Agile HR - Agile and Scrum Blog

Onboarding and Recruiting

It’s important to realize that the employee experience starts already before the day one during the recruiting process. In agile organizations where hard skills and past experience are not that important we often focus on cultural mix, mindset and ability to learn instead. We used to have a hard programming test for our candidates. It was so hard than our regular employee would not pass it. And it didn’t tell us much as what we really need, were people who can collaborate, learn new things fast, and were flexible. So instead, we started to ask them about what are they passionate about, what they did, what they like to do. We changed the whole process to allow people find their roles, not hire for fixed roles. You can imagine how hard it was for recruiting agencies. Give us the position description, how many years of experience they need, master degree, what technologies they asked us. But we didn’t really care. We were looking for flexibility, and people willing to grow and co-create their roles.

Another important aspect is diversity. For team dynamic is good to have a mix of different profiles. For some roles we did MBTI, and TKI during their onboarding to help team understand people’s typical behavior during decision making, and conflicts. And you can be more creative than that. Very agile organizations are often inviting candidates to join them for a day so they can experience how it is to be part of the organization, and also hear from the team perspective, what is the candidate like. Recruiting is like dating. Some other agile organizations are even doing team hiring event, where they invite all candidates for the role – for example ScrumMaster or Product Owner to spend a day together and simulate the typical day. It’s transparent for both sides, and very revealing about the way how they react in different situations. In general contact before the day one is always encouraged.

Onboarding then can start by pair working, where the new person is not only introduced to the processes and products but also to the people and teams. We always have focused on the values and culture during the onboarding. Some organizations are creating a handbook for new employees to share with them who they are, but I believe becoming part of a team and a larger ecosystem and getting a mentor who can help people start is always worth of. It helps new people to create relationships and become integral part of the system. Time invested into people development always pays back.

Time to Change Performance Review and Rewards System

I wrote here about the need of changing the HR in agile organizations. Agile HR helps organizations to adapt their culture to be more creative and collaborative and less control and compete oriented. They are here to create best employee experience from the first contact, through day one, support their growth, motivation, and increasing their value to the organization. And once you embrace such collaborative and creative culture, it’s time to redesign the performance review and overall evaluation process. The individual KPIs created by managers for upcoming year becomes irrelevant as the people are inspecting and adapting not only of what they deliver, but also what their roles are as those are changing depending on the needs. Some organizations are going towards team created and measured goals (like OKRs) but the others are removing any fixed goals with exchange to the radical transparency and strong evolutionary purpose. That’s where we talk about team organizations.

If you are not there yet, any type of the 360s, like Comparative Agility, Agility Health radar etc. can be a good start. It helps to start with receiving feedback and learning based on that. We are shifting from management feedback and ranking to self-assessment, peer-feedback, and coaching for growth with regular check-ins. I remember that the biggest shift happened where we stopped evaluating and started coaching people. Help them to design their own journey. We made organizational goals transparent and let teams and individuals to create their own goals. Together with a strong sense of the ownership, it helped to feed the motivation.

Finally the last step is to change the rewards and bonus system. It’s only possible if you already created a culture based on collaboration, transparency and purpose driven. Removing the detailed positions goes hand in hand with changing the evaluation system. The peer feedback is flowing there and back on a daily basis, most of the teams would be running their regular retrospective to improve, and help each other to grow. Most of the agile organizations are shifting towards higher base salary with no variable part as they realize that money are more demotivating factor at the end of the day. In creative complex world incentives for tasks are not really working. So that organizations are decoupling financial rewards from individual performance. If there is any bonus it’s more at the overall organizational level, split to the teams and allowing them to distribute it themselves, then given by the KIPs evaluations or decided by management. Some organizations go further on and make salaries fully transparent to everybody. Such level of transparency is a good review system as any inconsistency is visible to everyone.

Agile organizations focus on rewarding people behavior, and learning, over just doing your job. They realize that flexible working hours, self-selection of work, unlimited vacation, work from any place on the world, etc. are better motivation factors than your salary and bonus.

It’s all very different world. And it will not shift overnight. So start small, and inspect and adapt from there. The very first step is to get awareness about what culture you have in the organization and what is the desired culture. You might need a good communication, facilitation, and coaching skill to be able to help your organization to reflect that way, but that’s only the beginning. It’s all about changing mindset. Grow that mindset first, the different practices will follow.

In a summary, Agile HR helps organizations to change their culture to be more creative and collaborative and less control and compete oriented – we build organizations around motivated individuals, involving them in co-creating their journey. Agile HR focuses on the best employee experience from the first contact, through Day one, support their growth, motivation, and increasing their value to the organization. It’s not about processes but a different culture, different mindset.

Agile HR: Start by Getting Awareness

As organizations are changing the way they work, their need for overall business agility is growing. Different departments are trying to not only implement the agile frameworks and apply Scrum or Kanban to enhance their capabilities to deliver value but also completely redesigning their function and AgileHR is one of those departments which requires a radical shift. You need to change the way you look at things and approach things. Agile requires a different culture that is team oriented, and much more collaborative and creative. As many practices organizations currently use for Recruiting & Onboarding, Positions & Career Paths, Performance Review & Evaluation, and Rewards and Bonus systems are individual oriented, and are coming from competing and controlling cultures, the change is inevitable. The higher level of business agility is in the environment, the stronger pressure is for changing the practices as well. So what is HR role in the agile space?

We can say that: “We build organizations around motivated individuals, involving them in co-creating their journey.” Agile HR focuses on the best employee experience from the first contact, through Day1, supporting their growth, and motivation, and increasing their value to the organization. It’s not about processes but a different culture. We simply create environments enhancing collaboration, co-creation, innovations, and creativity. Very different from what HR role is in traditional environments. I see HR as the core of the transformation. They need to allow it to happen, they need to support that shift.

Every change needs to start with awareness about the current and desired stage. What is our current culture? What are our values? What is the current level of safety? What is the engagement of people? Do we understand employee satisfaction? Are they promoters?

If you look into the ADP Research Institute Global Study of Engagement “Only about 16 percent of employees are ‘Fully Engaged’. This means 84 percent of workers are just ‘Coming to Work’ instead of contributing all they could to their organizations.”

Be aware of those things is a good starting point. Many organizations start by measuring engagement on yearly basis. And it’s a good start. Having the ability to compare results not only to the global data but also to your company trends. But if you start doing it, two interesting things usually happen. First – people start complaining that they have to fill in too many questions at one time, and second that once you start digging into the data and trying to inspect and adapt based on that, people start telling you that their responses are not particularly valid anymore – for example, there was a lot of stress in December, but now, in January we feel we are fine, etc. So sooner or later you realize you need to do such surveys more frequently, and also in a distributed way. The good news is there are many tools that can support that need. I have experience with using Officevibe which is designed to ask one question per week and that way is giving you more frequent data points and trends so you can make it actionable. It’s easier to be measured and you can see the impact of changing the practices right away.

Starting the Agile Journey

Understand Scrum is simple. If you don’t know what Scrum is and is not, there is a 17-page definition called Scrum Guide. If you like to know what is agile, go to the four values and 12 principles of Agile Manifesto. The agile community mostly agrees on both. As large products increase the complexity, there is no common agreement on how to apply agile and scrum to multiple teams and organization as a whole. The good news is that there are many options to choose from and many organizations can serve as inspiration on jour journey – Menlo Innovations, Zappos, Valve, Odde, ScrumAlliance, and I can continue. The first two are even often organizing visits to see how they work.

In agile we love options and know, there is no one way how to do things. Some options are easier to apply, some harder, some less agile, some more. But remember Agile is not your goal, it’s just the way how to achieve your strategic goals so at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. The less agile ways are not necessarily bad options for given circumstances. Some companies go faster, some slower on their agile journey. Your organization needs to be internally ready for the higher level of agility and without direct experience with self-organization at the team level (across the organization at product teams but also at the executive teams and boards), it’s hard to go forward towards the organizational agility, Agile HR, Agile finance, and last but not least Agile leadership. I started this article by referring to the Agile and Scrum definitions. Would the definition of an Agile Organization be useful? It may look that way however I don’t think it’s needed. The Agile organization is not about practices, processes, not frameworks. It’s about being agile. It’s about agility hardcoded in the organizational DNA and culture. It’s about living the values. Be courageous to change the status quo, be open to feedback, respect different opinions, and have focus and commitment to deliver value not only to the customers and shareholders but also employees. So if you want to check your readiness to apply agile principles at the organizational level, start with the values. Do you like them? Do you live them? Or do you think they are not important?

Agile HR: Shape the Culture

I already wrote here that during the agile journey, the Agile HR changes the entire focus from being compliant driven to focus on overall employee experience. Agile HR is about leadership, system coaching, and large groups facilitation. And there is another layer. Agile HR should shape the culture. Yes, that’s right. There is an interesting framework of Competing Values which is in a very simple way describing culture as a tension between control and creative quadrants and competing and collaborative quadrants. The traditional organizations were grounded in the control and competition hemisphere, having the fixed processes, hierarchy and competition at the both individual and organizational level, while the agile organizations are more leaning towards the collaboration and creativity hemisphere changing the focus from individuals to the teams and networks, having higher level of autonomy and empowerment, forming partnerships instead of fighting with competitors.

As organizations continue on their agile journey, the culture is shifting and sooner or later the practices need to follow. For example, having a very hierarchical narrow position structure becomes an obstacle of a higher level of collaboration and self-organization. The silos are in the way of the cross-functional teams so the first step is to get rid of traditional positions i.e. Developer, Analyst, Tester and create a team member position as in the cross-functional team that’s all we need. The steep carrier path gets in the way of collaboration from the other side so organizations usually descale and become (more) flat as they rely more on intrinsic over extrinsic motivation. Speaking about motivation, how many of you are motivated by performance review and KPIs? None? That’s right. So what’s the other option? When we remove the individual goals and KPIs together with the performance review, how can we assure people get actionable feedback? So instead of artificial annual performance conversation, we invest into creating a learning environment where people learn from failures, get frequent peer feedback and mentoring from their colleagues so they can co-create their journey and grow as individuals and teams together. It’s not that much about any magical practices, but more about coaching and facilitation skills – that’s where ScrumMasters could be quite helpful. And I guess I can continue.

And keep in mind, it’s not about practices, processes, and tools, those can only support or make your journey harder. It’s about having a strong sense of purpose, common values, and joined identity. Once you have it, the practices will follow in a very natural way. So where to start? Think about your organization, where your culture is right now, and then think about where you need to be to keep up with nowadays business challenges and stay competitive. Only then, you are ready to assess individual practices. Are they supporting that shift? Are they indifferent? Or are they in the way of the desired culture shift?

Agile HR: Leadership, System Coaching, and Large Groups Facilitation

Finally, as the last blog about the Agile HR in this series or talent management if you like, is focusing on the skills and experiences of good HR. Primarily it’s about the understanding of Agile mindset and ability to create an environment where Agile culture can flourish. Environments supporting collaboration, transparency, open peer feedback, trust, team spirit, ownership, empowerment, and responsibility. The more Agile your organization is, the higher the need for coaching and facilitation skills it creates. The role of HR is critically important to grow coaching and facilitation skills in the organization and support individuals and teams with education on coaching, facilitation and guide them on their journey.

Another fundamental shift is from management which is based on decision making and delegation into leadership which is not given by any position but is a state of the mind. Anyone can become a leader. It’s only your decision if you are ready to take over the ownership and responsibility and lead an initiative, team, or product. The peer feedback will take care of enough self-awareness so leaders can emerge through the organization. Very often we speak about emergent leadership as one person can act as a leader of one initiative while at the same time being a team member of another one. As the evaluations transform into regular peer feedback and coaching for development, the key goal of the leaders is to help other leaders to grow where again, the need for good coaching and facilitation skills is inevitable.

The fact that HR changes the focus in Agile organization to the overall employee experience is only the beginning. So let me suggest another idea. The good HR shall act as an organizational ScrumMaster or agile coach if you like, operating at the third level of the #ScrumMasterWay concept, focusing on the overall system. At this level it’s not that much about coaching individuals but coaching teams and organizations as a system, leveraging tools from system coaching like ORSC. It’s not that much about team facilitation but the ability to facilitate large groups with 100’s people, leveraging tools like world-cafe and Open Space. It’s about being a model of an Agile leader growing the ‘we-culture’ and mentoring other leaders to grow to Agile leaders. In short, Agile HR is Agile leadership, system coaching, and large groups facilitation.

Agile HR = Agile leadership + system coaching + large groups facilitation.

Agile HR: Career Path and Salaries

The third blog from this Agile HR series focuses on positions, career paths, and salaries. As I already mentioned in the first Agile HR blog about hiring, positions are not that important in agile organizations as people collaborate, take over responsibility and become leaders as needed, not because they have it in the job description. In traditional organizations, it’s all about the position. We hire to fill the empty position, it designs what people do and don’t do, it shows the potential of who employees might become if they got a good evaluation and are promoted. And last but not least the position defines a rank of the salary.

The whole concept breaks once you stop treat people like individuals and create a team environment where people self organize their work and collaborate based on their skills and abilities. Such shift quite naturally creates a need for fewer positions as for example in one Scrum Development team there are no roles, just team members. So your positions can follow the Scrum organizational design and instead of having the SW developer, SW tester, and analyst, maybe you can just have one position of SW Engineer. Or simply a team member. Every position potentially creates silos and gaps, dependencies, and the need for synchronization and hand-over. Nothing which would help you create high-performing teams.

In more agile environments…

If reading the previous paragraph hasn’t created too big shock in your mind, you are ready for step two. Teams members have the same goals they contribute to, they do frequent peer reviews and hold each other accountable to improve their skills. In such environments, the only reason for positions and career paths is the direct correlation with the salary. The solution is obvious – decouple salaries and positions. In such case, you don’t need any positions at all, as the team roles are emergent, same as leadership. Salary can be linked to the peer feedback and individual value to the organization as a team member. It’s a startup mindset. Imagine for a while that you are not an employee but entrepreneur and every day you need to prove that you bring enough value to get paid. Stressful? Maybe. So be aware that every practice like this needs certain culture and organizational agility. I would not start with it the Agile journey. However, you can take it as a next step and be ready to move there when your organization is ready. On the other hand, if you feel you are ready, there are two tips on how to start. First is a hard choice of two options to the employees: stay because they believe in the change and are ready to take over the ownership and responsibility to succeed and achieve the organizational purpose or take a leaving package of x salaries and go. The people who stay are those with the right mindset and any transformation will be so much easier. Second is gradual. Start with decoupling the salaries from the positions. Sooner or later the positions become irrelevant so no one would miss them anymore if you remove them. You must have the courage to choose the first way. On the other hand, the second way only make your journey long and painful. But it all depends on what you want and where you are. Agile is not about practices, it’s about mindset. And this is very true for Agile HR or talent management as well.

In agile organizations…

The more agile you become at the organizational level, the more flexible and dynamic is the team structure and the more difficult is to say what is the position or role. The more agile becomes the way you work, the higher need for transparency is created at every level. We can see what every person is doing and can challenge them and give feedback. Any employee can join any initiative but with all responsibility towards the organizational purpose. As nothing is hidden, it’s in a way controlled by everyone. Emergent servant leadership is the key part which links everything together and makes sure it creates harmony instead of chaos. Such environments are ready to make all salaries transparent and let employees be part of the decision. To be fair, not many companies got there, so you don’t have to do it all tomorrow. But you can still bet inspired 🙂

Agile HR: Evaluations and Performance Review

The next topic in my Agile HR series focuses on evaluations and performance reviews. Once you hire the right person to the team, it’s time to start thinking about evaluations and performance reviews. In a traditional organization, it was pretty simple. Each employee got a task assigned, each task can be evaluated and linked to particular KPI. In Agile organization, it’s not that simple as multiple people collaborate on the same task and even if you try to set some KPIs at the beginning of the year, they mostly become irrelevant somewhere on the way so there is nothing to evaluate at the end of the year.

The most simple practice used in agile environments is to set a team goal instead of an individual. There is still risk that the goal becomes obsolete during the year, but at least you support the team collaborative culture. The slightly better option is to break the year cadence and create shorter goals. After all, there is no magical on the year cadence when we deliver product regularly. A good practice is to let teams design their own goals, but you need a high level of trust in order to be able to move this direction. Some companies like OKRs, however, I see them too close to the traditional KPIs. Those were still traditional mindset practices spiced by little agility.

A good step on the way is replacing evaluation part by coaching conversation focused on employee development. As every coaching conversation, it is not about the coach but coachee (employee in this case) and is focused on raising the awareness of the person about themselves and their abilities and potentials. When done well, it can skyrocket people performance. But here is the downside – unfortunately, not many managers are good coaches which is a limit in most organizations.

Finally, if you are ready to be truly agile, how about if you do it in an agile manner and run regular frequent retrospectives instead of any form of evaluation. Together with radical transparency, it will create enough clarity about performance towards the Sprint Goal, product vision and entire organizational purpose so people can adapt in a very efficient way. Simple and powerful. Indeed we talk about not only team retrospective which brings so powerful peers feedback but also overall retrospective as it is designed for example in LeSS and organizational retrospective which can be facilitated for example in a form of world cafe or open space. All together it will engage employees in solving team, cross-team, and organizational issues, and increase their motivation to come up with creative and innovative solutions how to be better in delivering value and achieving the organizational purpose.

The frequent retrospective cadence brings regular feedback that allows fast changes and small improvements on day to day basis which as a result prevents big disappointments and surprises of traditional performance reviews which often brings demotivation and stress. Issues got solved sooner, before they are too big and poison the team or department and people get help to work on those issues early, ideally from their peers. You might not be ready for that tomorrow, as the culture of transparency and trust is not there yet, but you can go step by step until no-one misses any KPIs, performance reviews or any formal evaluations and frequent feedback, inspection, and adaptation become the regular way of work.

At this stage, we often stop using the name of Agile HR and change it to Talent Development where the entire focus of the HR is changing to support overall employee journey and development. Supporting coaching and mentoring programs, and creating an environment for effective peer feedback are just a few ideas about where to start.

Agile HR: Recruiting

The more organizations shift to Agile, the more they need to redesign how they work with the employees. During this series, we focus on different functions of HR in Agile organization and explain the fundamental shift HR need to do in order to support agility in the organization.

Knowledge and skills are not anymore the key factors of what are we looking for. Agile organization builds on top of the collaboration, encourage innovations and need high flexibility. Experiences are also applicable only to a certain extent. It’s more about having an open mind, being able to learn new things, and collaborate with others to deal with complexity and unpredictability then being an expert with deep but narrow specialization. If you don’t think so, have a look at your own career. How many of you are still having in the same specialization? Most of the people changed their career more than once. And it’s getting even faster. So would you still care about hiring experts with particular specialization? Not really as they create silos and prevent your organization from changing a direction of the business. Agile organization needs people who are ready to learn, inspect and adapt. People who are not afraid to take over responsibility and run experiments. People who are not stuck with one way of working often saying “we always did it this way” and are ready to change their way of work as the business needs it.

Skills are easier to be learned then mindset.

If you think about it, it’s very hard to create a traditional job description based on skills, and experiences as those are soon to be irrelevant. The new advertisement for an open position can say instead:

“We are looking for an enthusiastic, flexible, and open-minded person, who is ready to take over responsibility and collaborate with others on achieving the value. We are a team-oriented organization with a flat structure, which will support you in your personal growth. Join our team for a day to experience our culture. Together we can [achieve the vision].”

Quite different, right? When we tried it, no recruiting company was ready to support our needs. How many years of Java experience they need? What is the position description you are hiring for? No matter if you were looking for developers or new CEO… Quite a mismatch. Eventually, we realized that hiring new graduates is easiest for us. They were flexible, had ideas and be ready to be learned. All we had to do was to create a team learning environment based on pair and team working where they can get things fast. We realize that learning is easier than unlearning old habits, so very often, to get fresh graduates up to the speed was easier then hire Sr. Employees with individualistic habits which were creating more harm than help for the team environment. And that’s a hard message for all people who believe experience years count and shall result in a higher salary. Maybe if you are working for the government, but in Agile space, not necessarily as the recruiters may not care about your traditional company experience years at all.

Unfortunately, a similar experience was with executive search companies, no matter how ‘big name’ of recruiting company you choose. They often had no idea about what agile is, so they are not helpful assessing the candidates, nor finding relevant people either. If you are looking for a leader with an Agile mindset, they are hard to find. Most of the executives are having bad habits acting as directive managers from hierarchical traditional organizations and again, it’s easier to grow leaders from your organization then hire externally.

So if we can’t measure experience and skills and count working years, how shall we find out if the person is the right match? The same as in every other relationship. Let’s start ‘dating’. In this case, it’s about meeting team members at the interview. To be able to talk about the usual day, see if candidates feel attracted and also talk about candidates dreams and visions, to see if there is a match. Once they pass, they can go with the team to lunch. Informal conversation is critically important to learn about each other. And finally, it’s a good practice to offer a candidate one day at the company. To try and feel how it’s gonna look like.

Hiring is more about creating relationship then assessing skills

If you feel uncomfortable with having interviews just like that, and feel a need for more formal assessment, you can try to role play some situations. Again, it’s not about correct answers as there are no correct answers in the complex world, but seeing the behavior and reaction when the candidate is surprised. Those situations are great to know how the candidates react when things go unpredictably. Again, it’s more about personality, approach, and mindset then skills and knowledge.

That’s it. Forget experiences which are mostly irrelevant and skills which are soon to become irrelevant and focus on the relationship and employee experience. That’s the only way how you can be successful in finding the right employees and truly supporting the culture of the organization.