Business resilience and HR agility
If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed in the world of business, it’s that nothing stays the same. The global pandemic was a rather shocking example of how quickly things can change, and how commercial challenges can crop up when you least expect them!
This explains the pressing need for organisations to build adaptive and responsive business models, including HR agility. This is widely viewed as a central pillar of business resilience as employee performance underpins commercial survival.
This article explores the connection between business resilience and HR agility in more detail, as well as methods you can use to ensure employee recruitment, retention and development keep pace with business aims.
First, what does agile HR mean?
In a nutshell, if you have HR agility, you can respond to any commercial situation:
- Quickly
- Decisively
- Effectively
- Accountably
- Compliantly
This would include a seamless response to these situations, for example:
- Loss of a key decisionmaker
- Sudden skills shortfall in the workforce
- A need for redundancies
- Demand for seasonal or temporary employees
- Shifts in training requirements
- Conflicts and misconduct
- Employee unrest or dissatisfaction
- New legislation impacting your workforce
- Staffing requirements for new markets or products
The opposite of agile HR is laborious recruitment and onboarding and elongated or inept systems to support staff training and development. This can happen in legacy HR teams, or ones that have evolved piecemeal, as well as human resources departments within complex, multi-site or large businesses.
HR agility and flexible and dispersed working
The pandemic didn’t just destabilise businesses due to its ripple effect of changed buying behaviours, economic hardship and skills deficits. Many HR teams also had to respond to an accelerated upturn in remote and mobile workers.
Recruiting, supporting, nurturing and developing staff working from home presents its own special difficulties, and requires increased reliance on IT.
An agile HR function is one that can orchestrate a dispersed or hybrid workforce as effectively as an entirely office-based one, including ensuring that all staff feel listened to and recognised.
This could be particularly vital in preventing staff churn in the many business sectors struggling to fill record numbers of jobs vacancies.
How else does HR speed and efficiency, impact business resilience?
This possibly requires very little discussion, as the link is clear. Contemporary businesses need to cope well with change, whether that’s a threat or an opportunity, downsizing or growing.
Let’s not dwell on the high rate of business failures in the UK, but instead, look at mergers and acquisitions as a litmus test for change. According to www.ons.gov.uk, despite the pandemic, there were 446 completed inward mergers and acquisitions in 2020, with a total value of £16.3 billion. (This compares with 2019’s figures of 609 inward mergers and acquisitions worth £55.5 billion.)
Even if you’re not currently inviting such a major development to your enterprise, change is still inevitable. There are studies that show over 50% of business decision-makers alter their business model every three years to survive.
If your HR team can’t respond swiftly and effectively to these changes, you can find yourself with serious workforce gaps or overspends, or employees who feel underappreciated, stressed or resentful.
What are the steps involved in creating agile HR?
Much of the work you need to do to create a responsive human resources function is best achieved by bringing in outside expertise. Beyond that, the starting point is a thorough review of your policies, practices and processes.
It could become apparent that your HR staff need new skills, and that you need to invest in more up to date HR software, including Cloud technology that enables your HR team to work anywhere, anytime, and with the assurance of secure, automated data backup.
Also, can your team use the latest HR tools and in-house data to respond quickly and effectively?
This could focus on such activities as:
- Talent mapping current and future workforce needs
- Analysing data on productivity
- A skills matrix, showing gaps and priorities
- Encouraging, developing and validating e-learning
- Collating end-to-end feedback and constant job satisfaction analysis
- Delivery of measurably beneficial employee engagement
Clearly, having an agile HR team is not simply about hiring and firing quickly. They play a vital role in supporting a positive and inclusive workplace culture and keeping employees engaged, cohesive and loyal.
This may mean focusing on how HR recognises, rewards and incentivises your staff. As well as their contribution to up-skilling decision-makers in the latest principles of emotionally intelligent leadership and change management, for example.
Why is outsourcing HR an agile solution?
There are still many day-to-day HR tasks that are predictable and often automated, such as payroll and compliance activities. However, many aspects of contemporary human resource management are more fluid.
This can make outsourcing HR services to the innovative and agile team at BluSkyHR a wise move. You can call in the experts as and when needed, including optimising specialist experience and skills that match specific business demands.
As this could well get you through times of change more seamlessly, the business resilience benefits represent an excellent return on your investment.
To explore how BluSkyHR can improve your agility – and underpin your business development goals – book your free 15 minute exploratory call – contact us.