The competitiveness of companies depends on their ability to design a customer-centered business and to adapt to constantly changing conditions.
Each organization develops customized responses that seek to enhance its own values, culture, and assets.
However, we believe there are two recurring dynamics.
Transformations are characterized by strong autonomy, the spread of knowledge, and delegation even at lower levels, in order to respond quickly to ever-changing conditions.
In this context, some argue that HR is destined to disappear, or at least to play a marginal role by acquiring new knowledge — including coding and digital technology skills.
However, this seems to be a view born of linear thinking, which mechanically translates digital changes to define the evolution of the HR function.
Those who adopt this linear thinking make simple equations:
Customer Experience = Employee Experience…
Branding = Employer Branding…
Recruiting = Digital Recruiting…
These are practices that a modern HR department must continue to oversee. The real transformation, however, is towards the Modern Agile or Agile HR model.
What does it mean?
It’s a journey that starts with adopting the four principles of Agile HR:
- Deliver Value Continuously – Release value continuously
- Make People Awesome – Make people awesome
- Experiment & Learn Rapidly – Experiment and learn rapidly
- Make Safety a Prerequisite – Make safety a prerequisite
Agile HR helps rethink HR practices and, above all, enables new types of interactions among the different HR structures.
What guides it is a systemic vision of practices and skills within the HR department, all oriented toward the goal of continuously delivering value.
This evolution allows contributions, skills, and expertise to be directed toward value creation — without rigidly codified processes within individual silos, but instead moving in an agile way to respond to change.
The HR department does not disappear; rather, it is the first function that must make the leap toward a new way of working, thereby triggering an acceleration in the transformation of the entire organization.
Oh, and the Digital?
For us, it’s no longer a novelty or an element of innovation — it’s the new normal. It’s an option on the table that offers greater freedom in organizational evolution.