Agility refers to the ability to change, respond, or adapt to an external stimulus effectively. An agile company or firm includes flexibility and is open to try out different ways so that they can increase the efficiency, job satisfaction, and productivity of the agile workforce.
What is an Agile Workforce?
An agile workforce involves part-time, full time, and contingent employees. It also includes flexible strategies that motivate both old and new workers to remain employed with your company. This makes your company ever-ready to meet the dynamic challenges of the industry.
How to create an agile workforce?
Here are some of the strategies that you can employ to help your employees become more agile and develop an agile mindset:
Emphasize the human aspect:
Businesses are run more by human intellect rather than technology and processes. So, attach more importance to the human aspect of your company. Appreciate every worker. Encourage team building and cooperative learning. Do away with the idea of one person being the ‘jack of all trades’. Rather, focus on cultivating the innate skills of the workers. Acknowledge limitations but help your employees work on them to sustain unprecedented situations.
Empower and support your workers:
Encourage your workers to take up newer challenges and give their fullest to come up with unique solutions. Help them overcome the impending barriers and reach their targets successfully. Enable them to develop risk-taking abilities. Delegate different tasks to your employees and rotate their roles. Give them the freedom to work on their own by allowing independent decision making. This will help your entire workforce feel empowered.
Encourage experimentation:
Agile organizations promote innovation and experimentation. This is important to keep up with the changing trends of the industry. Focus on propelling changes and be open to welcome new ideas. This can be done by organizing brainstorming sessions and motivating employees to work on ideas that they are most passionate about. Try and build a system offering personal support to the employees as and when required. Eliminate barriers to promote all sorts of inclusion.
Engage experienced, expert employees:
When experienced workers leave your company, there occurs a significant gap in skill and expertise. Without able workers, your company might struggle to function smoothly. Therefore, it is always better to avoid such situations. You can do this by capturing and retaining expertise. Consult the experienced experts of your firm and work out a system that would help them prepare their replacements before leaving the organization. You can also have recordings of sessions with them and use those while training the new replacements.
Enhance collaboration:
Include agility in your approach when trying to establish communication among all the levels of the company. While working on an ad-hoc project, try to get everyone involved. This would be motivating for all the employees. Create opportunities for the different teams to engage between themselves so that they can transfer useful knowledge to one another. Give certain tangible targets and evaluate their performances. This will enhance learning and drive collaboration.
