Agile HR in 15 minutes - YouTube

Hi, I'm Riina from the Agile HR community  and today we're going to do a quick  

introduction into Agile HR. We're going to  use the amazing poster Agile HR in a Nutshell  

that Agile HR community's founders co-created  together with Mia Kolmodin from Dandy People.  

This is a quick overview of Agile HR and we hope  this inspires you to learn more and dive deeper.  

Agile HR is changing the HR profession and we  believe knowing this on a professional level is  

a must-have capability if you're working in HR  today. To begin with it's good to consider why  

Agile is important for HR. Organizations across  the globe are seeking increased business agility  

to innovate and to meet the challenges of this  increasingly complex and sometimes volatile  

business environment that we now operate in.  We in HR have such important roles to play in  

this transformation. The other key reason is  the challenges that we face in HR ourselves:  

the need to modernize, the need to digitalize,  and they need to deliver value to our people  

and business at speed. And this  is where Agile really can help HR.  

To help explain Agile HR we divide this  topic into two distinct sections: The first  

is Agile for HR and this is all about embracing  the Agile mindset the tools and techniques in  

our own work. This is how we run our own projects  and how we build the people strategy. The second  

section is HR for Agile and this is all about  our role in Agile organizational transformation.  

When our companies and businesses are moving  towards Agile operating models we in HR play  

an important role in the behavioral and structural  changes required to build business agility. HR for  

Agile is also about reinventing and redesigning  our HR and people practices for the future of work  

ensuring that what we produce is helping the  organization evolve and not stalling or blocking  

business innovation agility and end customer value  delivery. So, let's look into Agile for HR first.  

The first section is about embracing the mindset,  and the message here is that agile is so much more  

than a project management methodology on what  some people think sticky notes scrum boards and  

teams doing whatever they want. Agile is all about  placing the customer at the heart of what we do  

and building business value while delivering  to the customer. In HR we often talk about  

being business-centric or true business partners  but quite often can't define the value for the  

business when asking about quantifying what the  business value of our HR products or services is.  

This focus on the customer means that Agile HR  makes us much more human-centric because our aim  

is to constantly enrich the user experience and  the employee experience of work. Next, Agile looks  

at how can we deliver the value incrementally step  by step instead of through a big bang implementing  

a whole solution for the whole organization  at once. And this is revolutionary for HR  

because we've been pretty used to implementing or  rolling out large scale initiatives to everybody.  

Instead, Agile helps break down our big complex  deliveries into smaller chunks of work and start  

to deliver slices of value early and often. Our  aim is to release parts of the product and service  

to our users and customers at a faster pace of  course trying to define these parts wisely. So,  

what part of the whole solution would already be  valuable to our organization, teams or people?  

Could we build just that first and then continue  with adding on more features or parts? We then use  

feedback from our customers: does it work? Does it  not? To then guide the next increment of work or  

the next update of that product. What's beautiful  about agile is that we are lowering the risk of  

releasing any HR products to the organization  that wouldn't be used or wouldn't be liked.  

Because in Agile we're constantly validating  the value to our customers as we work. We look  

for feedback and test and prototype solutions long  before we have invested in building them at scale.

Next, we look at ways of working. Once we  embrace the mindset you can start to evolve  

your own approach and style of Agile. There is  no recipe or blueprint for adopting Agile HR  

and there is no one way doing it or being agile.  Many HR teams are using a try-and-learn approach  

for finding the Agile HR operating model  that suits them. You need to find the right  

framework that fits your own culture, your  team structure, and size and your industry.  

Some teams dive into using SCRUM in HR, others  choose a framework called Kanban. Some have a  

hybrid approach combining Agile initiatives with  more traditional approaches to some HR functions.  

Some HR teams have gone through several  iterations of their modern networked Agile  

HR model and are in their third, fourth or  fifth model of operations. The point is the HR  

operating model – the logic of how HR operates  – won't be ready but will be under evolution.  

Whichever framework you do go for there are some  key similarities that are common to all Agile HR  

teams. The first is forming of cross-functional  teams. This means for example that reward,  

recruitment, talent and learning professionals  might work in one team together solving complex  

problems. Ideally the team includes business  people and/or professionals from other functions  

too. Whoever is required to deliver the solution  should form the core team. Some professionals  

needed for smaller bits of the delivery can join  the team for part of the journey but the core  

team consists of people with the capabilities to  develop the solution end to end. Another increment  

is a cyclic cadence of work this is moving HR  away from the more traditional annual cycle that  

we've often based performance and reward on, and  moves into a more frequent cycle of development  

or moves HR practices and processes into a more  ongoing continuous cadence. For example, we can  

see many organizations moving from annual surveys  to continuous listening and improvement practice.  

The final one is ruthless prioritization  of what should be delivered:  

what is the biggest value and where the effort  to deliver it makes sense. Agile teams also  

visualize their work and bring transparency  to the whole project and to the whole team.  

This allows many decisions to be made real-time  

and the team does not have to wait for meetings or  steering group decisions because it's right there.

Next we're going to look at co-creating the  employee experience. Now this is what we believe  

truly changes how HR do their work. This is about  inviting your people in to experiment with you  

and to discover together what works and what  doesn't. It draws on tools and techniques from  

design thinking like personas, experience mapping,  and prototyping. It is all about getting you to  

step into the shoes of your people and start to  redesign the experience of work with them – not  

at them. Now this concept of co-creation is really  powerful and it transforms the concept of change  

management too. So when people are working on  co-creating and influencing the change with you,  

you won't need to think you should manage  people through the change later on. They  

will manage themselves and adopt the changes  you have together co-created. Co-creation also  

highlights the importance of discovery work in  HR. Quite often, HR is quick to draw conclusions  

and feel they know the answer. Then we've  also been keen on following best practices  

that we used last time or trust the highest paid  person's opinion. This is what we call the "hippo"  

without any real evidence. Instead discovery  is all about finding out what the answer is  

and using that evidence we collect to validate  our decisions. Instead of opinions, we've got  

data. Instead of HR's previous experience we build  on what our customers have told us what they need,  

Agile teams also validate their solutions  through experimentation in small scale.  

If the experiment fails, we can actually just  leave the idea and not continue building a  

solution around it. This way we can save a lot  of sunk cost that otherwise would have been spent  

on building the whole solution and only realizing  those flaws of the solution after the whole would  

have been implemented. Agile HR is about being  evidence-based in everything we do. For example,  

you might invite people into actually  mapping out a whole HR service  

and then start to redesign it together because  it improves the people's experience or work.  

Or you can be evidence-based by simply walking  down the corridor and asking five people what  

they think of a piece of communication and  email before you send it out. Working more  

evidence-based can really help the HR profession  to be seen as a more credible business partner.  

We bring facts to the decision making tables and  develop our solutions on actual received feedback.  

The good thing about all of these techniques is  that you can actually start them tomorrow, even  

if you're not fully working agile yet. The big  difference is, how do we see ourselves delivering  

value, developing hr products or services  or facilitating change in our organization.  

Do we use the so-called waterfall approach  meaning we believe we can plan the whole  

solution up front, define the requirements in  the beginning, then set out to build the whole  

solution and implement it in one go – or do  we accept that whatever we are working on will  

be impacted by changes and unexpected events,  and we can't plan the whole solution upfront.  

These are the environments or problems that need  an Agile or value driven. incremental approach.  

Essentially the more traditional way of running  a project – the waterfall way – where you planned  

everything in front is just too rigid. It didn't  allow for a changing scope a changing customer  

needs or a change in budget which as we know  happens all the time in HR. If we know we are  

dealing with a changing environment and still have  to deliver value or solutions to our organizations  

we can choose the Agile approach. Here you are  driven by a vision and an outcome rather than  

predefined detailed specifications. In Agile we  are doing planning but it's done as a recurring  

activity meaning planning is done with a certain  frequency that allows us to consider needed  

changes to our next few deliverables. In Agile you  also deliver parts of the product to the customer  

before the whole is done and you get feedback from  the customer to know if you're on the right track,  

does this work or doesn't it. Then you use that  feedback to guide the next increment of work.

Now let's look at the other section of which we  call HR for Agile. This is all about our role in  

Agile organizational transformation. This is about  how we use the Agile mindset to begin to reinvent  

HR and our people practices for the future of  work. The first section is Organizational design  

for Agile. This is how we help our businesses  build agility and innovate and deliver value at  

speed. A key to this is driving a business that  is customer-centric, building teams that can  

make data-driven decisions. Getting that shared  narrative and alignment of purpose and vision  

that allows true autonomy at that team level. HR  should also be facilitating and defining the role  

of the Agile leader, enabling self-organizing  teams and supporting their performance,  

also supporting their ongoing improvement.  We can also see a need for new roles such as  

Product Pwner or SCRUM Master. In some companies  we have a transition towards a structure without  

any managers at all. The key here is that  the HR needs to develop a new capability  

in agile organizational design that essentially  modernizes it for the future of work. This moves  

us into the next part which is understanding  Agile organizations. There are several  

different existing frameworks about scaling  Agile organizations but agile is first and  

foremost a team-based working model. Imagine  that you've got multiple teams: tens, hundreds  

all collaborating together to deliver a product  through to your customer. Now this has led to  

the development of quite a few different  models out there that you may have heard of.  

For example Spotify, SaFE model or SCRUM at  scale. In HR we don't need to be an expert in  

all of these models but we do need to be aware  of them and be ready to ask the right questions  

and help our leaders make the decisions of  what kind of scaling approach is right for your  

organization. Also for HR we've often been able  to assume there's a safe operating model if we  

move to another organization but now we can have  multiple models sometimes even within the same  

organization. The danger with transformations is  also that people who are more used to a waterfall,  

big bang type of approach see organizational  change as an implementation that can be rolled out  

too. They might take a scaled model and believe  it can be rolled out like a blueprint and that  

they are ready after this kind of implementation.  We think Agile organizational transformation and  

operating models is one of the biggest behavioral  shifts going on in work life in a century.  

This behavioral and mindset change cannot  be implemented: the key is to do emergent  

transformations and again co-create a contextual  design that's right for your culture and your  

industry. Next, we're going to look at Agile HR  services. This is the cool stuff, it's about how  

we embrace an Agile mindset and start to redesign  HR and our people practices to support the modern  

ways of working and essentially co-create the  future of work and employee experience with our  

people. The organizations of today have a much  flatter structure. The employees are recognized  

for diversity. They are used to digital tools and  outstanding services from their private lives.  

To offer the same user experience throughout our  HR processes we need to embrace an Agile mindset  

and start co-creating the answers through  the test-and-learn approach. Of course we  

must be mindful of the constraints in which we  operate in HR. So yes, we do need to consider  

compliance and legislation and of course we  need to keep our people safe but let's not  

lead with the compliance constraints but with the  value we want to create for the business and the  

people and what works when adopted in reality.  Let's make it more about the user experience  

and how we get the people to be really great  at their job rather than amandatory approval  

and checkbox ticking processes. If you found  this video useful please like, share it around,  

use it for your HR team's inspiration and  subscribe to our YouTube channel. Also,  

if you go into the description below, you can find  more information on our Agile trainings for HR,  

other Agile trainings for non-IT professionals,  Agile trainings for leaders, as well as our  

meetups and other events we run both virtually and  across the globe, live. Thank you for your time!