AgileHR is gaining significant traction as an approach for HR and people management in meeting the rapidly changing and complex demands of today’s workforce and the new world of work.  It is also seen as a fundamental skill-set for managers and HR in successfully enabling the wider organization to become more agile and adaptive.

Whether you are an HR professional, agile coach or a line manager, you need to understand how people strategy and processes need to change when working in an organization embracing an agile culture and operating model.

How do performance management, recruitment, learning and development, reward and the way we engage employees change? What are the specific skills that we need to use to develop an agile culture from a people perspective? 

The programme will provide participants with fresh thinking, practices and tools for this increasingly important field in HR and people management as well as providing great insights into the changing world of work with fellow professionals and organisations on the same path. 

Completion of the programme will also come with full AgileHR certification from ICAgile and will entitle course participants to the official ICP-TAL certification standard. 

Participants will also receive a copy of Agile People – A Radical Approach for HR and Managers.  This leading book on the origin and topic of AgileHR was authored by our colleague, Pia-Maria Thoren who is also founder of GreenBullet Agile HR and Agile People.

During the training we will cover:

• • Introduction to the agile approach and how it is related to the changing world of work, lean and other work methods today. Why work with agility and what does this look like for HR and people practices?
  • What characterizes the agile mindset and approach and how to transform traditional HR processes when we are working with agile values?
  • How should HR adapt work to create maximum value in an agile organization? What do agile recruitment, performance, talent and reward processes look like?
  • Practical examples of practices and processes in AgileHR? How have others done it? What works and what doesn’t?
  • Skills training in how you can use agile techniques like Scrum and Kanban for HR.

Specifically, we will cover the HR agenda and key people processes required to create an Agile organization and culture: 

• • The Agile Organization – what is it and why is it important for organizations today ?  What is the role that HR and people processes can play to support the development of an agile organization and culture.
  • How HR can support an agile organizational transformation: Assess the current organizational structure and design a new structure that enables business agility, maximizes communication and collaboration within and among teams and enables the flow of value. 
  • Goal setting and performance management in a new way: Appraise current performance management practices and identify ways of bringing Agile thinking to enhance performance, accountability and growth.
  • Salary and benefits management for an agile organization: Describe and contrast traditional reward structures with Agile-friendly structures, discuss the pros and cons of each approach and explain how they could apply them to their own environment.
  • Job Roles – are they needed in the future? Develop an oganizational action plan for role modeling an agile mindset and to build new skills that will enable cross-functional teams.
  • Employee engagement in an agile manner: Recommend different motivational tools to be applied in a context and describe how the traditional employee engagement survey is changing.
  • Talent acquisition and the candidate experience: Design a sourcing strategy that can be used to find and acquire the “right” people to support the strategic growth of the organization taking values, culture, diversity and collaboration into the hiring decision.
  • Agile learning and development: Suggest ways to enable and support a learning mindset in a team, supporting the shift from a focus on deficiencies to a focus on development of new skills and capabilities.
  • Onboarding practices for agile companies: Design an onboarding experience that enables new employees to become a part of the organization rapidly and smoothly.
  • Why the agile mindset is HRs responsibility: Design the talent/people elements needed to help support an Agile transition in an organization and explain how different contexts can influence the approach to be taken. 
  • The needed changes in the HR core function: Relate how the need for business agility affects the HR function and organization and how it impacts HR team members’ roles and behaviors.
  • Practical tools, templates and exercises for HR and managers: How an HR department can work with agile tools and methods, for example with Kanban, Sprints, Scrum and Retrospectives.

The training places great emphasis on practical examples and scenarios and we will present a series of tools that you will be able to use when getting started on your own agile HR initiatives. We take you through an agile HR project from setting goals and developing user stories for HR to implementing sprint planning and monitoring the sprint using Kanban.

Target audience

Agile coaches, consultants, HR managers, HR Business Partners, HR professionals, line managers, operational & business managers and consulting managers in both the private and public sectors.

We have previously trained participants from Irish and International organizations across all sectors including: Irish Life, permanent tsb, ESB, HSE, RCSI, Office of Government Procurement, Ammeon, KBC, Volvo, TetraPak, Tele2, IFS, Manpower, TV4, Vitrolife, Rebtel, Dynabyte,  DEK Technologies, IKEA, Blue Garden, Nordic Morning, Findwise and many other companies and organizations.

Evaluation of the last completed training ended up on average 4.8 on a 5 point scale.

Your Course leaders

Kevin Empey is the founder of WorkMatters, an international consulting and training firm focused on supporting business leaders, HR leaders and their employees in the changing world of work.  Kevin is a qualified executive coach, AgileHR instructor and has a masters qualification in leadership and management.  He is also an associate faculty member with the Irish Management Institute and is the Programme Director of their Senior Executive Programme (SEP).

Before establishing WorkMatters, he founded and led several start-up organizations and was a Partner and Director in Willis Towers Watson in Dublin where he led the firms HR and Talent consulting business.  He also established the firms ‘Future of Work’ offering in Ireland. Kevin has won several national and international awards for his work in the areas of employment policy, social entrepreneurship and future of work research. 

Joanna Koprowicz is an Agile and Lean consultant in Ireland. She also has helped coordinate Agile-Lean events internationally and is a board member of Agile-Lean Ireland. In industry, she has led key initiatives including digital transformation and developing agile teams. Her expertise includes Agile HR and Lean process improvement.