Rethinking the employee experience in changing times

As the workplace evolves, new agile working methodologies such as scrums, tribes and squads are replacing traditional top down ‘command and control’ organisational structures.

The benefits of these new methodologies are manifold, cross functional teams, knowledge sharing, rapid innovation and a focus on end user needs. However, with these new types of working come unique new challenges too. 

Agile working methods benefit from co-location due to their reliance on stand-ups, transparent processes, and increased need for constant collaboration. However, team members are often in multiple locations, have flexible work arrangements, and work across multiple time zones. This puts huge pressures on traditional places of work, with many organisations falling short due to lack of flexibility, established working practices and distributed populations.

Agile working also puts unique demands on communication software, which now needs to support coaching of squads, capability management, knowledge sharing across and within tribes, the visualization of all aspects of the product development process, and complex discussions as squads’ experiment and iterate. Many traditional forms of communication such as email, cloud storage and video conferencing fall short on providing the nuanced conduits that teams really need.  

Employee experience will face the biggest changes as Agile working focuses on self-organisation, autonomy of the individual, experimentation and an elimination of chains of command. While this works for some, other people within the organisation may experience negative reactions such as anxiety and stress due to the lack of structure. Collaboration across divisions and sharing of data may also be counter-intuitive to many, especially older employees who may not have the flexibility to modify their working practices.