How to Develop an Agile Workforce for Your Business

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Workforce agility is crucial in today’s business world. It’s needed more than ever because of the ever-changing transformation and development in the market. If you want to keep your organization competitive and aggressive in the market, you have to develop an agile workforce. Make a smart move before it’s too late.

Many business people would think that the external market is the number one of obstacles and struggles. However, the absolute truth is that they lack the agility needed to adapt to the changing market conditions. Every year the market condition evolves, you have to adapt quickly to avoid any problems. Lack of agility can become a problem and your organization could even lead to bankruptcy.

How Do You Create an Agile Workforce?

What is agility? Agility, the simplest term, can alter, adapt or effectively respond to an outer stimulus to operate successfully. Agile organizations need their labor force to adapt swiftly to produce and comply with the customers’ changing needs, the market place, and the flow of the organization itself. Building and developing a strong workforce is a challenge HR should embrace.

Agility is a mindset or an interactive behavior a workforce should develop, especially in a fast-paced organization. So, how can you help your workforce to become agile? How do you ensure they will be able to handle any given situation on their own? Mindsets are the employee’s interactive behavior that helps them understand and guide the team toward the right response and action. Mindsets give employees the drive to think and deliver the right actions to take.

Therefore, if an organization wants to enhance their employee’s agility, you must ensure that your employee possesses mindsets that allow them to develop into an agile worker. Guide them and teach them how to adapt to the ever-changing development of the market. Adapting to the fast-changing market conditions could be troublesome for any organization. However, to increase the organization’s competitiveness to competitors, you must adapt to changes.

Don’t Overlook Employee Mindsets

Unfortunately, many organization leaders often overlook their employee’s mindsets during the time of change. The main reason why this was overlooked because some leaders often don’t know what mindsets they need to develop and enhance their workforce agility.

Three important mindsets are necessary for developing the agility of your workforce. You can take charge of developing the agility of your employee, but usually, HR takes the lead in handling the employee’s development. HR is recommended to handle this situation because they have the knowledge, skills, and education background about management, marketing, and psychology. By combining these mindsets, they create a simple and yet effective framework for driving your organization’s agility. Please continue reading below and find out more about how to develop the employee’s agility.

Growth Mindset

Growth mindset is the belief that employee can change their intelligence level, abilities, and their talents. A growth mindset differs from a fixed mindset in which the belief that employees can’t change their key set attributes.

The growth mindset boos the employee’s goals, or rather they dedicate them to the things they should prioritize, which influences their ability to steer effectively during change. In contrast, those who have a fixed mindset prioritize to look good from the start because if they believe that they can’t improve their talent and abilities as long as they can deliver the tasks. As a consequence, they:

They avoid failure as much as possible because that would indicate that they are no good for the job.
Avoiding challenges because much more complex work has higher chances of failure.
They tend to put more effort into filling the knowledge, intelligence, and skills they don’t possess and succeed.

In contrast, an employee with a growth mindset believes they can adapt and change their abilities, talents, and intelligence. They are less concerned about how others see them. They don’t mind failing because they believe they can help them to grow, learn, and develop. Their growth mindset allows them to see challenges and failure as an opportunity to develop and create a new skill, so they embrace it gladly with no problem how people might see them.

Open Mindset

An employee who possesses an open mindset often listens to others’ suggestions and ideas and is willing to take them seriously. This differs from an employee who has a closed mindset, which shuts others’ ideas, resulting in arguments and failures.

On the other side, employees with an open mindset focus on finding the truth. They don’t care if they hurt someone’s pride as long as they on the right side and are more comfortable with ambivalence. They seek out new and different perspectives and turn disagreements into an opportunity to improve their thinking.

Promotion Mindset

An employee who possesses a promotion mindset, they tend to focus on winning and gains. They only want the best for their selves. They often avoid disagreements with others to avoid tainting their credibility. But they care about others’ development as well.

This mindset leads employees to steer change much more differently. Employees with a promotion mindset are only focused on what is important such as reaching the goal, objective, and destination. They anticipate problem effectively and are often open to taking risks and wants to advance as fast as possible rather than maintain the status cue.

Improving Your Team’s Mindset

An organization cannot develop its workforce agility when its employee mindsets resist the changes in the organization. This resistance amplifies stress and challenges in the organization leading only to problems in the long run. Agility is very crucial in any organization; it helps the organization to be competitive in the market.

So if you want to meet the demands on the market, you must learn how to develop workforce agility very quickly. Educate your employees about mindset, what mindset they should have, what mindset they should retain, and what mindset they should dispose of. Help employees become aware of their current mindsets.