Strategic Agility and Employee Experience

“All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns” by Bruce Lee.

If the Agile move is only about generating great employee experience for software developers but doesn’t produce finer business results then its lifetime won’t be lengthy. The question which affects several top executives is: How can we respond swiftly to changing market conditions while simultaneously dedicating resources to durable strategic initiatives in a profitable manner? Leaders faced with a progressively undetermined environment require to welcome strategic agility.

Strategic Agility

Operational Agility means making the existing products finer, quicker, cheaper & so on for existing customers—and conversely Strategic Agility manner producing new markets with new merchandise that attain new customers, i.e. market-creating innovation. Strategic agility is about staying competitive by identifying & take advantage of opportunities, also, identifying possible threats & reducing or preventing them from happening in the first place. The improvement of strategic agility will provide leaders the competency to pick out marketplace changes that could be good or bad for business & swiftly implement or act on new ideas.

Nothing is wrong with operational Agility. It’s generally a need of staying in business, i.e. surviving & also the foundation for Strategic Agility, i.e. for thriving. In common, a firm won’t be able to produce new products for new customers without mastering operational Agility.

Examples of Operational & Strategic Agility

• When some firms were improving DVDs i.e. operational agility but Netflix introduced web-based flooding of movies i.e. Strategic agility.  
• Companies like Blackberry & Nokia were running after Operational Agility in the mid-2000s by producing finer cell phones but Apple produced versatile device, the iPhone—that attracted to a much higher range of consumers & in this way Apple revealed Strategic Agility.
• As Google has been regularly improving keyboard-based search (Operational Agility) but Amazon’s Echo introduced voice-activated search (Strategic Agility).

Operational Agility vs Strategic Agility

• Operational Agility is defined as enhancing existing products & services by decreasing the cost, time savings or quality improvements for existing customers. Strategic Agility, generating improvements that generate absolutely new markets through turning out the non-clients into clients.
• Operational Agility meaning is like filling a sequence of small glasses with water. But Strategic Agility is like filling a full bucket.
• Operational Agility is a good thing & also necessary, but it has a snag. It generally doesn’t make much money & it’s not sufficient. But if a firm wants to make a lot of money today, there is the dire need to follow market-creating innovations, i.e. Strategic Agility.

In a marketplace where competitors are often fast to match improvements to existing products & services and where power in the marketplace has clearly shifted to customers, it can be hard for firms to monetize those improvements. Among severe competition, consumers with choices & gain to authentic information are regularly capable of call for that quality upgrades be approaching at no cost or may be lower cost. Additionally, firms require to be expert at Strategic Agility.

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Elements of real-world Strategic Agility

 Multinational corporations (MNCs) should aim to master 3 elements:

1. Consistently decide where to invest resources:

By controlling strategic initiatives & assessing them consistently, a company can more swiftly stimulate, pause or even disown specific initiatives, so, increasing agility & fostering alignment across geographic boundaries & fiercely decreasing the odds that time, money & human resources will be drained by initiatives that are going nowhere fast.

2. Enhance continuing dialog-

MNCs are specifically competitive when they leverage new organizational transformation knowledge & routines across boundaries and use economies of scale and scope. In this context, it is pivotal that there is a continuing dialog between headquarters & subsidiaries in the creation & diffusion of new global practices as the knowledge inserted in these new organizational routines enables the MNC to enhance its competitive position worldwide. Without these dialogues both the early implementation of strategic initiatives & the scaling across various locations is endangered.

3. Respond to unit-particular contexts to determine the strategic assessment needs:

Consistent governance of cross-functional initiatives promotes a dialog all over the year, permitting senior management to get a context for every unit’s strategy earlier than launching a strategic assessment process. To evaluate the present situation of each unit – specifically geographic units, senior management can use 3 key standards:

• The unit management’s willingness to change (from high to low).
• Financial outcomes (on- or off-target). 
• The strength of the external pressures (from high to low).

Keys to develop Strategic Agility

-Identify the requirement:

It starts with a focus on results & the possible customer’s requirement. What is the customer requirement? Will the solution be a painkiller or lifesaver? How can you figure out the requirement? Is it concerned with one person or a complete demographic? Initially, make a record of the need as you see it & determine just how big the scope is.

-Understand non-customers:

Go after non-customers. Recognizing the range of complementary products & services that are consumed alongside your own may give you vision into opportunities. Ultimately, you need to look at how consumers might find other ways of fulfilling the need that your product or service satisfies.

-Study Markets:

Although there is a lot of attention on global markets, for instance in smart phones, most markets are shattered in narrow segments. It can be a mistake to track a single narrow marketplace. What you need is a product or service that addresses a collection of narrower market segments. Strategic agility hints moving into markets that are bigger than the firm’s present market.

-Think big:

The technology has the capability to produce a very large future cash flow. Twitter & LinkedIn are valued highly, not because of any profits today, but because they are judged as having the capacity to generate huge cash flow over the coming decades.

-Refine the Approach:

It describes how you solve this specific requirement of the customer. Ask yourself what your secret strategy is Secret strategic assessment tells you how innovative your real idea is. Also, a secret strategy is your entry hurdle, but it gives you an opportunity & incentive to develop the idea to its fullest. The approach must tell how it will produce revenue & make a profit.

-Obtain digital competency:

Traditionally, adjacent movements were judged as risky. Once firms obtain competency in handling huge data & operate in a network fashion, they become able to make reforming radical adjacency moves, as at Amazon. A fluid core enables moves into new sectors, growing competency very swiftly.

-The indirect approach:

Separating consumers & end-users is often key. Google search is free to end-users, still huge financial gains result to Google from data-focused advertising. The search service provided to users feels costless & having the monetization occurring in the background creates a apparently united experience for the user during transformation. 

-Benefits Per Costs:

The Benefit per Costs “tells you not only what a difference your solution will make in the life of the consumer for the better, but also how much of a difference. Sometimes we may consider benefits that seem hazy & think that it’s impossible to assess them, however that’s due to the fact we haven’t nonetheless were given the discipline to observe them carefully enough. “With tolerance, determination & practice we will learn to identify things in a consumer’s life that are innately valuable.

-Identifying the Competition & Alternatives:

The final part of the Strategic agility is Competition that concerns “what others are & could be doing to address the same requirement you have identified. Sometimes young innovators suppose that their concept is so modern that there exists no competition. But that’s a mistake.

“When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was asked by famous venture capitalist John Doerr who Netflix was competing against. “Really we compete with entirety you do to relax,” became his reply. That’s a mainly difficult one! We compete with other video networks. Playing board games.”

Think of the requirement & try to make a list of everything anyone is or could be doing to address that. “Once you identify & make a list of the competitive approaches, you’ll find it to be a list of approaches to solve the original need. Your personal approach will now be one of those within the lengthy list. You can now begin listing the pros & cons of each approach.

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-Employee Experience

Employee experience encloses what people experience & observe during the timespan of their occupation at an organization. Millennials are really an element. They consist 30 % of the population & by 2025 will represent 75% of the global workforce. A survey by Gartner reported that only 13% of employees are fully satisfied with their experience. In a digital world with growing transparency & the growing influence of Millennials, employees expect a rich, engaging & enjoyable work experience.

We define Employee Experience as companies & their people working together to create personalized, genuine experiences that explode passion & tap into purpose to strengthen individual, team & company performance. The experience people have at work is becoming an integral part of an organization’s ability to thrive.

Now many leading organizations aim to enhance the employee experience benefits as a whole, supported by various pulse feedback tools, wellness and fitness & apps, and employee self-service technologies. Employee experience, or EX, switch the relationship to one that explode employees with passion & allows them to generate experiences they desire.

-Defining Employee Experience-

Employee experience is the amalgam of 3 things that exist within any organization irrespective of industry, location & size. The parts of employee experience are the technological environment, culture & the physical environment. 

The technological environment is the tools an employee requires to perform their job, including the user interface, mobile devices & desktop computers. An organization should provide pertinent & modern tools that permit employees to get their job done. The physical environment consist anything that can be seen, touched, heard & tasted like the meals, desks, chairs & art. This is important due to the fact employees spend maximum in their time within the organization so it ought to have a fantastic impact on them. Culture represents how employee feel when they are inside of an organization, the vibe that they get, the organizational structure, leadership style, compensation & benefits, etc. 

-Key Factors for Improving Productivity

There are 4 factors that improves productivity on joint tasks: social connectivity, physical health, mental health & workplace tools. Among these, social connectivity appeared as the most powerful force. Respondents who are satisfied with social connectivity with colleagues are 2-3 times more possibly to improve their productiveness on joint responsibilities as people who are dissatisfied with this. Employees who doing higher on all 4 elements are nearly five times as probably to say they have felt capable to improve productiveness on joint responsibilities as people who are doing worse on at least 3 factors.

With great employee experience:

• Individuals do determined work for significant rewards & recognition, motivated by managers who provide regular mentoring & feedback leading to effective transformation.
• Teams are allowed to make decisions, work with trust & employ user-friendly manner of working & processes.
• The company provides a positive workplace environment & culture that strengthen its DNA.

How to enhance Employee Experience?

1. Get Obsessed on Your Employees:

Apply the best of customer experience & go further. Inspect how employees interact with the company throughout their career. Go past mapping journeys primarily based on HR approaches to discover the moments that in reality matters, then make the ones extraordinary.

2. Understand Your Priority:

Identify what aspect of the employee experience your organization should focus on. If you’re about to notably amplify hiring volumes, you may want to focus on the recruitment stage first & consider using a candidate survey to get feedback. Or if you’re seeing high turnover rates, put your resources into understanding & improving an employee’s exit experience may be your first step. There’s no right or wrong place to begin – it all depends on your organization’s priorities at the moment.

3. Start Gathering Data:

After determining your priority, the most essential thing is to start gathering feedback. It takes time to collect sufficient data to start to draw linkages & tell stories about the employee experience. That’s why we suggest you not professing yourself by tackling everything at once. Rather than, start by focusing on one aspect of the employee experience (such as onboarding), iterate & grow your employee experience data capture program from there.

4. Acknowledge It’s not About Fancy Perks:

Experience is frequently burdened with fancy perks. They play a role however starting there probably won’t make a material difference. Determine which elements of Employee Experience will fix pain points & empower performance – ranging from workplace environment, manner of working, and the implicit contract between employer & employees.

5. Build an Enduring Culture:

Experience is about lasting change in how an organization operates & needs a culture change, not just slogans & short-term incentives. Modifying how work gets done means changing fixed employee habits, which needs recognizing the mindsets, values & beliefs that drive them and designing evidence-based interventions to modify daily behaviors.

6. Empower Action:

Employee experience characteristics surveys come up with plenty of treasured information. But there’s no point, if you don’t use it to take action. Look at each the combination results to adjust your organization-wide programs, in addition to specified results.

Always Remember it’s for the people, by the people:

Empower your employees to design & develop solutions. Use agile approaches to let them prototype & scale solutions themselves. Provide the skill-building to generate ideation, trial & iteration. This will save money, develop employee ownership & make modifications stick.

Final word

This isn’t simply managerial theory. We’ve seen companies that focus on the employee experience have lower staff turnover rates & higher productivity. To be precise, the objective of providing a strong employee experience characteristic isn’t to make your people feel warm & fuzzy. It’s to enable them to give nothing less than their very best at the job. To make them to need to return back to work. And because the employee experience is becoming so essential to people, including to prospective job candidates, organizations can’t afford to ignore it.

Frequently Asked Questions

1) How do you develop strategic agility?

 Multinational corporations (MNCs) should aim to master these elements for strategic agility:

1. Identify the requirement
2. Understand non-customers
3. Study Markets
4. Refine the Approach
5. Identifying the Competition & Alternatives

2) Which is an example of organizational agility?

• Companies like Blackberry & Nokia were running after Operational Agility in the mid-2000s by producing finer cell phones but Apple produced versatile device, the iPhone—that attracted to a much higher range of consumers & in this way Apple revealed Strategic Agility.

• As Google has been regularly improving keyboard-based search (Operational Agility) but Amazon’s Echo introduced voice-activated search (Strategic Agility).

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