In a new and modern agile world here is what is likely to happen to culture and the role of HR. Most of this is my own view but was inspired by a great Gartner article I read.
People join the mission FIRST, and not the team or company or job: You can't have an agile culture where the "why" is not clear. This means that people join for the journey, mission, vision and goals. They volunteer to be part of the very clear values set - and are prepared to be evaluated against their contribution to that - in all likelihood by each other. There may also be a time when it becomes clear to individuals that they have contributed all they can and need to be able to self-select out with grace and dignity. The culture should be easy to join if you have passion and skills and believe but it should also be easy to leave without pain. HR needs to ensure on-boarding and off-boarding are simple and easy and human. HR and marketing need also to be very aligned in such cultures because the message to the customer is exactly the same as that to the employee. In this context HR has a huge communications role.
Agile is not just the IT folk - it's everyone. This includes HR. In the first year HR should probably jettison more ways of working than it creates. Also because we are dealing with the culture itself - HR needs to ensure the culture its co-created by everyone. The HR skills that become the most important become things like facilitation, group dynamics, noticing, challenging, sensing, coaching, visioning and communication. Above all HR will need to be in touch with the business value chain and the voice of the customer. I'd expect HR will start by putting all admin, risk and control activities into the cloud - and all the data back to the employees. Then they need to get into the behaviour business.
People Over Process: Spotify engineers align themselves in overlapping communities focused on objectives (squads), work environment (tribes), skill-sets (chapters), and interests (guilds), so they can freely experiment with tools and processes. Zappos, likewise, encourages employees to self-organize. Roles and titles are fluid. There cannot be job descriptions as such. There can be no barriers to the free internal movement of talent either - to join and un-join initiatives without weird pay conversations or bonus implications and the like. Remuneration structures need to be flat with the ability to make the next level based on both requirements and merit as judged by peers. Workforce planning takes a whole new importance in agile settings. Its probably better to not have bonuses in such settings unless they are team based and tied to actual results as well as communal as possible. HR will need to throw out the process rule book and instead have rock solid principles
Dynamics Over Documents: Relying heavily on pre-scripted documentation doesn’t work in a dynamic digital environment. Agile teams need to be configured for speed, working in short iterations – while, of course, frequently referring back to the original objectives and principles. If the goal can't be stated clearly and measurably then there has not been enough thinking ahead of the doing. Everyone needs to be clear of what we are doing and what it will broadly look like when we get there. This probably means annual goals, performance reviews are out based on the the way these processes are typically done. Such processes will need to be far more peer-informed, behavioural, feedback-rich, and regular.
Collaboration Over Cascading: At Spotify and Zappos, the culture is less about owning and more about sharing. This collaborative mindset provides bountiful benefits to both the enterprise and employees; it leads to better communication, trust, knowledge distribution, and adaptive and shared leadership. Hierarchy is out. People will be paid based on their overall potential and performance - both - their overall capability, breadth, capacity, know-how, and ability to lead and contribute to the culture.
Adaptive Over Prescriptive: Does your enterprise invite disruption, or is the focus overwhelmingly more on policy and standards? Instead of asking “Why can’t it be done?” people in an agile culture are empowered to seek answers to the question “How can it be done?” People in agile environments will ask different questions to determine if they are on track. This will have nothing to do with control, compliance, or within a rules based order. Instead these people will ask "how does this feel", "who else thinks this", "does it feel like we are on track", "are we wasting our time here", "how do we speed up", "whats getting in the way", "do we still have all the right people and skills to deliver this", "who can help us" and "shall we continue".
Leadership Over Management: Enterprise agility is only possible if the CEO, CFO, CIO and other executives and managers view their jobs as to “serve and enable.” At Spotify, this means that leaders focus on what problem needs to be solved, but let the teams figure out how to solve it.
Adopting agility requires a level of flexibility, inclusivity and, above all, trickle-down C-level support and behavior modelling. Not every organization has the appetite and adaptability to go down this path. But for those that do so successfully, the reward is a competitive edge in the digital economy.
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