AND continuous reviews & recognitions by peers, managers, team leaders not just our managers
• We still want to increase performance through goal setting and here we can work with OKRS on personal, team and organisational level

These are just some of...

The company is like a garden. There is an overall purpose with the garden. It could be to be to deliver fruits and vegetables for example. Regardless of the purpose, the garden needs to be taken care of to reach it’s purpose:

We need to take care of the plants. Some like to grow in the shadow, some need more sunshine and we need to remove the weeds.

Some like to grow with other plants of diverse kinds, to develop faster and become beautiful together. Some need a lot of space. Some need lot’s of water. Some grow slower than others etc. 

The agile / modern leader is the gardener who takes care of the plants, trying to fulfill the purpose of the garden.

The gardener can create fundamentals for the plants to grow by giving the right conditions for every plant, without forgetting about the whole garden.

We cannot force the little seed to grow, we can only give the right conditions and the right environment. Then we can just hope that it will grow.

And if it...

People will forget what you said, people will also forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel” Maya Angelou

 Why trust is important for empowerment?

Empowerment can be defined in a different of ways. But to be honest, it’s about trust. It’s when you give employees a certain degree of autonomy and responsibility for decision-making in their work. It is empowering employees to make their own decisions and grow their skills.

A business agile approach gives employees the trust, ability and opportunity they need to do their job and do it well. Empowered employees have the authority to make important decisions when and where it’s necessary, make their own path to success and create a better workplace culture.

It is all about trusting employees who are given the resources and autonomy to do their jobs more efficiently. Increasing the level of transfer of power to employees also increases the need for a higher level...

We live in a fast, changing and complex world. Unpredictable events affect us – our lives, our workplaces.

Health issues, climate changes, digitalisation, economic crashes, political tensions.

All these changes have BIG impact in organisations:

• on our business
• on our strategies
• how we work and
• how we lead employees.

Do you remember Darwin - the survival of the fittest? Meaning that the organisms that survive are those who can adapt and change. And the same goes for our organisations.

 If you seek new knowledge and competencies to deal with this complex world. And if you adopt the agile ways of working - you will be the fittest – you will be more successful and efficient now and in the future.

But what is agile? What does it mean?

Agile represents a change in mindset. So instead of making a perfect plan that we already know before it starts, will not happen, you could say that in agile, you accept reality as it...