Rally Your Workforce to Your Agile Transformation

Our recent article on preparing for an agile future discussed how organizational agility and leadership are necessary for navigating today's unpredictable geopolitical, economic, and social environment.

Businesses must now be lean and agile, requiring an agile workforce—flexible and adaptable employees who can quickly respond to changing business needs and market demands. Its agility must rapidly adjust resources, skills, and capacities to address new challenges and opportunities. Essentially, an agile workforce is like a team of chameleons.

What is an Agile Workforce?

It isn't a gaggle of gymnasts—it's a workforce strategy that uses full-time employees, temporary employees, and contingent workers to improve your business' flexibility, scalability, and agility—and more:

• Agility requires a collaborative approach to managing work, emphasizing communication and feedback among team members.
• An agile workplace is designed around complete flexibility, where workers can move freely to work with others.
• It promotes employee engagement and responsiveness to change.

Characteristics of an Agile Workforce

Lifelong Learners: Agile employees continuously learn and gain new skills. They see learning as a lifelong process that enables them to conquer whatever technological and business changes emerge.

Creative Problem-Solvers: An agile workforce blooms when facing fresh problems. They think creatively and holistically to find innovative solutions. They may not all be solution creators, but they can quickly grasp and think through new concepts.

Effective Collaborators: Agile teams collaborate seamlessly with cross-functional groups. They break down silos and work together to achieve common goals.

Resilient Disruptors: Agile team members handle disruptions and changes with resilience. They adapt to new situations and remain productive, even in uncertainty.

It's about succeeding in an unknown future. By cultivating an agile mindset and fostering a learning culture, you can build a workforce that drives business value and stays ahead of the pack in today's dynamic environment.

Agile Workforce Planning

In the late 20^th century, many organizations trained in Total Quality Management (TQM), which Walter A. Shewhart created in 1931. It's based on Francis Bacon's scientific method, published in his Novum Organum in 1620. Others of us learned the Deming System of Profound Knowledge,^â which goes beyond measures and processes to espouse a people-focused organization, or Six Sigma, emphasizing operational excellence.

Those ideas influenced the origin of Agile by emphasizing quality, continuous improvement, and understanding of the system. While Agile isn't a direct application of these principles, their underlying principles resonate with Agile's values and practices.

For example, most companies have traditionally done workforce planning infrequently on a regular annual schedule or when they made a large-scale change. Agile workforce planning is a continuous process that enables organizations to prepare for disruption by aligning the workforce with changing business objectives.

To build an agile workforce, consider the following strategies:

1. Market, products, and competition analysis.

Engage stakeholders to analyze your market, products, and competition to understand your strategy and align your workforce.

2. Define your vision and strategy

Strategic workforce planning is continually identifying gaps and developing a plan to ensure you have the proper knowledge, skills, and abilities to execute your strategy (and the unexpected). Eric Van Vulpen, co-founder and thought leader at AIHR, recommends a framework of four steps that helps you align your workforce with your strategy.

• The right size.
• The right shape.
• The right size, optimizing labor cost.
• Agility—lean, flexible, and adaptable to changing market demands.

3. Identify and Anticipate Skills Gaps

Assess your current workforce quantity and quality. Analyze your employees' skills, competencies, and capacities.

Identify gaps between the existing workforce and the skills needed to achieve your strategic goals.

4. Use Analytics to Plot Potential Futures

Analyze your potential future paths with scenario analysis. Analyze potential skill gaps. (Expect your analyses to change frequently.)

5. Develop an Action Plan

Determine how you'll bridge your skill gaps and prioritize actions that align with your priorities. Be willing to use contingent workers to speed up filling your gaps.

6. Launch, Monitor, Evaluate, and Revise

Monitor the effectiveness of your plan and whether you are achieving your goals. Continuously adjust your plan as needed.

Rallying Your Workforce to Become Agile

To make organizations successful in our rapidly changing business environment, it's urgent to mobilize people to become agile. Here are a few strategies that you can use to encourage agility:

1. Develop Skill Gaining Ability

What is it? Learning agility is a mindset and collection of behaviors that enable individuals to develop, grow, and use new strategies continually. Why is it important? By growing employee learning agility, your business will shift from reactive to proactive and be better able to develop innovation capability.

2. Promote Skill-building

Upskilling: organizations should prioritize upskilling on a grand scale, especially in the face of digital transformation and hybrid workplaces. Our experience shows that people learning and building skills are much more engaged. More than one billion jobs worldwide may be transformed in the next decade.

Learning Culture: Create a strong learning culture that encourages lifelong learning. People who continually update and improve their skills are higher performers and more satisfied.

AI-driven Adaptive Learning: Unleash the power of adaptive learning to deliver personalized learning to everyone in the organization.

3. Attracting Agile Individuals

Mindset: Look for candidates who embrace change rather than view it as a disruption. These individuals are more likely to contribute to an agile workforce.

Create a Team Environment: Create an environment that encourages agility. When people feel empowered to generate new ideas and strategies for managing change, the organization becomes better at navigating disruptions. Train team leaders at every level to engage and coach each team member.

4. Instill Leadership and Organizational Values

Promote organizational values: Think of agility as a mindset in which organizational values thrive. These values guide everyday practices and behaviors, leading to the desired company culture. Effective leadership plays a crucial role in enabling this transformation.

Start with leaders: Leaders immersed in Agile will better serve as role models. Agility goes beyond process; it's about creating an environment that fosters capacity for change while continuously gaining knowledge. By following these guidelines, you can motivate your labor force to become more resilient in challenging situations.

Into Your Agile Future

Agility is more than a buzzword. It's now an essential business strategy. Your workforce must go beyond mere job descriptions to help your organization successfully navigate the unpredictable waters of changing geographies, economies, and societies.

Your workers should act as a constantly developing force capable of adapting, creating, and prospering through change.

Our recent article on preparing for an agile future discussed how organizational agility and leadership are necessary for navigating today's unpredictable geopolitical, economic, and social environment.

Businesses must now be lean and agile, requiring an agile workforce—flexible and adaptable employees who can quickly respond to changing business needs and market demands. Its agility must rapidly adjust resources, skills, and capacities to address new challenges and opportunities. Essentially, an agile workforce is like a team of chameleons.

What is an Agile Workforce?

It isn't a gaggle of gymnasts—it's a workforce strategy that uses full-time employees, temporary employees, and contingent workers to improve your business' flexibility, scalability, and agility—and more:

• Agility requires a collaborative approach to managing work, emphasizing communication and feedback among team members.
• An agile workplace is designed around complete flexibility, where workers can move freely to work with others.
• It promotes employee engagement and responsiveness to change.

Characteristics of an Agile Workforce

Lifelong Learners: Agile employees continuously learn and gain new skills. They see learning as a lifelong process that enables them to conquer whatever technological and business changes emerge.

Creative Problem-Solvers: An agile workforce blooms when facing fresh problems. They think creatively and holistically to find innovative solutions. They may not all be solution creators, but they can quickly grasp and think through new concepts.

Effective Collaborators: Agile teams collaborate seamlessly with cross-functional groups. They break down silos and work together to achieve common goals.

Resilient Disruptors: Agile team members handle disruptions and changes with resilience. They adapt to new situations and remain productive, even in uncertainty.

It's about succeeding in an unknown future. By cultivating an agile mindset and fostering a learning culture, you can build a workforce that drives business value and stays ahead of the pack in today's dynamic environment.

Agile Workforce Planning

In the late 20^th century, many organizations trained in Total Quality Management (TQM), which Walter A. Shewhart created in 1931. It's based on Francis Bacon's scientific method, published in his Novum Organum in 1620. Others of us learned the Deming System of Profound Knowledge,^â which goes beyond measures and processes to espouse a people-focused organization, or Six Sigma, emphasizing operational excellence.

Those ideas influenced the origin of Agile by emphasizing quality, continuous improvement, and understanding of the system. While Agile isn't a direct application of these principles, their underlying principles resonate with Agile's values and practices.

For example, most companies have traditionally done workforce planning infrequently on a regular annual schedule or when they made a large-scale change. Agile workforce planning is a continuous process that enables organizations to prepare for disruption by aligning the workforce with changing business objectives.

To build an agile workforce, consider the following strategies:

1. Market, products, and competition analysis.

Engage stakeholders to analyze your market, products, and competition to understand your strategy and align your workforce.

2. Define your vision and strategy

Strategic workforce planning is continually identifying gaps and developing a plan to ensure you have the proper knowledge, skills, and abilities to execute your strategy (and the unexpected). Eric Van Vulpen, co-founder and thought leader at AIHR, recommends a framework of four steps that helps you align your workforce with your strategy.

• The right size.
• The right shape.
• The right size, optimizing labor cost.
• Agility—lean, flexible, and adaptable to changing market demands.

3. Identify and Anticipate Skills Gaps

Assess your current workforce quantity and quality. Analyze your employees' skills, competencies, and capacities.

Identify gaps between the existing workforce and the skills needed to achieve your strategic goals.

4. Use Analytics to Plot Potential Futures

Analyze your potential future paths with scenario analysis. Analyze potential skill gaps. (Expect your analyses to change frequently.)

5. Develop an Action Plan

Determine how you'll bridge your skill gaps and prioritize actions that align with your priorities. Be willing to use contingent workers to speed up filling your gaps.

6. Launch, Monitor, Evaluate, and Revise

Monitor the effectiveness of your plan and whether you are achieving your goals. Continuously adjust your plan as needed.

Rallying Your Workforce to Become Agile

To make organizations successful in our rapidly changing business environment, it's urgent to mobilize people to become agile. Here are a few strategies that you can use to encourage agility:

1. Develop Skill Gaining Ability

What is it? Learning agility is a mindset and collection of behaviors that enable individuals to develop, grow, and use new strategies continually.

Why is it important? By growing employee learning agility, your business will shift from reactive to proactive and be better able to develop innovation capability.

2. Promote Skill-building

Upskilling: Organizations should prioritize upskilling on a grand scale, especially in the face of digital transformation and hybrid workplaces. Our experience shows that people learning and building skills are much more engaged. More than one billion jobs worldwide may be transformed in the next decade.

Learning Culture: Create a strong learning culture that encourages lifelong learning. People who continually update and improve their skills are higher performers and more satisfied.

AI-driven Adaptive Learning: Unleash the power of adaptive learning to deliver personalized learning to everyone in the organization.

3.   Attracting Agile Individuals

Mindset: Look for candidates who embrace change rather than view it as a disruption. These individuals are more likely to contribute to an agile workforce.

Create a Team Environment: Create an environment that encourages agility. When people feel empowered to generate new ideas and strategies for managing change, the organization becomes better at navigating disruptions. Train team leaders at every level to engage and coach each team member.

4.   Instill Leadership and Organizational Values

Promote organizational values: Think of agility as a mindset in which organizational values thrive. These values guide everyday practices and behaviors, leading to the desired company culture. Effective leadership plays a crucial role in enabling this transformation.

Start with leaders: Leaders immersed in Agile will better serve as role models. Agility goes beyond process; it's about creating an environment that fosters capacity for change while continuously gaining knowledge. By following these guidelines, you can motivate your labor force to become more resilient in challenging situations.

Into Your Agile Future

Agility is more than a buzzword. It's now an essential business strategy. Your workforce must go beyond mere job descriptions to help your organization successfully navigate the unpredictable waters of changing geographies, economies, and societies.

Your workers should act as a constantly developing force capable of adapting, creating, and prospering through change.

Unleash your Agile Workforce Potential with Pixentia

In today’s fast-paced business environment, agility isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a strategic imperative. As you navigate the unpredictable currents of geopolitical shifts, economic fluctuations, and societal changes, your workforce must be more than just a collection of roles and responsibilities. It must be a dynamic force that adapts, innovates, and thrives.

Book a meeting with us to explore how you can start where you are to conquer your agile future.