Has Covid-19 boosted Business Agility?

Written by Nawel Lengliz and Mario Moreira

Economists might argue that the Covid 19 crisis caused a lot of disruption to companies. I strongly believe the pandemic has helped companies improve the way they collaborate, especially via remote work, which boosted their business or, more precisely, their business agility. Let me explain how.

First and foremost, remote work has helped teams in democratizing information sharing. In effect, by using digital tools, it has become easier to have access to information, to briefings of decisions or to digital white boards in the sense that people do not have to be physically present in meetings to understand the meeting outcomes.

Democratizing information sharing has paved the ground for a natural transition to something we believe in a lot in the Agile community: Visualization of the work. This technique, borrowed from lean manufacturing, consists of using a board that shows all the work being done via cards representing each piece of work, is simple and very powerful. Besides creating a shared understanding on who is doing what within the team, using boards helps to visualize problems in the system of work. For example you may find there is too much work in progress (WIP), work with competing priorities or tasks that have remained stagnant. Therefore, by making problems visible, it becomes easier for teams to discuss problems and try to overcome them by continuously improving their system of work. 

Another advantage to the transition to remote work is the ability to have worldwide access to talent. I remember when Covid 19 broke out, I was part of a global company and we wanted to create an Agile community of practice for the french speaking region. Thanks to remote collaboration, we were able to include skillful people located in francophone Africa. This cross-border collaboration allowed very creative ideas to emerge and spark new perspectives. We were all energized by the diversity of our backgrounds and experiences.

Finally, using digital tools during retrospectives or feedback sessions makes it possible for teams to write notes and share their ideas while building trust. This ability to speak up without fear helps to improve the Psychological Safety climate within teams. According to Amy Edmondson, a famous psychology researcher, creating psychological safety is the number one condition for creating high-performing teams.

Nevertheless, people working remotely sometimes miss face-to-face collaboration (I am among them). In fact, being in the same room creates energy as people communicate not only with words, but also with their body language. However, as food for thought, according to some research, flying generates an equivalent of ¼ tonne of CO2 per hour. Is it really worth generating such an amount of pollution to attend a couple of meetings over a day?

In summary, the Covid 19 pandemic urged companies to try or improve new ways of working remotely with such results as democratizing information sharing, making work visible, accessing talent everywhere and using digital tools to foster psychological safety. These techniques have helped companies move faster, be more inclusive and promote collaboration that helped employees to become happier and to our planet being more ecologically healthier. 

• Learn more about Nawel Lengliz at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nawel-lengliz-111b795/
• Learn more about Mario Moreira at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariomoreira/

Being Agile in HR with Peer Recruiting

A collaboration by Alexa Fuhren and Mario Moreira

Does a manager know better than a team who fits best to a role? How can we recruit the right people that fit best to our Agile organization? The answer is, by being Agile ourselves, particularly in the recruiting process!

In a more traditional working environment if there is a vacancy in a team, the manager approaches the recruiter, shares the requirements of the role, hands over the responsibility for the recruiting process to the HR department, and will be involved again when interviewing and selecting candidates. The recruiter is responsible for creating a job ad, posting it in appropriate recruiting channels, pre-selecting candidates, inviting the manager to interviews and making an offer to the selected candidate. The team usually plays a minor role in selecting the candidate.

Many teams in Agile operate with a self-organizing model.  This model includes much more team ownership, autonomy, as well as responsibility and accountability for all team members than traditionally operating teams. In self-organizing models, the concept of peer recruiting can be applied where the team should play a much stronger role in selecting the right candidate that fits best to the team. Due to a better person-team fit, a reduction of early employee turnover could be a desired outcome.

If teams are responsible for selecting new team members, this will change the role of the recruiter from owning the recruiting process to supporting the process and coaching the team. Depending on the knowledge and experience of the team, the recruiter will be more or rather less involved in selecting the right candidate.

Self-organizing teams can be responsible for the whole recruiting process and accountable for hiring the right candidate. It starts with creating a (new) job profile for the vacancy. The Recruitment Coach will challenge the team to figure out which profile is needed to increase their current and future team performance. When creating a job ad, the Recruitment Coach can give advice on how to make it compelling and will provide templates that are in line with corporate design.

Team members can post the job ad on job boards and in their social media channels (LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, chatrooms, private networks). After pre-selecting the candidates based on previously defined criteria, the team invites the selected candidates for interviews, roles plays, presentations etc. They can choose to ask the manager or recruiter to interview the candidates. The recruiter’s role will be to train the team on interview techniques and how to avoid evaluation errors like stereotyping, the halo effect or the Pygmalion effect etc.

Implementing peer recruiting means moving the decision to the people who know best who fits to their teams. It helps to speed up the recruiting process by reducing long decision making processes with managers and HR.

What is in it for the company?

• Faster decisions due to less interactions with HR and the manager
• Higher team commitment
• Less turnover in the first 6 months of employment due to a better company-person fit
• Recruiter can focus on strategic work, e.g. employer branding, building networks etc., and become a valuable coach for the recruiting processes

What is in it for the candidate?

• Candidate experiences an Agile culture right from the first contact with the company
• Candidate gets to know the colleagues he will closely work with
• Job interview at eye level with team members instead of the potential manager

Peer recruiting shifts the recruiter’s role to a coach who supports the business in making hiring decisions faster, selecting candidates that fit best to the company and lowering the early turnover rate. Enabling the team to select new team members increase their autonomy which can lead to higher team commitment and higher team performance.

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Learn more about Alexa Fuhren at: https://de.linkedin.com/in/alexa-fuhren-b745843/de

Mario Moreira writes more about Agile and HR in his book "The Agile Enterprise" in Chapter 21 "Reinventing HR for Agile"