HR leaders, the workforce is changing

An agile HR mindset must include channels for employees to have their say, especially those from different demographics than those hiring them. For example, the next influx of talent for Indian businesses will come from Gen Z, who generally desire more flexibility and purpose in their work. Then there’s India’s growing reliance on gig workers, which requires us to reconsider how we provide everything from employee benefits to career development pathways. Treating these new workers like older, full-time employees is inadvisable.

The better we understand our people’s psyches, the better we can devise policies that support them as well as our corporate objectives. This includes identifying which digital solutions or workflows will enable different groups of employees to do their best work (as well as which systems will struggle to gain adoption). And when we cultivate a better understanding of underrepresented or disenfranchised groups, like women, we stand a better chance of building a more diverse workforce that adapts to and fills skills gaps more effectively.

Technology allows us to hear from our people on a consistent basis. We should consider replacing annual employee surveys with monthly or even weekly pulse checks, using engagement platforms that can analyse employees’ responses based on geography, age, and skills. In turn, we should acknowledge their feedback via timely communication and policy adjustments that align their suggestions with business objectives and contexts. The result is a more co-creative, personalised, and agile approach to HR. 

However, these pulse checks must be anonymous and run by an independent third party with a rock-solid reputation for security to remove the fear that honest feedback will result in punitive or “corrective” action from managers or leaders. This is part of establishing one of the key ingredients of an agile enterprise: trust.

Without trust between leaders and employees, companies cannot reach their full potential. Trust not only allows for more agility, but also enables companies to scale by giving smaller teams the autonomy to decide how they work. The alternative is to invest huge sums to police every employee and force them to conform to a set of top-down policies—an unproductive exercise at best.

Our people policies should empower team leads to make these kinds of decisions for—and with—their teams. At the same time, companies should apply processes and technologies that keep leaders of smaller units accountable to business standards. The goal here is not to punish noncompliance, but rather to understand why a team diverges from established practices, and the effects of doing so. It may be that the policy, not the team, needs to change—part and parcel of adopting an agile frame of mind.

Take hybrid working arrangements and the haphazard post-pandemic return to office. HR leaders now have four modes of working at their disposal:

1. Remote working with online collaboration (through platforms like Zoom or Teams)

1. Remote working in isolation (usually reserved for deep work)

1. Working in the office, together with others (with in-person meetings)

1. Working in the office but separately (where individuals come in on different days)
    

All these modes are here to stay, and they each have specific use cases and offer benefits for specific employee groups. Giving teams agency to do what works best, albeit within broader organisational guidelines, sends a clear message of “I trust you to do the right thing.” These smaller units can then agilely shift course when conditions require it, much more so than organisations with numerous layers of hierarchy.