Organisational agility is can be the difference between booming and busting in today’s rapidly changing business environment. Here, we explore the role of agility in the workplace, and why it’s essential businesses become more agile to stay competitive.
What does agility even mean?
The saying of the modern business world is that agility is king—and it’s more than a cliche. Agility means changing to address the needs of customers, competition, your business, and the market.
There are three key factors when it comes to assessing business agility: willingness to change, ability to change, and the speed at which you can change.
Stability + speed = agility
A major international business study showed that the agile companies—those who have both speed and agility in their DNA—significantly outperform companies with only one of those attributes (or neither).
Key attributes of agile businesses can be broken down into three categories: people, processes, and principles.
| People | Process | Principles |
| Have role clarity | Innovation comes from the top | External ideas are welcomed |
| Inspirational leaders | Process-based capabilities | Meaningful values |
| People-performance review | Operationally disciplined | Knowledge sharing |
“Part of what makes agile companies special is their ability to balance fast action and rapid change, on the one hand, with organizational clarity, stability, and structure, on the other,” the report by multinational consulting firm McKinsey says.
Finding the competitive edge
To become more competitive, businesses can find themselves caught between wanting to respond quickly and nimbly in a changing environment, and getting entangled in it.
In the information age, the ability to convert data into insight—and be able to act on it—is the core of sustainability. This means that businesses of all sizes need to think in terms of making their operations more flexible so that they can be competitive.
A number of studies have shown the rewards of agility in the marketplace:
- A large survey of CEOs found that 50 percent of them believe that rapid decision-making and execution are essential to a company’s competitiveness
- Research Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that agile companies generate 30 percent higher profits and their revenue grows 37 percent faster than non-agile companies.
- A huge 90 percent of executives surveyed by The Economist agreed that organisational agility is critical to the success of a business.
Conversely, business leaders say that the major obstacles to flexibility and responsiveness are conflicted priorities, low risk tolerance, siloed information, and slow decision making.
Lights, agility, action
Now you see just how important agility is, the next step is some simple ideas to put it into practice:
- Tech-based communications: digital channel communications isn’t just for Millennials. They can help real time decision making and problem solving, and open up lines of communications across departments and hierarchies.
- Use the cloud: the Harvard Business Review says that the primary advantage of cloud computing is agility. It offers rapid scalability up and down in response to business conditions, live sharing of documents, data available anywhere, anytime, and more efficient storage solutions.
- Explore the ‘internet of things’: the heart of the rapidly developing IoT is the smart analytics that enable applications to deliver on predictability, efficiency, and speed. They prize connectivity and make sure various devices and programs are talking to each other.
- Take advantage of fast response tech: digital service providers, such as Zoom2u, are streamlining service relationships. This new generation is built around simplicity and transparency—two attributes highly prized by the most agile and successful firms around the globe.
