Building an Agile Culture: HR’s Role in Creating a Supportive Environment

What does Agile culture mean?

Agile culture is mainly characterized by collaboration and cooperation between people and teams in an adaptable environment that minimizes autocracy, control, and bureaucracy. These ways of working are encouraged so that we can perform best in the VUCA world that is wrapped in Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.

Agile culture is also linked to the ability to continuously innovate and improve in order to keep our businesses (and products) relevant. Or, as we say in Improve Everything: “continuously improve to defer failure for as long as possible.”

What is the role of HR in creating an environment that supports an agile culture?

It is important to understand the central points of an agile culture, and, as a result. They are:

1. Engage people and their interactions
2. Improve the system
3. Help to delight all clients
4. Manage the system, not the people
5. Co-create work

Often company HR practices contradict or prevent the full application of these principles which leads to environments where delivery circumvents the HR practices and creates its own path, often excluding HR professionals from their day-to-day responsibilities.

“Culture is a fabric made of people, relationships, and practices. If we want an Agile culture, we need to put intention and shape the organization’s practices with that purpose. HR is responsible for influencing this path, anticipating possibilities, and seeking the results of these actions. Our responsibility in the Agile culture needs to be admitted and understood; we can be facilitators or great blockers of this transformation. Only then will we be able to generate impact and value so that Agile is perceived by the business as more than a method, but a way of seeing work, which needs to be simpler, more collaborative, and generate more value.”
– Camila Berteli, Learning, Development, and Culture Manager at Unilever.

How HR can contribute to and support the development of an agile culture

In an Agile culture, HR creates a supportive environment that fosters collaboration, learning, and employee engagement. Here are some key ways that HR can contribute to creating such an environment:

Performance Management

HR can redefine performance management practices to align with Agile principles and create a supportive environment with an Agile culture.

Firms exist to coordinate and motivate people’s economic activity.

John Roberts, The Modern Firm

Many firms usually motivate people with money. But that is rather simplistic. Work environments must increasingly focus on human needs and motivators. One important need is fairness, which should always appear in remuneration and reward models. A well-known experiment demonstrates this fairness phenomenon and has even been the subject of a TED with Frans de Waal, Ph.D.

To foster employee engagement and motivation, HR can work on the following:

• Career ladders – how to work in the modern world. It is necessary to offer more flexible and personalized career paths to employees.
• Job titles and roles – the concept of a fixed job needs to be updated. Instead of a steady job, expect continuous adaptation and responsiveness to meet the moment’s needs.
• Salary formulas – a good way to deal with salaries in a more transparent and fair way.
• Merit Money is a different way to reward people based on collective intelligence, not just on HR or management requirements.
• Six Rules for Rewards – six scientific ways to improve your rewards system (merit money, for example, applies all the six rules).

Training and Development

HR can facilitate training programs and workshops to enhance employees’ understanding of Agile methodologies and principles. By providing opportunities for continuous learning, HR helps employees stay up-to-date with Agile practices, enabling them to work effectively in an Agile environment.

Corporate universities, individual development plans, training incentives, courses, study, and reading platforms. Many HRs already do all of this as these learning initiatives are very important for organizations, yet there is plenty of room for improvement.

HRs should stop acting as centralizers of the learning process and make learning a systemic property of the company and its teams. Here is how:

• Establish the use of the Team Competency Matrix – a simple and powerful tool to develop competence.
• Dedicated slack time or knowledge hours – people need time to self-improve, and HR can make room for that by establishing company- or team-wide guidelines.
• Internal mentoring program – improving competence with a company’s existing internal competency is possible. Mentoring programs led by HR are a great way to do this.

I have seen, at least here in Brazil, great HR initiatives, such as:

• The employee managing their training budgets
• Slack time as Geek Tuesday, Friday Learnings, Tech Talks, Team Gathering
• Many hackathons, DOJOs, guilds, and other learning opportunities
• Simple mentoring programs in small companies and more sophisticated ones in big companies, supported by tools.

Stefanini, in Brazil, is a great example of a global mentoring tool that connects people who want to learn with people who want to teach, improving internal competency at a low cost. I talked about this with Stefanini’s People VP (in Portuguese).

How does your HR team support your company in terms of learning?

Build a Supportive Organizational Structure

HR can help shape organizational structure to enable Agility. This includes designing flexible roles and job descriptions that allow for cross-functional collaboration and adaptability, implementing flexible work arrangements that promote work-life balance and remote collaboration, and establishing clear channels for communication and decision-making. By creating an organizational structure that aligns with Agile principles, HR supports an organization’s flow of information, decision-making, and innovation.

Today, leaders need to deal with a series of dilemmas known as organizational ambidexterity: Hierarchies versus Networks, Specialization versus Generalization, Efficiency versus Effectivity, Centralization versus Decentralization, Exploitation versus Exploration.

Achieving organizational ambidexterity involves creating structures, processes, and a supportive culture that encourages exploration and exploitation of key information.

This is all key to creating a great Agile culture, and HR is the department which can foster a more participative approach to organization design. Heidi Helfand (in her amazing and must-read book Dynamic Reteaming), talks about being moved from one team to another without involvement in this decision to reinforce the importance of employee participation in decisions like this.

Encourage Experimentation and Adaptability

Agility requires a mindset that embraces experimentation and adaptation. HR can foster this mindset by encouraging employees to challenge the status quo, providing the resources and support needed for experimenting with new ideas, as well as celebrating and learning from successes and failures. By promoting a culture that values learning from mistakes and adapting to changing circumstances, HR helps to create an environment where innovation and continuous improvement thrive.