Agility seems to be the strategic thought of our time – lots has been written about ‘Uberisation’ or holocracy – but the impact on people often seems to be tuned down. Employees in agile organisations are often considered units of production or resources. However, I think to get to be really agile we need to consider people more carefully as the supply side to the agility question.
One part of getting this personal agility is to focus on employees as individuals. The ‘you experience’ of social media and digital customer experience has changed the expectations of people at work. Added to this is how fast personal circumstances change, and how little that is considered in a work environment.
You might think this has been fixed with zero-hours contracts, or using freelancers, but I contend that while this approach might give agility with production resources it won’t make your organisation truly agile.
Zero-hours contracts as competitive advantage are easily eroded and not easily extended. What we need to really drive agile companies is agility for people in the core of the organisation; to be tied to the enterprise but free.
Perhaps in the past social bonds tied us to specific places and employers from our mid-20s to the end of our lives, and this gave us greater confidence to develop without risk.
Today these bonds change over time, as we care for elderly parents, buy our first house later in life, or take a year out travelling long after formal study. And to add to this these bonds change depending on our circumstances – if this week you are working away from home a call at 8.30pm might be fine, but next week your school governors’ meeting clashes.
In Capgemini we have been thinking about this issue in two big categories. First the idea of trust and learning with short tenures, and second the risk of getting stuck in your career, and how to get unstuck by reskilling. These two issues stem from what happens when personal bonds aren’t well-considered.
For example, if you have strong family bonds that keep you in one place – perhaps you have parents that need care – you tend to have to take the work given to you, and your opportunity to develop is constrained. For a time this is a good trade – the company gets economic value and you get your local bonds respected – but after a while you risk getting stuck. You are tied too tightly to a particular skill or competency, even if your circumstances change. Reskilling is our response to this.
At the other extreme is the example of short tenure employees who have strong bonds to work, but not to just one company.
Previous generations had a reasonable expectation they would stay in the same organisation for life – a trust developed over time and mutualised by long tenure. The next generation shows a trend to work in a new role every two to three years. In that context how do we build trust so people can take the risk to change and develop, and how do we train on the job confident, we are not teaching and learning bad habits or idiosyncrasy? Developing experts, visible outside the company, is our response to this.
In the past HR has been a councillor figure or ‘personnel’; enabling the relationship between employees and managers. This traditional role for HR might need to be reasserted to better understand these bonds. This would help get an honest view of where our people stand, what they expect from work, and how to deliver on a more transparent promise as a company to our people.
There is a strong business case to reskill people when they get stuck in a role. Although it is simpler to value the business case in a professional services business like ours, the cost of retention, new hire, and move is true for most industries. Considering the personal bonds our people carry has helped unlock this for us.
Will Peachey is senior VP, group HR transformation at Capgemini
