Employees Work in Hours and Days – Your HR and Company Practices Don’t.

If you work for a technology company you’ve probably heard the term agile development flowing around your office. You know, those processes and meetings that the ‘techies’ are involved in. If you’re not in the tech bubble or have never heard of it, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered.

Agile development is defined as an approach to “help teams respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences and empirical feedback. Agile methodologies are an alternative to waterfall, or traditional sequential development.”

In other words: as humans we’re not great at predicting how long major projects take to accomplish, so we need processes that focus us on getting specific work done within digestible time frames (i.e. weekly) and frameworks to ensure continuous feedback for improvement.

The technology community has really caught the value of agile development.

Executives and HR leaders that are trying to drive improvements in performance and employee engagement can learn a lot from this process.  In fact, it’s already happening. Several HR practices are shifting from annual to more real-time:

• Employee engagement measurement is now ‘pulse’ based and happening more frequently than the annual survey
• Employee recognition has moved from years of service to daily social recognition
• Performance management, in its traditional sense, is getting blasted by what seems to be every media outlet for being too infrequent and invaluable (check out this Fast Company article about why annual performance management is going extinct).

Why this shift? Because employees work in hours and days, not in quarters and years. Also, according to Deloitte, only 8% of enterprise companies believe that the traditional performance management process drives business value.

So if you’re still stuck in annual processes, it’s time to rethink your approach to employee success.

What is agile performance management anyways? 

The Human Capital Institute is one of the first to offer certification for Agile Performance Management. They describe it as a process of:

• Setting goals
• Helping managers coach individuals
• Providing more continuous feedback, support, and growth or change (shifting the focus from annual evaluation and rankings to continuous feedback and development)
• Being more collaborative, social, and faster-moving

The Fast Company article mentioned earlier reinforces these ideas:  “… the future of the workplace depends on how successful these companies become at building out new systems that incorporate frequent feedback, open communication, and coaching.”

Is your company creating quarterly goals that get put into a system and don’t get looked at until the quarter is completed to check off a few boxes?  If so, you’re not alone and need to start setting more frequent goals and ensuring there is a continuous feedback loop.

Why do these new practices work?

Think about the major drivers of employee performance and engagement:  communication, personal growth, direct relationships with the manager, and recognition. It makes sense why a new agile approach to working impacts all of these.

By setting frequent goals and establishing continuous feedback, it lends itself to better communication and alignment of what each employee is working on and how they’re contributing to the company’s goals and purpose.  Structure around this adds accountability to management to have frequent conversations that offer better communication.

So what are you doing to become more agile and drive higher performing teams and engaged employees in your organization?  Is it even a priority?  We’re interested in hearing your thoughts.