By embracing an agile HR practice, HR leaders at Virgin Australia and Carman’s are driving their organisations towards greater efficiency and resilience.

The ability to quickly adapt to new challenges and opportunities has become the most powerful tool in HR’s arsenal. Ongoing disruptions in the talent, technology and business landscapes mean agility is essential for the effectiveness of any HR strategy.

Agile HR is not only about responding to changing external factors, but also about adapting internal approaches to continue fostering a workforce that is engaged, aligned with business goals, and ready to drive innovation and growth.

HRM spoke with HR leaders at Virgin Australia and breakfast food brand Carman’s to understand how agile HR is reshaping their approach to engagement, change management and more. 

How Virgin Australia navigated major change

A common misconception about organisational agility is that it implies constant change for change’s sake without direction, says Lisa Burquest, Chief People Officer at Virgin Australia.

“Sometimes, you might have to make a radical adjustment in some part of your strategy. But you don’t want to be doing that around all of your strategy. You don’t want to be chopping and changing. You want to be evolving,” she says.

Virgin Australia is no stranger to rapid business change. After the disruptions to the airline industry brought about by the pandemic, the organisation went through a period of significant transformation. 

Part of the HR team’s strategy to help the workforce navigate these changes was to refocus on the organisation’s core values and identity, which remain consistent regardless of disruptions in the external environment. 

“Our strategy post-administration was repositioning Virgin Australia as a value carrier in the market. Our strategy specifically puts our people at the centre. 

We call it ‘Virgin Flair’. It’s about how we work with our people to rebuild the business in a way that delivers our customer, financial and operational outcomes, and makes us a more focused business as we move forward.”

Virgin Australia’s strategy involved a phased approach, starting with a reset phase to get the fundamentals right.

“We started with resetting our values and behaviours because we wanted our employees to understand what the identity of this business was, and what matters [to it]. We went through a collaborative process with our people around establishing our values, identity and expectations around behaviours.

“Then we introduced the Virgin Flair awards recognition program, where every quarter we recognise people against those values.”

By focusing on the aspects of the organisation which never change, such as its core values, employees gain a sense of alignment and stability even when external conditions force the business into a period of rapid change.

“Sometimes, you might have to make a radical adjustment in some part of your strategy. But … you don’t want to be chopping and changing. You want to be evolving.” – Lisa Burquest, Chief People Officer, Virgin Australia

Key to building an agile HR strategy is gathering regular insight into what is and isn’t working within the business in order to ensure HR initiatives are adding maximum value, says Burquest. 

By grounding strategies in research and evidence, HR practitioners can offer clarity amid uncertainty and ensure their efforts are aligned with broader business goals. 

“I can’t encourage people enough to look at the data and use the insights to drive how you build out your strategies,” says Burquest, who is speaking at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition this week. “It’s really important because it helps you build a real case for change.”

For example, this year, Burquest’s team has implemented a data-driven approach to ensuring HR initiatives are meeting the diverse needs of its workforce.

“We’ve broken our workforce into employee personas, from people who were early in their career through to people who were long-standing and might be closer to retirement,” she says. 

“We have half a dozen different personas that make up our workforce, and we test each of the initiatives against those personas to see if this is really going to drive the right outcomes for those team members to help us deliver on our strategy.”

How Carman’s is nurturing a culture of agility

According to Lainie Tayler, Chief of Staff at Australian breakfast food brand Carman’s, HR practitioners play a key role in ensuring the agility of a business as a whole, as well as within their own practice.

“[HR] should be really close to the strategic priorities of the business so they can organise and support the workforce to deliver on those priorities. If an organisation doesn’t have that right, it’s really hard to deliver on your strategy,” says Tayler, who is also speaking at AHRI’s National Convention and Exhibition later this week.

To ensure the organisation’s HR strategies remain responsive to change, Tayler’s team employs the principles of design thinking in crafting their initiatives.

There are a number of frameworks HR practitioners can use to help apply design thinking to their strategies. For example, Tayler’s team often develops initiatives using the Double Diamond model, a framework developed by the British Design Council.

Source: The British Design Council

The Double Diamond is designed to help teams explore an issue more widely or deeply (divergent thinking) and then take focused action (convergent thinking). It separates the process of problem-solving into four clear phases:

1. Discover: Understand the problem by engaging with those affected.
2. Define: Use insights from discovery to clearly define the challenge.
3. Develop: Explore multiple solutions through collaboration and external inspiration.
4. Deliver: Test solutions on a small scale, refine successful ones and discard the rest.

“We use it for projects like building our annual strategic priorities for the business, optimising our market strategy and increasing employee engagement,” says Tayler.

The two diamond shapes represent the process of divergent thinking for the Discover and Develop stages, as team members explore possible problems and solutions, and convergent thinking for the Define and Deliver stages, where the problem is clearly defined and the solution is implemented.

For instance, say an organisation is experiencing higher levels of turnover than expected. Using the Double Diamond model, the HR team could use the Discover phase to diverge and conduct surveys and interviews with employees about their experiences at the company. During the Define stage, the team converges to compare findings and identify issues, which, for example, could be a lack of career development opportunities and poor work-life balance. 

The team will diverge again during the Develop stage, where potential solutions are explored and discussed, such as a revamped recognition program, more robust professional development offerings and more flexible work hours. 

Finally, the team converges in the Deliver stage to pilot these solutions, gathering feedback, refining the initiatives and ultimately rolling out successful strategies company-wide.

Tayler says any effective agile HR strategy should recognise that a healthy and engaged workforce is one that is ready and willing to navigate periods of rapid transformation.

“We’ve upped our internal communication strategy to make sure we are supporting all the different types of challenges outside of work. For example, at the moment, we’re doing quite a few financial webinars in response to the cost-of-living crisis.”

The company is also continuing to embrace flexible working as another support mechanism for employees. The value of flexible work provisions in boosting job satisfaction, retention and productivity is well-documented. But an often-overlooked benefit of flexible ways of working is its ability to foster an adaptive and agile mindset.

Once employees have this mindset, a culture of agility tends to take hold, says Tayler, helping workforces adapt quickly in challenging circumstances.

“If you’ve got your people rhythm right in your business, then you can respond pretty quickly to any changes that come in, whether that’s financial headwinds, competitors or new trends,” she says. “Whatever the change is, you’re able to weave it into the existing rhythm you have.”

A longer version of this article was originally published in the August/September 2024 edition of HRM Magazine.

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