5 Ways to Build an Agile Organization

An agile business model aims at satisfying customer wants through the continuous delivery of valuable goods and services. It’s a customer-centric organization that transforms people into cohesive communities through a shared vision and purpose. It quickly adapts to the marketplace and environmental changes and makes fast decisions while focusing on its customers.

Agile organizations encourage sharing information across teams to empower them to make decisions and improve efficiency and impact. They also listen to their customers’ needs throughout a product’s lifecycle and add value where necessary. Here are ways to build an agile organization:

1. Change your organizational structure

To build an agile organization, shift to a non-hierarchical organizational system of operations to allow your business more flexibility and the ability to respond to market shifts and changes quickly. It encourages open communication, fast activity cycles, an autonomous teams’ network, and customer-centricity to allow quick decision-making across all levels.

A manager in an agile organization communicates the company’s shared objectives and encourages the team, especially those close to the customers, to make informed decisions and act on customer feedback. Consider getting support for the transformation of your company to an agile organization from experts such as Innovation Ecosystem.

2. Hire a dynamic, flexible team

Introducing agility into your company should start from the HR department and how they recruit. Stop looking for self-starters and team players; instead, go for creativity, collaboration, and curiosity. Look for candidates who can’t easily fit into a box; generalists with entrepreneurial mindsets. Once you find suitable candidates, find ways to incentivize them to retain them.

3. Establish scalable systems to enhance visibility and information sharing

Agile organizations have vital processes and procedures to support accountability, flexibility, free flow of information, fast decision-making, and more. These should grow with the organization to create a balance between stability and agility, develop a culture of learning and collaboration, and change leadership.

4. Encourage collaboration

When a team works together to achieve shared goals and objectives, they share ideas and skills, working faster and more efficiently to achieve the desired outcome. To facilitate and optimize collaboration in your organization, clearly communicate your goals, objectives, and expectations to ensure the team works towards the same target, enhancing ownership and accountability.

Consider eliminating organizational silos as they make it difficult to actualize a collaborative workforce by creating overlapping functions, duplicating efforts, inflating costs, and inconsistent decision-making, which negatively impacts agility and growth. Establishing processes that facilitate information documentation and discussion helps to avoid creating information silos. Additionally, adopt modern collaboration technology to enhance team interaction and quick decision-making. Take advantage of team collaboration tools to develop collaboration across departments and teams.

5. Build an agile culture

An agile culture creates an environment supported by core values, practices, and behaviors to enable all levels of an organization to quickly adapt to strategic, cultural, and any other changes. Agility brings about a significant shift from highly structured environments by breaking down workplace barriers, flattening organizations, and offering employees greater independence and autonomy. Find ways to create an agile culture in your organization for growth and stability.

Endnote

An agile organization requires an agile team, and to build such a team, you should commit to organizational stability. Use these tips to transform your company into an agile organization.