The Impact of Agility on Organizational Well-Being

December 23, 2020 4 min read

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Agility and organizational wellness go directly hand in hand. We refer especially to agility for people management, since it focuses on taking care of employees, collaborative work and how to achieve more productive and agile companies by increasing the happiness of their teams.

How do you do it? As we said before, there is a specific framework for HR Agile , one of the world’s leaders being the Agile People organization, which is led by Pia-Maria Thorén, and Helgi Gudmundsson, who are also part of the professionals who created the Agile Manifesto of People Management .

This manifesto is composed of values and contains 36 principles, among them: Transparency, Trust, Say Why and What and Leave the How to People, Know People Deeply, Increase Happiness, Learning and Continuous Improvement, Increase Safety Psychological, etc.

So is there a connection between organizational wellness and agility? Clearly yes. Why do we bring up this issue and how does it connect with the ranking of Heroes Companies ? They are linked from the values, principles of this framework, and with the objective of this ranking: Finding “the best in Latin America, those that this 2020 were resilient, reinvented themselves, maintained their productivity, but, above all, protected what most valuable thing they have: the well-being and happiness of their collaborators ”.

The relevance of this does not lie only in the fact that the sense of belonging is increased, turnover is decreased or retention is increased; rather, as the organizers of the ranking point out, sales also increased by 44%, productivity by 31%, among other benefits.

The experience of a multinational

We are going to a specific case taking into account one of the principles mentioned above, “Psychological Safety”. First, what do we mean by this? Experts in the field define it as: “An individual’s perception of the consequences of taking interpersonal risk, or the belief that a team is safe to take risks without being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative or disruptive. In a team with high psychological security, the partners feel safe to take risks with the rest of the members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question or offering a new idea. “

Google was the company that discovered that among the keys that make its best teams successful and effective, psychological safety is in the first place … as we see below.

1. Psychological safety. Team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable to each other.
2. Reliability. Team members get things done on time and meet Google’s requirements for excellence.
3. Structure & Clarity. Team members have clear roles, plans, and goals.
4. Meaning. Work is personally important to team members.
5. Impact. Team members think their work is important and create change.

These results were obtained by the company, through its Aristotle project , which brought together the best performing employees.

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Finally, it is worth taking into account the clarification made by one of the professionals who has studied this topic the most in the world -the professor of the Harvard Business School , Amy Edmondson- in her book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth : “Psychological safety is not about being nice or just about creating a pleasant environment, it has to see with concrete practices, such as being open to new ideas, appreciating each person’s contributions, explicitly admitting mistakes, giving positive feedback about them and learning from each other regarding those experiences ”. In his understanding, this is applicable both in collaborators and in those people with leadership roles.

Considering all this, it makes complete sense to be part of a ranking as Empresas Heroinas that seeks to recognize and empower companies -from 12 Latin American countries- that bet everything on their collaborators and maintain their competitiveness despite a challenging year.

* Jorge Ulsen is CEO of Decides and president of the International People & Players Association.