Why an 'Agile' approach to HR transformation is the way forward!

We all heard about 'Only Fix What is Broken' from many senior executives, this mindset isn't good enough anymore, in order to survive and thrive in today's ever-changing HR world, we need an HR leadership and workforce who are constantly challenging the status quo with a 'good can be made better' mindset. 

Based on AgileSHIFT framework, dynamic and fast changing nature of the world (VUCA - volatility, uncertainity, complexity and ambiguity), increasing role technology, distruptors like gig-econonomy, remote working are constantly creating a gap between where an organisation currently is and where they wants to be. This gap which is referred as 'DELTA'  in agile world is constantly increasing day by day. In order for organisations and HR function to thrive and strive in this ever changing environment, it is important to build 'Enterprise agility' i.e. building resillience from being distupted for organisation with new 'agile' ways of working. Traditional approach to transformation  talks about using planning (waterfall) based program management approach by spending significant amound of money and time with external consultants brought into manage change, however agile transformation talks about incremental changes utilising BAU roles (RTO - Running the Organisation) supported by change roles (CTO- Changing the Organisation) within organisation to drive transformation. 

Today, employee experience, learning driven continuous performance management, AI/RPA driven smart HR automation are all hot topic within HR, however these weren't key topics that we thought would be the priority for HR couple of years back. Traditional HR tranformation programs spending millions of dollars with months of scoping/ discovery might help to get us to what we think is 'good' today in couple of years down the line. However we will be talking about the next big transformation by then as the world is moving and changing much faster than us.  This constant 'catch-up' transformation approach takes away the focus of HR leaders and employees from supporting business leaders to achieve outstanding performance to focussing on transforming their own function to survive. 

HR leaders need to think beyond the traditional ways and start adopting 'Agile HR transformation' approach to create required 'agility' for HR department to stay current and relevant. Agile transformation approach focus on delivering quick value to businsess with incremental changes utilising BAU (RTO) roles supplemented with change specific (CTO) roles. This requires a mindset shift for HR leaders from 'Let's transform' to 'Let's start delivering value' which will eventually lead to transformation of the HR function.