Over the last years the business changed enormously: globalisation, intercultural matrix organisations, technological development, which made businesses instable, constantly pushed to improve their competencies and adapt to the business environment. The companies are not working in the same way as they did three, five or ten years ago.
That is how agility became one of the most important and differentiating competencies. The organisation’s agility is the capability to rapidly change or adapt in response to the changes of the market. In other words, it is the ability to be rapid and graceful at the same time.
What are the benefits of agility at work?
1. Task Simplification
How many times has it happened that you didn’t realise how fast the day had gone by and there wasn’t even enough time to carry out all of the things you wanted to do? The agile working process helps to simplify the work and saves lots of energy because it prioritises tasks and minimizes steps of achieving them. Plan ahead! – Always plan your day or week ahead. One effective method is “eat the frog” (pretty name for a method, right?) – You start with the most difficult or most important task.
2. Multidisciplinary teams
One of the biggest benefits of working in an agile way is sharing knowledge and skills. It doesn’t matter if we talk about daily work or big projects and programmes; the good balance between technical knowledge and good relationships strengthens the company’s quality of and effectiveness at work. It also helps build good relationships across the entities of the company and therefore, breaking down silos. And here is one tip for leaders - to strengthen the relationship in your teams even more, you can organise team-building activities. The workshops with role-playing are a good way for the team to know each other better. Main themes for team building activities could be assertiveness, negotiating skills, communication skills, etc.
3. Adding value and reducing waste
When you want something you have to give up something else. That is life. However, what if you will get more effectiveness and rapidity by giving up delays? And also save more money than planned for a specific project? That is the principle of being agile – because the time and the budget are always fixed, but you can concentrate on the quality! These two constraints give you flexibility only on the scope of your work and will push you to adjust your priorities. The real value of a specific project is to achieve goals by keeping control, staying realistic and minimising risks.
4. Helping the organisation’s innovate
Again, we should not forget that technological development and people’s wellbeing should go hand in hand. The most successful organisations are those whose leadership engage employees to innovate with a mutual effort and never stop them from developing new ideas. The innovation agility process involves good communication on the long-term objectives. It gives freedom to people from all hierarchical levels and background to work together by achieving these objectives rapidly.
5. Building resilience
Following the previous benefits, we arrive at the last one - building resilience. By challenging people to be more agile, which involves taking actions, expressing their ideas and standing behind them with responsibility and control, you can improve not only the individual but also the overall organisational resilience.
These are only a few of the many benefits of bringing agility to the work place. The biggest strength of the modern organisation is the ability to create a sustainable advantage and only the organisation’s agility could create this power.
Visit our website soon in order to learn how to shape and measure the agility of your organisation.
Business Dictionary, [04/04/2016]
Janet Sernack, Innovation Excellent, (November 3, 2015)
Barry Winbolt, Training & workshops, Resilience at work (2016)
About the author
Viktoriya studied at the University of Strasbourg, where she obtained her Master degree in Project Management, and she is now working as a Training Coordination Officer at fts global. Her education background helps her a lot in the position she's occupying today. She knows that working in many small projects at the same time and being closely linked to the customer all the time can be very challenging but she finds it very exciting; that is why she founds the agility way of working very useful and she is glad to share her knowledge and tips with you.