an independent report from lyonsdown, distributed with the sunday telegraph
July 2011
Business Technology
5
Agile people
The inspiration of innovation Agile businesses are better places to work – and are best for getting the most out of employees
By Rod Newing An agile organisation is very different place to work from a traditional one. Control is replaced by trust, structured working hours disappear, managers stop taking all the decisions, staff are not told how to do their job and productivity is no longer measured in working hours. “Goal- and task-orientated staff draw on the knowledge and expertise of other people,” says Samantha Kinstrey, managing director at technology specialist 2e2 Training. “Agile organisations encourage home and remote working during hours that suit the employee and the task. Managers encourage their people to make decisions and focus only on what they deliver. As long as work is done on time, it doesn’t matter how and when people do it.” Employees working in an agile organisation thrive on challenges, responsibility, teamwork and freedom. “Being inflexible can be stifling,” says Kinstrey. “But agile businesses create a working environment that has creativity, innovation and enthusiasm in their DNA.” This is a far cry from traditional workplaces, where research shows that many employees are unhappy. According to research company Career Innovation, 55 per cent of employees are dissatisfied with their level of achievement, 55 per cent want a complete change of direction and 54 per cent are not satisfied with the way their skills are being used.
Employees working in an agile organisation thrive on challenges, responsibility, teamwork and freedom
In an agile organisation, employees control when, where and how they work most productively for different types of work’ – Winter An agile business tackles some of those issues. Such organisations no longer rely on isolated individuals to create and implement new ideas – instead, spontaneous selforganising teams make collective decisions without management guidance. “Individuals work in a highly competitive environment, within international matrix management structures and go from project to project,” says Jonathan Winter, founder of Career Innovation. “They control when, where and how they work most productively for different types of work. Office space is designed to encourage creativity, inspiration, team formation and faster decision-making.” Take Allianz Insurance, which created a programme to promote individual motivation and innovation. It encourages employees to submit ideas to improve the business and its products and services – so far more than 20,000 ideas have been submitted, 17,000 have been implemented and cumulative benefits exceed £11m. Employees receive a percentage of the costs savings resulting from an idea they submit. “Inspiring employees and engaging them in improving your business is a challenging task,” says chief executive Andrew Torrance. “The programme allows employees to feel a sense of ownership in the evolution and progress of the business. This is a key motivator and in turn challenges the business to adapt to new ways of doing things, because innovation is now at the heart of everything we do.” When recruitment firm CBSbutler experienced a slowdown and increased
competition in many of its sectors, it decided it needed to become a more agile business. “Encouraging people to innovate is key,” says managing director David Leyson. So the company designed a new reward system for staff and introduced a number of initiatives including quarterly innovation
forums in which staff from each operational area worked together to create ideas and solve problems within the business. In an agile organisation, individuals must also be agile, as well as the systems and the organisation itself. They must embrace new responsibilities, learn new areas, work with new systems, seek new sources or knowledge, reach out to new suppliers and customers and decide for themselves how to contribute to achieving the overall vision. Insurance giant Aviva, which in 2009 became a single global brand, bringing together 46,000 people across 28 countries under one identity, has seen the potential in encouraging new ways of thinking. In its Systems Thinking initiative, business systems are designed by the employees to improve customer service, cut costs and errors, and increase renewals and crossselling. “We encourage our people at all levels to think innovatively,” says HR director John Ainley. “They are the people who understand the systems intimately and who understand what the customer really wants.” Aviva’s annual Customer Cup tasks employees across the group to form teams to generate ideas to improve the customer experience, which they then submit as a business plan. It motivates employees to think in more depth about the customer experience and many of the ideas are delivering benefits to both the customer and the business. “It unifies the company around a single brand promise,” adds Ainley. However, according to Career Innovation’s Jonathan Winter, not all organisations recognise the role of individual employee agility. Individual creativity and initiative cannot be compelled or written into a job description. They also fail to realise that agility involves helping people to feel secure during change – and that can hold a business back.
Working out socially BT is using social networking to take flexible working to new levels Given that open collaboration is a key characteristic of an agile organisation, it’s not surprising that some companies have embarked on a corporate social media strategy. Take BT, which has been a pioneer in flexible and remote working, and which employs many knowledge workers. Its company intranet hosts both formal and informal content, including a growing social media presence. Tools include BTpedia, a corporate Wikipedia started in 2007 that now has several thousand articles that are not subject to formal content policies. “No articles are owned by senior managers and the wiki is simply accepted as part of the information furniture,” says Mark Morrell, BT’s intranet manager. Then there’s Podcast Central, a podcasting platform for video and audio files which is based on the YouTube experience. In addition there is a blog platform called Blog Central with more than 500 blogs, some team-orientated, others individual blogs and some by senior managers. The vast majority are active.
There are also live online CEO chats with Ian Livingstone, BT’s chief executive. And now BT is rolling out a Facebook style profile page for each employee, which will help people find and work with the right experts for projects. Morrell says: “We don’t allow anonymous blogs or wiki articles. People are happy to be named and be responsible for what they say. It’s a sign of our maturity. Having this information published online and having senior people up there on the site makes managers more approachable, brings people down to earth and removes barriers. “When you’re engaging with a line of communication that someone in your team has triggered, you have to be more agile in thinking and behaviour. You have to be quicker to respond and aware of the channels themselves. “In the future I’d love to see the situation where at least half the people in BT contribute content and their views via some kind of social media tool. We’re nowhere near that at the moment, but we’re ahead of many organisations.” Marc Beishon