To become a top-performing business, it's critical to focus on your people, and to understand what you need to create, in order to encourage collaborative working between them. Not to sound too cliché, but you essentially need to treat your workers as you would treat your clients in order to achieve employee empowerment.

Many organisations are attempting to deliver an agile way of working to this end, but end up focusing on new processes and methods instead. It’s a counter-productive strategy that, by its sheer essence, takes focus away from the personal element.

With organisations having to deal with a wide and diverse staff demographic – made up of both full-time and ‘gig’ workers – this challenge has exacerbated where ‘talent’ identification and development has become wrapped up in digital tools or all-encompassing HR tactics. By its nature, this detracts focus away from providing a bespoke and tailored environment for each individual. Inevitably, this then results in poorer work fulfilment and enjoyment among the workforce.

The solution needs to stem from the top, down – a leaning towards enabling and empowering each member of staff in a more flexible and dynamic way than is currently being enacted.

In creating an apt organisational structure and dynamic, staff are likely to buy into the business’s core strategy more impactfully; ultimately improving the likelihood of optimum business outcomes.

Rigid processes are now the enemy

It’s hardly new wave thinking to suggest that staff performance is improved when individuals feel valued by their employers. Achieving such an agile strategy amid crowded and process-driven organisations, however, is trickier than it sounds. Keeping everyone happy, challengingly, requires the opposite to an ‘everyone’ approach.

This challenge begins in the hiring phase as ensuring the availability of the right capability and capacity, at the right time, is different for agile initiatives. The type of people needed is different in each case, and the fast-paced, highly-interactive approaches of agile delivery require people with different interpersonal skills.
Amid the iterative, incremental nature of agile, uncertainty is a certainty. And thus, it’s not surprising that businesses are now looking to try out innovative solutions in order to shake off traditional, constraining staffing models; especially in a ‘millennial’ era famous for the pursuit of flexibility and immediate fulfilment.
Rigid HR processes and policies are now the enemy, as they slow down these vital hiring and embedding stages, and then strangle employee development once in.

Creating a virtuous cycle

The answer lies in practicing what you hope to instil in each new person that walks through the door. From these – hopefully – agile workers, you want them to be digitally-savvy, cross-functional, intuitive and effective as part of a wider team.

This holistic philosophy is exactly what organisations need to be implementing and encouraging from a structural and process perspective too. From the use of technology, to the office environment, to the ways of working (remote, flexible, BYOD); each silo needs to be broken down to create a more cross-functional and collaborative way of working. If employees are working in their own space, creating their own ideas, and making their own impacts; then they’re more likely to be rewarded, valued and treated as critical – individual - cogs of the wider machine. And that adulation is likely to promote more of the same work ethic.

So, the virtuous cycle continues…

It should no longer be a utopian vision seemingly reserved for idyllic Scandi startups. The competition for skilled staff is such that employees can be picky, and have every right to lose patience with rigidity, quickly.
Therefore, to ensure long-term retention of valued skills; talent agility, (not process improvement) should now be the key leadership KPI – a front-of-house advert for overall enterprise agility.