Agility helps your business stay competitive and buffers against sudden jolts in the environment, and it’s become even more necessary to your organization in 2024 — especially as it increases employee engagement, customer centricity, and operational performance by 30%. Yet, despite 92% of C-level executives believing that agility is vital to organizational success, there is a lack of clarity on how businesses can create an agile working environment, with agility engrained in the company’s culture, employees, and systems.
There are many ways of cultivating a company that functions on agility. However, the best ways to incorporate agility into the core of your company involve:
Thinking of your business as an adaptable organism
Relying on agile goal setting
Thinking of your business as an adaptable organism
To create agility, think of your organization as a living organism, where different parts of your business interact with components inside and outside your environment. Introducing this new paradigm requires you to reorient your business’s internal structure by:
Moving from complete bureaucracy to structures that empower teams to take accountability, collaborate, and become self-sufficient
Encouraging continuous learning cycles and short feedback loops that incorporate experimentation, innovation, and growth
Establishing a united purpose and end goal that enables everyone to recognize and seize opportunities
Creating a people-centered organization that focuses on collaboration
Integrating new technologies to stay competitive and subdue the impact of current business issues
elying on agile goal setting
An agile organization recalibrates goals according to current business problems, keeping the business relevant, timely, and aligned. Use the following tips to create agility across your business goals and overcome incoming business challenges:
Create short-term and long-term goals: Your long-term goals act as a North Star, while short-term goals adapt to changes in the market environment and align with your long-term vision
Establish measurable goals: Without goal measurability, you don’t know what (or whether) things need to change
Schedule regular check-ins with employees: This can cultivate a qualitative and nuanced view of goal progress, goal relevance, existing challenges, and overall alignment
Set collaborative team goals: A collaborative goal-setting approach can help you prioritize goals, discover solutions, and accommodate changes at the macro and micro level
Choose an agile goal-setting framework: An adaptable goal-setting framework such as objectives and key results (OKRs) can help you create adjustable, measurable, collaborative, and ambitious goals that keep your organization aligned and agile.
