Agile HR - Far beyond adopting agile methods

An article by Matheus Haddad and Yoris Linhares in partnership with Scopphu.

We are used to a management style inspired by the principles of scientific management and influenced by the values and norms of religious and military institutions. Built on the relationship between command and control, this more traditional management style rests on the premise that the organization is divided between thinkers (executives and managers) and doers (the people who actually carry out the work that creates value for customers).

The thinkers get to decide what should be done and how, and they also hold the responsibility of controlling how the work is carried out. The doers are left to obey orders, since, according to this idea, they would be incapable of determining the work to be done and would hardly be able to make sound decisions for the business.

That is why rigid hierarchical structures prevail in companies today, divided into areas and departments that command and control the work through well-defined rules and processes. In this deterministic view of the organization, the Human Resources department (a name that reflects the way workers are seen in this kind of management) handles the people management processes, as well as the side effects that this way of working ends up bringing.

However, an increasingly complex market, the creative economy and new generations of workers have been demanding a more flexible and adaptable management style from organizations, so that they can stay competitive and relevant. Until that happens, one of the side effects we see is a picture in which a large share of workers are not engaged (66%) or are actively disengaged at work (14%), as shown by GALLUP’s biannual State of the Global Workplace 2021 Report. The agile approach to management, which originated in Software Engineering, has been the main representative of this new perspective on organizing and carrying out work in a constantly changing world.

So HR departments have realized that traditional practices are not as effective as they used to be. Faced with well-informed workers, thanks to easy access to the internet, with a good education, who need more support in developing social-emotional skills than technical skills, these departments need a new perspective so that people management can reap the benefits of agility.

In agile transformations, it is quite common to find HR departments that use concepts such as squads (cross-functional teams capable of taking on, end to end, all the work needed to create value for a customer) combined with Scrum, Kanban or Design Thinking. When they come up with a new recruiting and hiring process, the squad responsible for the initiative can use Scrum to manage that project. In turn, a new recruiting and hiring process, which involves screening résumés, interviews and other steps, can be visualized and controlled with Kanban.

Despite the value people see in adopting these methodologies, the adoption is still superficial, because they are still being used within this traditional context. People and squads without the autonomy to make decisions, a lack of organizational transparency and dependence on other teams or managers to move initiatives forward reveal the “agile window dressing” that exists in the market.

Beyond adopting agile methods, a truly agile HR understands this new way of working more deeply, one that replaces command and control with transparency, autonomy and collaboration, and discovers a management style that is genuinely centered on people and their relationships.

For example, why not replace individual performance reviews (of the doers) with peer feedback, supporting people in their personal development through a collaborative process instead of a one-sided judgment (by the thinkers) of their performance at work? After all, it makes no sense to evaluate individual performance when the outcome of the work depends more on a team’s collective performance. Frequent feedback between people supports professional growth and speeds up how quickly people adapt to the needs of the business and its customers.

In the same way, it is also possible to rethink how hiring processes happen, handing them over to the teams so they decide the best way to bring a new person into their work group, and also set that person’s salary. Of course, this requires greater organizational and financial transparency from companies. After all, who is better prepared to determine the best person for a job, and how much that person deserves to be paid, than the very team they will be part of?

Moreover, with the possibility of disappearing as a department, HR needs to find ways to distribute itself across the organization, taking on a more decentralized, team-based structure. Adopting agile methods such as Scrum to manage its projects and using Kanban for shared visualization and control of the workflow is the first step in that direction, but these are not necessarily essential for a deep transformation in how people management is approached.

For agility to become a capability of the organization, it is essential that HR people abandon the premise that workers are not capable of doing their work in the most efficient way, and stop treating them like children who need people, processes and practices to guide them while they do their work. Instead, HR people should help workers become autonomous and improve collaboration at work, treating everyone as adults capable of taking responsibility for achieving superior results. Limiting management, through the one-sided definition of structures, processes or practices, to the small group of people who make up HR means giving up the immense collective capacity that exists in the company and the real possibilities for innovation that emerge from the relationships between people.

HR professionals must relearn a new way of working when they decide to use agile methods, because these methods are deeply incompatible with traditional management. Working as a team, with emergent leadership, collaboratively, with planning and execution fed by constant feedback from the market, completely turns around the logic of the mechanistic management that still prevails in the market. Grounded in the trust that workers are the protagonists of their own work, HR takes on a new role: acting from a position of support and facilitation to foster an increasingly autonomous and collaborative environment.

Matheus Haddad and Yoris Linhares in partnership with Scopphu www.scopphu.com