An agile team has always been on the list of priorities of businesses. But its utmost significance was realized by companies only after the pandemic struck the world. According to a study by McKinsey and Company, 93% of companies that had an agile business model sustained and outperformed the companies that followed the traditional systems. Agility is mandatory to confront similar kinds of situations even if they were to happen in the future.  

Agile approaches increase an organization’s overall productivity by enabling the employees and superiors to focus on more productive and complex work rather than simple tasks. According to Harvard Business Review, in a truly agile organization, the CEO is able to focus more on strategy and less on operations management. Thus, building agile teams and organizations can improve performance and help businesses to weather any kind of storm.   

Working remotely is a piece of cake to companies that master agility. Don’t you agree? They would have all the systems and processes already in place. Besides, the teams could easily communicate and collaborate, no matter where they work from.  

What is Business Agility?  

The ability of an organization to respond rapidly to the challenges causing business disruption with no change made to the performance and momentum. Businesses should be able to adapt, be flexible, and sustain even in the hardest times. “Our team’s agile mindset and culture meant we were able to more quickly respond to needed business requirements and changes during the pandemic,” says Charles Roffe, Executive Advisor, Cloud Center of Excellence Lead, CVS Health.  

Organization Stability  

During business difficulties, only the organizations with stability can effectively leverage their agile nature to overcome the challenges. Efficacious systems and processes in the DNA of the organization decide the success of agility. Without stability, in the name of agility, an entire organization may collapse because of a lack of direction and guidance. For Organization stability, leaders should train the teams to have the following.  

1. Focus on what really matters  

2. Overcome the challenges  

3. After-action reviews  

4. Confront failure and spread positivity  

5. Increase their morale  

6. Formulate strategies to rebound quickly from adversity  

Objectives and Key Results  

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) are agile and transparent in nature. They are agile because they can be tweaked or changed completely along the way, without having to wait for the year to end. This framework helps the companies to have goals that consistently guide them through difficulties to the destination. Depending upon the changing business needs, the OKRs can be changed, and the teams can easily align their individual goals with the overall business objective.  

As the key results are numerically defined and have a clear timeframe to achieve them, they never become the eternally-pending tasks. The teams will be able to focus on their priorities and work on them to help their company reach greater heights. The Tech industry’s leading giants like Google, Intel leveraged OKR to follow their dreams. Some key benefits of OKRs include the following, as stated by John Doerr in an interview with Harvard Business Review.  

1. Focus  

2. Alignment  

3. Commitment  

4. Tracking  

5. Stretching  

“One of the core tenets of OKRs is that it helps organizations to nurture self-driven employees. So not only remote leadership but OKR empowers every individual employee to commit with a larger drive. Traditionally organizations operated on the waterfall model, a plan which was centrally developed and executed with little inputs from the ground. The current remote/ work from home model calls for a much more agile and fluid execution strategy. Under the new agile regime, employees work with two to four-week sprints where the duration of the meetings is less as is the number of meetings.  

Through these multiple short sprints, the teams achieve one module and then move on to the next module. These multiple short modules give a lot of flexibility to both organizations and customers.”  

– Bastin Gerald, CEO, to Dataquest  

Continuous Check-ins  

Imagine if your teams are still dependent on annual reviews, then it would have greatly stumbled while trying hard to get a foothold of the situation. Building agile teams through the adoption of continuous check-ins makes an organization to undergo any kind of transition seamlessly. Because the teams are involved in the planning stage, and so they do know what the goals of the organization are. Even if they are unclear of their direction, they can immediately clarify the doubts with their managers during continuous check-ins.   

“We tallied the number of hours the organization was spending on performance management—and found that completing the forms, holding the meetings, and creating the ratings consumed close to 2 million hours a year. As we studied how those hours were spent, we realized that many of them were eaten up by leaders’ discussions behind closed doors about the outcomes of the process. We wondered if we could somehow shift our investment of time from talking to ourselves about ratings to talking to our people about their performance and careers—from a focus on the past to a focus on the future.”  

– Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, the authors of Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World  

Continuous Performance Management System  

An effective continuous performance management system can help you build agile teams as they track the performance of employees from time to time and not once-in-a-year. This process keeps the teams engaged and also motivated. The employees will never be disengaged and lose the track of work and goals. The teams will be ready to battle any environment and bag success. The agile performance management system includes the following features.  

1. 360 degree feedback  

2. Rewards and recognition  

3. Frequent one-on-one meetings  

4. Employee engagement surveys  

Thus, building agile teams is the key to success, especially with an uncertain future ahead of us. Agility ensures business continuity and also helps teams to thrive and achieve their goals, no matter where they work from. Businesses with rigidity in working models and operations cannot sustain longer in this ever-changing business environment. Sustainability comes from adaptability.