What happens to HR in an Agile journey

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good evening everyone! Welcome to our new office. We just shifted last month and we hope to host more events using this space. Thank you for coming and thanks to Stanly for organizing this talk!
• #3: This evening, I will share these 3 areas: 1. how agile adoption shifted our co work culture, and some of our HR practices that are different from most companies and also how it has changed the way we work in HR team. Before we get into the topic, I will talk a little bit about myself.
• #4: This is a corporate version of my self-introduction I have been with Titansoft for 10 years and prior to that, I worked in Taiwan for about 3 years. In the past 10 years, I have gone through quite a number of trainings and some certifications based on the focus of the company at different point of time.
• #5: And, this is a preferred way of introducing myself, a yogi HR. In recent years, there are a few trainings that have bigger impact on me such as facilitation training, co activing coaching training, satir growth model workshop last year In HR context, I have strong interest in creating environments where people feel empowered. And, another passion I have is yoga practice.
• #6: About Titansoft, we started in 2005 and we are a software solution provider. In terms of workforce, there are 69 people in SG office and in Taiwan there are 102 people. As you see the demographic of our employees here, there are 50% of staff are aged less than 30 Our average age is 31 and apparently, I contribute to that increase of average age! We started agile journey in 2014 Majority of our employees are Gen Y & Millennials
• #7: In recent years, after Agile adoption in 2014, we were honoured to receive some important recognition and awards. The one that I like to highlight is Best Tech company to work for award which we received last year. The judges were interested about our non-conventional HR practices which I like to share with you all tonight.
• #8: This is the sentence i heard in 2014 when we decided to try agile. it left a deep impression in me. We started with a pilot team and engaged an Agile Coach, Stanly, to help us with the transformation In the monthly management meeting, our Dev manager at that time, (tomas for those who know him), hey we are all gonna loose our jobs! Because scrum team is a self-managing team and will no longer need team lead or manager When I heard that, I remember I was quite calm and in my mind, I thought if there were gonna be changes or impacts, it would probably not affect our side in HR & Operations. A good example of Silo thinking! In the same meeting the following month, Tomas proposed the idea of removing individual performance appraisal in the Pilot team and also for team members to have flexible working hours and no need to comply with co’s working hours policy.
• #9: Yup, that’s pretty much my reaction Because, all these ideas have challenged understanding of traditional HR practices Soon after, Stanly passed to me & Tomas some articles about performance appraisal and suggested to share thoughts after reading one week later. After reading the articles and doing some researches, I started to have different thoughts about the pro and cons of performance appraisal system by the way, we are talking about is individual performance appraisals
• #10: At that time, I was still not very sure what Agile and scrum was all about and I decided to attend the 3 days csm course to get a better understanding about agile and scrum. about the same time, i learned about theory x and y. who in the audience know about this? I will explain a little here: For Theory X: The management style believe that people are generally lazy and are motivated by extrinsic rewards. Theory X style managers like to define rules/policy to manage their employees and minimize their ‘laziness’. They tend to micro-manage. As for Theory Y: in contrast, Theory Y managers believe that people are internally motivated and want to improve and grow themselves. In such organization culture and environment, when there is a problem, the manager would look at what might be the possible reasons in the environment or system causing the problem instead of blaming an individual. To me, Agile & scrum lean towards theory Y. And, when I reflect back my experience, I thought it was important for me to understand the concept of Agile so that I could support the necessary changes in the organization. Impact on organization culture, structure and HR practices
• #11: creating safe & engaging work culture
• #12: fail forward: learn from failures/mistakes Before the agile adoption, in our environment, people were afraid of making mistakes. We didn’t have habit of collect feedback early. And, in terms of communication, it was often top down with command and control. Hero culture here means, when there were issues or problems, it would be the same group of people solving the problem. So, when they are on leave, they would still need to pick up calls and solve work issues. In operation side, we would spend a lot of time planning and delivering because we assume that work is predictable. And, NOW, we learned to be more open minded about ideas and feedbacks. We value information transparency and also collect feedback early. We also started think how to create a safe environment when people make mistakes and learn from the it. We also believe done is better than perfect.
• #13: There are some examples: one of practices we introduced was open space. open space allows us to give voice to anybody in the co here is how we did it: in 2016, we allocated 2 days for everyone in the company to come together to discuss important topics, generate ideas and create actions for the next 3-6 months We tried co level open space two times. but we have observed little engagement during the discussions about proposed topics. at the last open space one of the topics was “shall we continue with company wide open space?” and only 3 people wanted to discuss it. From this we figured that open space might not be that useful or effective for us at that time. Driven by the need is one of Agile principles.
• #14: we still continue using open space in smaller groups. for ex: in year end management meeting, we discussed about hr policies
• #16: As we saw the demographic of our employees are gen Y and Millenials. We thought what would be the important factors to engage our employees at work. And, here are the factors:
• #17: slack is time to think and improve yourself or team dynamic
• #19: Every year, we participate our campus career fairs in our target schools and in the past, we sent HR, Managers and some Sr Developers to attend the event. However, we noticed that not everybody is good at engaging in conversations with students. We then tried a different approach which is forming an Ambassador Team. It is composed of volunteers from different functions at all levels who are passionate about sharing our co culture to potential candidates
• #20: Besides the ambassador team, we also formed a Recruitment Committee to resolve bottleneck issues of our limited people qualified for conducting interviews. Also we thought it would be a good idea to involve Dev Team members and provide an opportunity for them to decide whom they want to work with Inspect & adopt: around April last year, Due to increasing # of interviews, we started hearing some feedback from Developers about time taken at interviews have affected their work. So, we decided to minimize the interruptions thus dismissed recruitment committee and assigned a few Sr to assist in interview process. So, hearing feedback and making adjustment accordingly to ensure our practice is relevant and effective is important.
• #21: In the past, our salary policy is to keep salary info confidential which is the same as many other companies. But, we know that people still talk about salary. So, we wanted to minimize the guessing game because we believe that any unnecessary communication that does not help company moving forward is a waste And, salary information can also be part of information transparency
• #22: Every year, we have annual salary benchmarking exercise and share the info to our employees. Just last Friday, we did the briefing and published new salary info this year. We took the opportunity to collect feedback from our staff about their satisfaction level of compensation package and what they feel about salary transparency after the briefing. As you see, there is about 68% of staff think it is a good practice.
• #23: In Titansoft, there is no min required working hours. For us, we hope to achieve a sustainable work pace and people don’t feel burn out in a long run. We feel that it is more important for us to measure the outcome instead of # of hours people spent in the office. And, I was thinking how supporting functions like HR or Accounting can also benefit from this: In 2015, in HR& Operations team, I was still deciding work hours rules In 2016, I felt the team was ready so let team to define their own core working hours. This is a cute roster created by our HR team. There are people like to come in early and leave early and people like to come in later.
• #24: For people development, we encourage our staff to grow toward T- shaped talents. For ex, for Developers, they are not only strong in coding as their core expertise, they are encouraged to pick up UX and DS analytical skills. T for devs. Core: programming (coding, tdd), Lateral skills: security, ui/ux, communication, interpersonal skills, analytics, SEO
• #25: The reason we introduced self promotion was to increase the awareness of we are responsible for our own career. and to encourage this, our staff are given the opportunity to apply for a ‘self-promotion’ when they think they are ready. First, our staff do a self-evaluation and thereafter they go through a technical assessment and panel interview to see if they are qualified to progress to the next level. People that are sitting in the panel are 2 team members, PO, DM and HR to provide different perspectives and feedback to the promotion candidate. Never stop improving: We have received positive feedback from our employees regarding this process. Even for those who fail, our assessors would provide feedback on improvement areas for the next round.
• #26: mention stuff growth since agile adoption in 2014, we had a steady decline of turnover rate for 2 years. people were generally happy with the new way of working. but as you can see, last year we saw an increase in turnover. this is due to several factors: general 2-3 years cycle where junior developers feel that they need to try something else or try different environment. several senior developers also left because they didn’t like how much time they needed to spend training younger developers in scrum teams, they want to continue developing their programming skills without learning other softer skills. Also, some perceived lack of technically challenging problems here. At the end of the year management meeting, we discussed about the reasons and decided to introduce a new program this year, to allow people take on innovative and challenging projects with company financial support.
• #28: Before agile: being too busy doing, less time for thinking After: introduce SLACK
• #29: It is based on my own personal experience. Before Agile adoption: in the work environment, I was afraid of making mistakes and thus did not delegate important tasks and decision making. And, when I did that, I later realized I was actually taking away other people’s learning opportunities. I then complained that the team didn’t grow and lacked of ownership/engagement. In the end, I was stressed and felt burn out. After Agile: I learned to trust people, to let go and delegate tasks with clarification on the boundaries and also how to provide a safe environment when making mistakes.
• #30: As the result showed, there were increased bottom-up initiatives and ownership of their work. These photos are taken at our VMV briefing in Sept last year. Our members stayed up late working on props and preparing the briefing. It was totally creative and fun with great outcomes and increased ownership of our members We also checked the effectiveness of the briefing, and there were almost 80% of our staff remembered the key messages from the briefing.
• #31: Spent lots of time planning and not spending time on collecting early feedback during implementation
• #32: After Agile adoption, we learned about Kanban and applied Kanban and now using Trello for task management
• #33: This is a photo of daily stand up in HR team
• #34: We noticed that online surveys sent out by HR often received very min participation rate. As we thought collecting post-event feedback was important for us to improve, we thought about how we can make survey more accessible and easy for our staff to participate We then changed the survey to a physical copy and pasted them at door way for people to vote when walking by
• #35: Change image to people talking (t.exchange) A story to share about validate assumption 像剛剛提到的 我們寄出去的email 或是online survey 沒有人回復 HR Team 就抱怨 大家不重視HR 都不看我們的email 這時我就challenge 我們的團隊說 這是假設還是事實 若是假設 我們怎樣去驗證? 當然最便宜直接的方法就是直接面對面的詢問溝通 也發現大家不是不重視HR 而是他們沒有常看email 的習慣 即使他們的部門主管發的信也可能沒看 現在我們也會每個月邀請三位員工做一對一的跟HR訪談 了解他們現在工作的狀態
• #36: It is important to allocate time for Kanzen Often when we come up with a brilliant idea, it usually doesn’t happen at work. For me, it could happen when I’m walking or cooking Thus, it is not about filling up 8 hours of working hours but reserve and allocate time to “slack” for self-improvement 我自己非常重視改善 因為有改善才會進步 要改善需要allocate 時間 我也很喜歡scrum 講到的slack 概念 平常工作八小時 主管或是老闆喜歡丟八小時的工作量或是更多給員工 以我們以前的經驗 我們忙著把那些HR projects 做完 但是沒有時間去思考怎樣能做得更好 產生更大的價值或是效能 這個slack 的概念就是說 一天八小時只做大概六小時的工作 剩下的時間可以去思考 看書 讀文章 或反思 如何改善
• #37: HR team has retro meeting every 2 weeks, at first I enforce the practice for couple of months and after the team started seeing the benefits, they carry on the practice themselves.
• #38: Go beyond our job scope and to provide better services, we need to know our customers! Know our business and the way of working Every year I will recommend a different reading list
• #39: Training needs in different career stages are different; Self-management might not be suitable for everyone