Agile management is on the agenda in boardrooms across the world – and not always for positive reasons.
Lots of organisations have been swept up in the fascination with agility, rushing to restructure their teams and transform how they work. McKinsey reports that agility “is catching fire”, with a quarter of companies now implementing agile methods in key units. Where once the focus would have been on management controls and individual productivity, there’s a new language being used – all about scrums, sprints, time boxes and self-organizing teams.
It’s also clear that many CEOs are struggling to implement agile thinking. In one study, 70% of agile practitioners reported tensions between their teams and the rest of the organisation. When you look at the language used to describe agile management, perhaps that should be no surprise.
My issue is not with the theory of agility. Many organisations desperately need to change how they work, to reduce silos, and to be able to respond more directly to their customer needs. For them, agility may well provide a helpful framework, although there’s a growing set of case studies showing where agile transformations fail.
My concern is with the language used to promote agility in businesses. Advocates of agile thinking are undermining the very idea they seek to promote by spouting business jargon that often isn’t credible with employees, is seen as code for cutbacks and fails to explain the real employee benefits of agile working.
We’ve worked with a number of organisations undertaking agile transformation and here’s the four biggest learnings about communications we’ve found.
1. Avoid business speak
As long-standing advocates for agile working have argued, the whole idea “depends on having a cadre of eager participants”. Earning employee buy-in is therefore fundamental to the transformation’s success and the way it’s explained really does matter. Unfortunately, words like scrums, sprints, and tribes may sound cool but they are totally alien to most organisations and strongly suggest agility is the latest in a long line of business fads that can be ignored.
The concepts aren’t difficult to explain, however, and it would be easy for organisations to reinterpret the approaches in a way that feels in keeping with the organisation’s own individual lexicon and values. Unfortunately, it seems too few companies spend time really listening to their employees before introducing an agile programme, which is ironic for a business strategy all about devolving decision-making.
Before change is implemented, the leadership needs to start with their internal audience and seek to understand what they really want, think and feel about where they work, so that the new approach can be explained in a way that feels in tune with the organisation. Having recently conducted employee focus groups on this issue, I can confirm the feedback is sometimes challenging but always invaluable to help improve internal comms.
2. Understand the gap between what’s said and what’s heard
It’s a common mistake in communications to think that because something has been said, it’s been heard and understood in the way intended. All too often, the message lands in a certain context which leads the recipient to understand something different. This is particularly true of agile changes.
When the CEO says “lean” and “agile”, too often what’s heard by employees is “cuts” and “redundancies”. This is in part because of the way agility is being delivered in practice. As Stephen Denning, author of The Age of Agile, wrote in Forbes, agility can be used “as just another set of tools and processes for reducing headcount”. Big management consultancies are particularly guilty, promoting their services to business by focusing on the financial savings: “Go agile to slash costs”. Agile transformation is also taking place when job cutbacks are already impacting employee morale. In a 2019 survey of employees across Europe, productivity was felt to be held back significantly not by the absence of a ‘scrum’ philosophy but by the lack of sufficient team members.
With this backdrop, CEOs have to work much harder to reassure employees about the real motives behind any changes – just claiming it’s only about improving customer service or employee morale won’t be sufficient to overcome their fears.
3. Be honest about what needs to change
Agility relies on open and transparent working, constant reviews and monitoring, and then the ability to adapt and move on quickly. Of course, most organisations don’t work like this already, or they wouldn’t need to change. Yet you wouldn’t necessarily know that when listening to how companies talk about agile transformation. A lot of time is spent focusing on creating scrums, reorganising teams, and the like. Often, very little is spent establishing what needs to change to make the organisation more open, or more focused in its priorities and quicker to adapt.
Predictably, employees aren’t fooled. For example, only a third of employees in the US, France, Germany, Spain and the UK really believe that in their company “we openly share information, knowledge and ideas with each other”. Even less said they think there’s good co-operation across teams. These aren’t arguments against agile working – on the contrary, they show exactly why some organisations need it. Yet they also highlight the size of the shift that will be required in order to ensure the prerequisites of agility are in place, and business leaders need to be honest about this from the start.
4. Explain why employees should care
Finally, as we’ve seen, too much of the justification for agile working is focused on business performance and cost savings: as well as pushing messages that aren’t particularly valued, CEOs are also missing the opportunity to explain benefits that employees would welcome.
Our research suggests there’s five in particular that CEOs should talk more about.
Flexible working. Creating smaller teams with a project focus rather than locating people in big departments often creates the space for more flexible working and this is a potentially big benefit to employees. Flexible working is widely associated with improved employee engagement and satisfaction and is believed to increase productivity.
Greater autonomy. Research suggests an astonishing number of hours are spent waiting for decisions or duplicating tasks others have already done. The promise of agility to create simpler decision-making is very appealing to employees, as it brings with it the prospect of increased autonomy, and more control over their working day.
Better management. Frustrations about remote bosses and decisions taken from ‘on high’ are prominent in the list of things people dislike about their work. The concept of devolving decision-making to teams who work closely together on specific tasks offers the potential to overcome at least some of these concerns.
Personal development. Creating a flatter structure with a small team intimately involved in working through a project brings with it the chance for employees to get more opportunity to learn and develop in their role. Given that ‘opportunities for personal development’ is the most important criteria for millennials when applying for a job, agility could also provide a better way to engage younger workers.
Job security and opportunities for advancement. Paradoxically, agile working should be associated not with job cuts but with greater job security. More effective working, resulting in better product development or more effective customer service, should help improve business performance, which in turn leads to greater stability and long-term career development for employees.
The average CEO is in post for a short time – only 5 years – and their tenure is falling. That’s not long to make a meaningful impact on anything, let alone organisational structure and internal culture. So if the focus is on agility, CEOs can’t afford to get their messages wrong. A little more honesty about what’s involved and the benefits for employees, and a little less jargon and agile-speak, could help make the difference between effective business transformation and change that falls flat.
