Before the Covid pandemic, volatile markets and competition were the primary factors driving changes in an organization. The future of an organization depends on how fast it can adapt to new circumstances. The worldwide pandemic put many organizations’ agility to the test. Some were more successful than others.
If your company has problems changing quickly and succeeding in this rapidly evolving new environment, consider improving organizational agility. How do you do it? The following six tips will get you started and help you future-proof your company, and enable it to react quickly to the ever-changing environment.
Adopt the start-up mindset
While the list of business practices is comprehensive, all of them can be divided into practices that promote dynamism and those that promote stability. Stability encompasses proven practices, and most employees are familiar with them. On the other hand, Dynamism refers to emerging business practices that offer great rewards but come with certain risks.
To improve organizational agility, organizations need to embrace dynamism at the cost of stability. That’s exactly what startups do when they enter saturated and volatile markets. However, organizations should never completely discard stability. According to the McKinsey Global Survey, truly agile organizations achieved a balance of stability and dynamism.
Improve resource allocation practices
Resource management is one of the most important agile practices. Knowing the people on your payroll, their capabilities, and their ability to take on the tasks they never did before are just some of the ways to improve resource allocation. As you could see, many organizations had to completely switch to work from home or design a sort of in-office & at-home work hybrid during the pandemic.
In large enterprises, HR departments play a pivotal role in improving resource allocation. They need to work with department managers and team leaders to make new arrangements and transition as fast as possible. Being able to deploy and redeploy people between tasks and priorities quickly will be very important in the post-covid era.
Implement emerging technologies
During the pandemic, many organizations had to use certain technologies for the first time. Most of the apps and tech used enabled remote work. These hard times proved that emerging tech is not disruptive. It’s quite the opposite. With its help, organizations can easily adapt to even the most challenging circumstances, even improving the bottom line.
CTOs have to play their role and help improve organizational agility as well. Many practical solutions promote agility ranging from online collaboration platforms and video conference tools to project management software and SD-WAN. They need to identify the best solutions for the organization and make sure the implementation process goes as smoothly as possible.
Custom-tailor workspace
Every job position in an organization comes with unique responsibilities. It translates into a unique workflow. When you add the personal characteristics of every employee to the mix, there is no reason to offer these people the uniform workspace and expect agility. To become more agile, an organization must re-address the work environment.
Workspace needs to reflect job tasks, employees’ personal preferences, and workflows. In an agile organization, a workspace also needs to facilitate communication and collaboration. However, it also needs to create different environments to achieve its goals. For instance, it should include quiet and private areas, meet-up rooms, and small collaboration spaces.
Efficiently engage employees
All the efforts to improve workspace and work with cutting-edge technologies can turn futile if you forget about your workforce. At the very foundation of an agile organization, we have employees aware of their accountability and are inclined to identify and solve problems proactively. The research shows that the best way to do it is to engage your employees.
So how do you engage employees? There are numerous strategies you can choose from. You can use positive motivation to start building a team-centric culture, hold regular company-wide meetings, or do it through individual recognition and workshops.
Always plan the key results
In order to promote accountability, drive employee engagement, and improve agility, you always need to know the key results. In fact, you should have planned for key results in advance. Once you have the key results, you need to keep your employees in the loop. The goal is to ensure that every employee, regardless of their job role or title, becomes aware of how they contribute to achieving the key results.
This is a great way to motivate them to come up with innovative ideas and identify new solutions. The more your employees are willing to tackle the challenges from different angles, the more agile your organization will be. You can communicate your key results and employees’ roles through one-on-one meetings, emails, and team/department meetings.
Improving organizational agility is the only way to future-proof a company. There are various strategies that you can pursue to do so. Since every organization is unique, we will leave it up to you to decide which is the best course of action to pursue.
