Learning & Development

5 Things You Need to Develop a More Agile Workforce

Continuing from yesterday’s post, here are 5 more things you’ll need when training and developing more agile employees.

agile

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1. Enhanced and Transparent Communications

To maintain an agile workforce, constant communication is needed amongst different employees with different roles and responsibilities across your entire organization. All employees will need immediate access to company data and information and will need to collaborate and interact with their fellow employees and bosses instantaneously.
In an agile workforce, employees must learn how to rely on various collaboration tools and techniques that are used across an organization. As an example, Vidyard, was able to foster collaboration between their sales and marketing departments using digital tools and was able to grow its business by more than 1,000% over a 2-year period, according to information parsed by Salesforce. Overall, these tools drive collaboration, innovation, and business.

2. Empowerment and Engagement

For your workforce to become more agile, you’ll need to make sure your employees remain empowered to innovate because they’re actively engaged in their own development and the success of your business.
In an agile work environment, pay raises and bonuses alone won’t always work to motivate employees to work harder. Instead, employees in an agile workplace want more opportunities to learn and grow, and they want to do work that serves a real purpose in the world and that builds a pathway toward their individual career trajectories.
And as employees become more remote, rewarding collaboration and teamwork will become more and more important to empowering them and keeping them motivated and engaged.

3. Mobile-First Strategies and Policies

As a workplace becomes more agile, more of its employees and contractors will start to work from remote locations and will begin to rely on mobile devices to complete most, if not all, of their work tasks.
So, moving forward, you’ll not only want to develop a BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Device) policy and ensure your systems and platforms are mobile-ready; you’ll want to make sure all your business systems and platforms are mobile-first.
This means that you’ll want to develop and implement your systems and platforms with the assumption that employees will access them from a mobile device before they’ll ever access them from a desktop computer or static computer system that can’t be accessed remotely.

4. Continuous Upskilling

To ensure your employees are prepared to tackle the roles and responsibilities of the ever-changing and agile business world, you will have to make sure they are constantly upskilled and that they remain agile, too.
You’ll want to make sure they have ample opportunities to self-direct their own learning as needed, and that they’re always able to learn about new systems, strategies, technologies, etc., that will make them more efficient at their jobs.

5. Strategic Partnerships

As you train and develop your employees to become more agile, you will need to make sure you’re building and nurturing strategic partnerships across your organization. As communications become more transparent and enhanced, and departments across your organization work together more intimately to share data and build agile strategies and work in a more agile fashion, your organization’s learning and development department will also need to participate.
Keep the information above and in yesterday’s post in mind as you work to train and develop a more agile workforce.

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