What is Organizational Agility & Why is it Valuable?

Why organizational agility?

Operating and growing a business of any size in today’s digital environment is difficult. This is true from the perspective of business performance and sustainable revenue growth and from an employee engagement, growth and success point of view.

With the speed of business continuing to increase, there needs to be better collaboration and execution around strategic goals, and to be more responsive to market changes and business demands. At the same time, more employee coaching and real-time development is needed given that diverse workforces include various professional backgrounds, skill levels, performance priorities, and working styles – all trying to keep pace with constant change and faster business cycles.

“Organizational agility means all your people are motivated, highly responsive to change, and performing at their best in any business environment.” Rajeev Behera, Co-Founder of Reflektive

In order to succeed in this kind of environment while managing the pressure of sustainable revenue growth, organizations need to apply a more agile approach to empowering HR leaders, managers and employees. Ultimately, all successful businesses help managers and employees to drive their best performance and growth initiatives that support overall business performance.

Organizational agility revolves around strengthening relationships between managers and direct reports and giving them a working environment to improve collaboration, innovation and growth-conversations enabled by technology.  Further, agile organizations drive strategic business goals in more effective ways that improve margins, predictability and profitability.

McKinsey & Company defines organizational agility as an ability for an organization to renew itself, adapt, change quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, ambiguous, turbulent environment. Agility is not incompatible with stability – agility requires stability.

Organizational agility translates into business value, including:

  • Accountability and alignment to achieve strategic goals
  • Continuous learning and people development
  • Customer engagement, success and retention
  • More responsive innovation across the business
  • People and revenue growth in sustainable ways

From Human Resources to Resources for Humans (#HRtoRH)

Rajeev has been talking and writing about his “HR to RH” (Human Resources to Resource for Humans) idea for several months now.

In fact, a new ‘Inspiring Leaders’ podcast episode, hosted by Terry Lipovski, was just published about this topic.

Let’s touch on three highlights from the podcast that speaks volumes about the business value of organizational agility:

1. Real-time engagement is core for organizational agility and employee success.

When managers and employees have frequent, quality conversations around development and performance during the course of business – they don’t need to do expensive, uninspiring  performance reviews at the end of the year.

2. Create human-centered experiences that motivate and enable employee performance.

There’s a shift in the way people work, grow and create value today. It’s very important to understanding how people work – to meet them in their current workflows and natural ways of working rather than forcing them into awkward, outdated HR processes. Providing resources to employees with human-centered experiences is now an economic imperative for businesses that rely on knowledge workers to innovate and execute in more agile and sustainable ways. And frankly, the power dynamic shifted several years ago from employers to employees so it’s important to transform your HR strategy, sooner rather than later. The urgency is real.

3. All businesses have two major challenges to address given widespread disruption.

Business leaders and their teams are wrestling with a number of external pressures. One, there’s a lot of innovation happening across industries and this is causing significant business disruption, talent shortages, and competition for business of all sizes. That said, the second challenge is organizations need to become more agile and better at enabling their employees to create a steady flow of new ideas, whereby a percentage of those innovations convert into viable products and services, intellectual capital, and competitive advantage across the business.

[bctt tweet=”Organizational agility means people are motivated, responsive to change, and performing at their best” username=”reflektive”]

At Reflektive, we believe creating a culture of real-time feedback is the foundation for organizational agility. With our innovative, real-time performance management platform we enable workforces with tools to intuitively and naturally give and receive feedback in their daily workflows. And with our best practices and customer education, employees are in a position to easily learn how to interact and perform as more agile organizations across all business functions; agility is no longer reserved for just IT teams.

Learn More with this Episode of Inspiring Leaders

Tune into this new episode with Terry Lipovski and Rajeev Behera to learn more about HR to RH and organizational agility ideas and insights. It’s an informative and entertaining way to spend 20 minutes at your desk or on the go!

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