People and Agility: Creating an Agile Workforce
February 12, 2025
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Well, until a few years ago, talent management was just a function of HRD. And even the largest of the organizations didn’t focus much on managing and developing their talent.
However, with increasing challenges and extreme volatility in business environment, companies are now realizing that they cannot just rely on their capital and automated systems. Rather they need human intellect and creativity to strive and thrive.
Organizations have always needed people. But the big difference is that in the current times they need people who can respond to change effectively and frequently. More precisely, they need people who are agile – in their thought and approach; those who are flexible and can easily and repeatedly adapt to changes – both internal and external.
This means that creating talent agility is important to sustain and remain at the forefront of the competition. Yet every organization speaks of the importance of getting the right talent onboard and retaining its best people, they haven’t really taken any solid step in this direction. And this is a dichotomy. They not only need to attract agile talent but also retain them.
So, before we see how talent agility can be acquired, let’s first understand what it means.
Talent agility is the:
And from the organization’s point of view, talent agility is having the talent that:
When it comes to talent agility, larger businesses face a wider gap than startups and small businesses. Employees in startups are more flexible and agile as they are used to perform multiple jobs and work harder to make ends meet. On the other hand, the workforce in larger companies is less agile and flexible. They are less comfortable in doing things that are out of their expertise. The situation is even worse in government institutions. The talent agility gap is the widest in all the government areas/departments.
There have been many studies in this field, which tell that:
All organizations admit the need of highly skilled, flexible and agile workforce to strive and thrive in economic tumultuous times. But they face numerous challenges because of which they find it difficult to bridge the gap. Sometimes, there are budget constraints. At other times, it’s the lack of awareness and keenness.
Before you even try to fill the talent agility gap, it’s important to assess your company’s current standing. It gives you a clear picture of what you
Assess talent agility gap in your organization by asking these questions:
Once you find answers to these questions, you would know what processes are outdated; what need to be changed, and what new things to be implemented. You will be able to spot the talent agility gap while also gaining clarity on how to bridge this gap.
Bridging the talent agility gap is a step in itself towards acquiring business agility. Manpower and its management is the most crucial aspect of a business. And business agility is more about relying on human instincts and abilities to respond to and drive changes. Therefore, there is a direct relationship between business agility and talent agility.
Here are a couple of ways to bridge talent agility gap. Take a look:
Highly agile companies have a well-defined career model in place for their employees. Their people are told right in the beginning that the company will look after them if they commit themselves to a career with it. They will be trained on new skills and be future ready on company’s expense. This is one of the best ways to keep them motivated and focused. Also, this is a strategy to retain them.
This is an approach to find highly flexible talent in the industry without promising them a career and job security in return. This approach has been adopted by many companies of repute, such as LinkedIn wherein they tell individuals that they will highly paid and can remain in job as long as they are able to perform brilliantly. This is about finding the experts skills right away, so that there’s no need to train and develop employees. They begin with work as soon as they are hired.
Internet has made it easier and faster to look for experts who are ready to perform a job at a fixed price within the contracted time. Crowdsourcing of labor, in fact, is an older technique but finds great relevance in bridging the talent agility gap. Precisely, an organization outsources the task that needs to be performed almost immediately and requires high level of skills. One obvious advantage is that the talent is not hired on full-time basis and is paid only for the work done.
Therefore, the talent agility gap can be filled by three methods:
However, there’s no hard and fast rule on which of the methods works better for your company. You will need to identify it on your own and conduct a hit-and-trial experiment. Or there may be another way that can help you bridge the gap and enhance your company’s talent agility.
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