With organizational culture, employee engagement and employee retention emerging as key business priorities , there is increased pressure on HR to foster a more positive digital culture. To be agile, HR also needs to leverage new technologies and platforms to help create a more productive and adaptive workplace that will progress the organization as a whole.
Bringing agility into the HR function should be a leadership prerogative, one that empowers and galvanizes HR to become an important cog in the organizational mechanism. The HR function, thus, needs to be mindful of all the changes happening across the organization, including the adoption of new technologies, the reshuffling of processes or the realignment of business targets, and adapt accordingly to facilitate productivity and efficiency, while driving business growth.
Stay up to date on the latest articles, webinars and resources for learning and development. HR can benefit from adapting agile practices to its needs rather than using the ones technical teams use, like Scrum. Identifying and Recruiting Top Talent Recruiting remains an HR priority, yet discovering and developing talent within the existing workforce is critical going ahead.
Creating a Learning Culture A learning culture is an important part of an agile organization. Leveraging Data and Analytics Analytics is, possibly, the best way for an HR function to become agile, as it enables insightful decision-making processes.
With goals established, commitment made, and a transformation roadmap in hand, we were ready. Over HR and HRIT staff members in roles from technology to recruiting to performance management to benefits administration were now part of this transformative journey.
Not only would the 6 supporting IT teams continue their transformation, the entire HR organization would set off on this expedition together. At a high level, I spent about 6 weeks with this HR Organization, and a few interested parties from outside of HR, to understand:. In HR, we identified one of the key Business Drivers was to improve predictability. In the current state of the organization, the teams were taking requests for work through many avenues operational mandates, business unit specific needs, regulatory requirements, executive direction, etc.
In terms of Boundaries in HR, there were few identified in the beginning as the team was genuinely interested in doing whatever it would take to improve how they managed work and the flow from idea to valuable deliverables. From a Culture perspective, it was important for me to align with internal initiatives to improve employee engagement and move toward decentralized, empowered decision-making.
The goal here was to encourage these HR professionals to feel confident in their choices rather than relying on managers to tell them what to do or give them permission to do what made sense. The Human Resources organization at Principal is supported by a robust Business Architecture discipline with a well-defined capability map that also includes understanding around how each capability is performing, where there are gaps, and a scoring algorithm to help identify which capability gaps are most in need of attention for various reasons such as size of gap, risk associated with the gap, value to consumers, etc.
This advanced view of HR from a Capability perspective made it easy to identify a governing structure to align with coordinating and managing the work across all the HR departments and supporting IT platforms. In Figure 1 in the attachment, you can see that we placed an emphasis on bringing together departments that aligned around:.
For several reasons, we chose to start with a pilot involving only a handful of teams that would test the new structure and governance approach. Second, the HR organization consists of nearly people in a dozen or more departments; I am one consultant — as ego-confident as I may be, even I realize managing communication, change and coaching for that many people at one time is not realistic. For example, the Workforce Planning Team in HR was already familiar with Scrum and had been closely partnered with a dedicated team of developers and testers for over a year.
The need for training and coaching was minimal with this group thanks to their established relationship to the AppDev Team and understanding of Agile practices. Examples of this work included: preparing for an upcoming presentation to the Board of Directors, consulting with leaders in the Sales organization to conduct labor market analysis, and creating predictive analytics to help understand attrition rates for future years as part of an overall staffing initiative.
The Workforce Planning team quickly adopted basic Kanban behaviors and began managing their work in Jira to better coordinate work among team members in Iowa and India. Because the team had prior experience working with an Agile AppDev Team, the adoption process and use of visual management tools was far simpler than it would be for some other HR Business Teams.
The team is aware of their need to focus on finishing and prioritizing for value, but. We needed to demonstrate there is more value to Focus on Finishing, not Starting!
Many HR Teams are a work group of Specialists, not well suited for cross-functional swarming. It would be difficult for Julie, for example, if she supported the Insurance division, to suddenly show up with the Retirement division to coach an entirely new set of people with whom she had no prior relationship, knowledge or understanding of the needs. Likewise, it would be awkward for the specialist whose primary goal was onboarding new interns and employees through orientation to show up at an Executive Breakfast and try to lead them through an Executive Coaching session that was typically led by another specialist with many more years experience and had a long-standing relationship with executives.
For me, it was awkward to come to this realization during our first day of Kanban training. Pressured by a short engagement timeframe, I had not spent sufficient time breaking the organizational capabilities down further at an individual contributor level to understand how I might better create a visual management system that more closely aligned with their reality.
After this first day of Kanban training, the team had stuck through it with me to at least learn about the basics and feel comfortable with basic Jira functionality.
But, I went home that evening frustrated. I was surprised by the next coaching session with the Talent team. What surprised me, though, was that the team started the discussion with the Agile Principles at the forefront. The team recognized that they all had very specialized and focused jobs, with little overlap, but that there were several team projects that they could share responsibility for regarding key activities and deliverables.
As a coach, I found myself in an interesting position. Was it perfect? Was it a wonderful attempt at the first step? As a result of the Talent team taking ownership of their Agile journey and starting to behave in different ways around the handling of work, including regular opportunities to inspect and adapt their own practice, the team has shown they can manage a steady flow of work through the system and is comfortable with both Agile Principles and Visual Management.
As an early step toward building a more cross-functional team environment, the team is even taking opportunities to pair together as part of cross-training and skill-building for team members.
Through this process of Agile Transformation in Human Resources, the usual suspects in Technology made themselves apparent:. What surprised me, pleasantly, with respect to the HR Business Teams was the quick and easy adoption that several of the teams displayed.
That example of self-determination and adoption by most of the teams helps soothe the disappointment I feel in the lack of enthusiasm and adoption displayed by others.
But, I know it is a journey and that the entire organization is on that journey, even if at different paces on different routes. Even from there, several teams preferred to touch base asynchronously or less frequently due to their schedules, locations or other factors. In cases where team structures and agreements allowed for swarming, pairing and working by priority, the shift in how the team works is typically easy — work from the top of the backlog and focus on finishing.
But, where teams are structured as a workgroup of specialists — whether the specialty is a work-stream or a set of relationships — the transition to working by priority can be challenging and frustrating. In most cases, those teams find it difficult, even impossible, to work by priority from a holistic HR perspective. The primary benefit to these teams is in the visibility that Visual Management brings, the coordination and collaboration on certain work that the regular planning sessions brings, and in identifying opportunities to improve through regular retrospectives.
I continue to wrestle with how I would approach these teams differently — and am, so far, convinced that the real changes lay in future discussions about team structure, assignments, and areas of focus. Whether or not to make changes is a decision that will come in time and requires the team to evaluate the practices and outcomes they have now and explore alternatives over time. As long as they continue to retrospect, inspect and adapt, this transformation should continue and opportunities to improve will become apparent.
Allow me to share some of those moments with you. I will use this one for years to come…. I would like to thank my Agile experience report shepherd, Christopher Edwards, for the early advice on how to approach this report and for the multiple iterations of review and refinement. Variations Put your right hand down on the ground during the first and your left hand down on the ground during the second Vary the distance.
Make turns on command by the coach. Use various biomotor skill combinations throughout the drill. Active Aging. Coaching and Officiating. Fitness and Health. Health Education. Nutrition and Healthy Eating. To work on acceleration, you can have your athletes get into an athletic stance, then use their body to explosively throw a medicine ball as they transition into a sprint.
This motion will get the athlete into the right angle to accelerate, while at the same time making them use both legs to drive into the sprint. There are certainly other effective acceleration tool options sprint chute and sled, for example , but because of simplicity and overall versatility, we rank medicine balls higher than those options.
When it comes to Medicine Balls, you want to buy a durable product. The heavy-duty stitching creates durability and allows for the ball to keep its shape. With options up to 30 lbs. Hurdles, when used correctly, can increase explosiveness, speed, and coordination tremendously.
The way to avoid this behavior is to start slow, emphasizing good form over speed to start with. The goal should never be just to get through it without knocking the hurdles over. Once athletes get the hang of using hurdles correctly, they can increase their speed, add height to the hurdles or complexity to the drill. These hurdles are lightweight and durable, and feature bounce-back construction for when athletes do inevitably knock into them during the drill. They are able to be used on all surfaces turf, grass, concrete, sand.
You can create a variety of drills that improve footwork, speed work, coordination and a number of other speed and agility components, but one of the overlooked benefits of ladder drills is that they often require athletes to work on connecting their mind to their body.
Bonus : Want to add a little more difficulty to your ladder training?
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