Workforce Agility: A Strategic Edge for HR Leaders

Hiring strategies that chase technical skills are likely to fall short due to the rapid pace at which skills are changing. For example, a Gartner study revealed that one-third of technical skills listed in job postings for technology, finance and sales positions in 2017 had become obsolete by 2021.

This rapid evolution underscores the critical need for workforce agility to keep organizations adaptable and competitive.

HR professionals know this because they’re struggling to find people who have the skills to meet the company’s current needs and whatever new challenges the organization will face in the future. But how can organizations hire for future skills they may not even know they will need years in the future?

Building Workforce Agility: 6 Essential Characteristics

The answer lies in power skills (often diminutively called “soft skills”), which form the foundation that enables employees to perform effectively across different roles throughout their careers.

Today, employees need to be able to negotiate constant disruptive change and adapt to rapidly changing skill requirements. Research on thousands of workers has identified six essential characteristics that collectively enable the agility employees need to succeed in today’s work environments:

1. Resilience: The ability to maintain composure under pressure and direct energy toward constructive solutions rather than becoming paralyzed by uncertainty.
2. Creative Problem-Solving: As established solutions become obsolete, professionals must generate novel ideas and think beyond conventional parameters to develop innovative approaches.
3. Adaptability: Effective adjustment of plans, goals, and priorities in response to dynamic situations without excessive attachment to original approaches.
4. Continuous Upskilling: The ability and willingness to engage in perpetual learning, proactively identifying and acquiring emerging skills before they become mandatory.
5. Interpersonal Savvy: Demonstrating keen insight into others’ motivations and tailoring approaches to effectively influence diverse stakeholders, especially in matrix organizations where formal authority is limited.
6. Cultural Versatility: Taking conscious, deliberate action to understand the needs, customs, and values of other cultures while recognizing how one’s own cultural conditioning influences assumptions.

These power skills are crucial for effective performance; they stem partly from innate characteristics, making them harder to train than technical skills. But they can be accurately identified. Organizations can use formal assessments to determine which candidates and employees have a natural predisposition toward these critical power skills.

Building Organizational Agility: The Leadership Imperative

However, even when an organization hires the nimblest employees, this alone is insufficient to develop agility within teams and organizations, and doing so is crucial to a company’s success.

For workforce agility to truly take root, HR professionals should collaborate closely with leadership to shape the organizational conditions that enable sustained adaptability and growth. And if leadership needs convincing that this is a worthwhile undertaking, HR can tell them this: Research shows that agile organizations achieve a 150% higher return on invested capital and a 500% higher return on equity.

Building Workforce Agility: Key Conditions

Three conditions rise above the rest as essential for building agility: creating stability, rightsizing teamwork, and developing self-correcting teams.

Creating Stability

Paradoxically, stability is the most important condition for workforce agility. Teams simply cannot be agile if they are not stable. Leaders build stability by:

• Consistently setting clear priorities to enable rapid, aligned decisions when responding to change
• Removing performance barriers such as outdated tools and overly complex processes
• Optimizing failure by treating unsuccessful initiatives as essential learning opportunities
• Reassuring people through transparent acknowledgment of difficulties while focusing on pathways forward, and
• Balancing resources with work requirements to prevent burnout and mistakes.

Rightsizing Teamwork

Rightsizing teamwork is also vital for workforce agility.

First, leaders must define what good teamwork means in each situation, recognizing that different tasks require different types. Some tasks simply require one person to hand off work to another, while others may require close collaboration. Other tasks may be better left to individuals to complete on their own.

Next, keep meetings small and purpose-driven, cutting those that are unnecessary, and streamline decision-making. In many organizations, people spend so much time in meetings, they have to spend time on weekends or after hours to finish their own work. In that same vein, empower team members to say no to unnecessary teamwork so they can prioritize individual focus time when appropriate.

Developing Self-Correcting Teams

Finally, the most agile organizations cultivate workplace cultures where people feel safe to raise performance issues and resolve them without blame.

Leaders create an environment of psychological safety, where raising issues constructively is valued and rewarded. They employ clear, objective metrics to spot issues early and reduce emotional reactions.

When challenges arise, instead of jumping to quick, surface-level conclusions, agile teams identify root causes through structured methods like the “Five Whys.“

Workforce Agility and Resilience: HR’s Blueprint for Success

The turbulence characterizing recent years shows no signs of slowing.

HR can help ensure that their organizations will thrive by prioritizing workforce agility, and that means hiring agile employees and creating the conditions that support agility.

In a world where the only certainty is change, workforce agility isn’t just an advantage — it’s essential for survival. Companies need to train their leaders to build the conditions for agility, so they can outpace their less nimble competitors during the rapidly changing and uncertain times we are all experiencing.