Hello and welcome to our blog. This week I wanted to talk about Social Mobility. Most of us have heard the term but, first off – what even IS Workforce agility?
We keep hearing about agility, flexibility and adaptability as the key words around the future of business. It plays to us not being rigid, immobile and stuck in our ways – of course we’d want to be moving and flexible and able to achieve more of our priorities.
So what is Workforce Agility?
- Is it Friday Yoga as a Team?
- Is it seeing how fast we can move around the workplace?
Not quite.
It’s actually all about giving your workforce the right skills to be able to help you do what you said you would.
We know how it feels when we don’t have workforce agility.
That might be an easier thing to look at first.
It’s when we can’t do what we said because we are tied to delivering different things, sometimes we can even know we shouldn’t be doing those things any more, but we don’t know how to shift out of that process. It can feel like we’re not moving fast enough. That we can’t do the work. That the stress and pressure is not helping as we’re just not aligned to deliver.
We can also struggle to hire people with the right skills, because we’re not entirely sure what it is ‘that person’ will need to do when they join our team.
We might have an idea but we spend time looking at their skills and attitude before we bring people in, to ensure they’ll be able to roll with the changes we get when we’re working in uncertain times.
So – workforce INAgility can feel like we’re doing the wrong things, we’re not helping people use all their skills, we’re not really delivering – we’re kind of just surviving and going through the process of the day to day. We’re maybe an Organisation, not a workFORCE.
What could an agile organisation feel like?
It could feel like you are valued and understood as an individual – you know your skills, your potential and so do the people around you. You can support one another, you can see opportunities for growth and movement and you can deliver the work RIGHT as well as doing the RIGHT work.
How does it feel as a leader?
You can see your teams skills, you can have confidence in the ability to deliver what you need to.
You can see the gaps and the right interventions for your team when you have them, that might mean training, skills development, job shadowing or it may mean hiring the right people in.
It also might mean bringing someone on from another area of your business.
You have confidence in your workforce.
Did you know, only one in 3 people look inside their organisation for the next opportunity.
Why is that?
They aren’t aware of the opportunities – for one thing.
They can’t see the conversations people are having about jobs and they can’t always see themselves in a job either – if they’ve not done it before.
It’s great for agile organisations to be able to see the talent they have in house and have a comparable for their own people to move into new roles first before they hire in, you don’t always know about the hidden skills and aspirations of your people.
Our development conversations aren’t always focused on the ‘What Next’ as much as they are on the “today’ version of your people or team. Or it might even be a historic review of how we did something. Great if we’re learning from that, if it is a true retrospective, but sometimes these approaches can delay moving forward with the right momentum.
We can be blocked from developing too, perhaps by people who know you do a good job at something and don’t want to lose you, or by people with less altruistic intentions.
Having an up to date picture of the talent you have and the skills they have is where your journey to workforce agility begins.
If you are in a merger or acquisition landscape – as so many Housing Associations are right now, you know you want to understand the whole picture across those organisations to optimise and offer meaningful career opportunities to your people, as well as being able to identify those gaps jeopardising successful delivery.
Talent isn’t really an afterthought. It’s not a luxury.
Your workforce agility should be front and centre.
If you don’t deliver – it’s going to be down to the people you have… or don’t have:
- Those building targets need builders, project managers, commercial teams.
- Those retrofit programmes need new skills and new education.
- If you don’t put your people first and understand them, remember that the rest of the delivery you talk about rests on their shoulders.
Dinah Turner
Customer Director, Skillsminer