In a time of change and uncertainty, it’s more important than ever for SMEs to remain resilient, adaptable and focused. With teams working remotely, or flexibly across locations, ensuring processes and team culture is maintained is a key focus of many businesses.
What is an agile mindset?
The agile mindset is a set of beliefs. In business, this methodology enables resilient, adaptable and focused teams. The methodology outlines four key values, recognition, communication, trust and learning. When embraced, these are said to improve respect and collaboration within teams, improve learning and development, and importantly during these times, enhance the resilience and adaptability of the business.
“Building an agile mindset and culture offers a way to harness the power of the people in your organisation to find ways to be more adaptive, innovative and resilient.”
Agile Business Manifesto
Mindset, values, and principles of a business are not always visible but are the most powerful indicator of a culture that will drive the business success.
The agile mindset builds an agile culture — of happy, high-performing teams who deliver value to their customers.
In a company set on the agile mindset, working style is typically executed in small team groups who work together in short project sprints. This allows faster progress, and greater responsiveness, through less hierarchy, more pride and ownership, enhanced communication and collaboration, and transparency.
Co-location was previously thought to be a key factor in the success of the agile mindset and culture — with teams side-by-side, communicating and problem-solving was easy, and trust was quickly built. This is being challenged, as businesses built on the agile mindset go remote, and many find that they’ve adopted remote working practices relatively seamlessly, given the resilience and adaptability that the mindset instills in teams.
However, the speed at which these changes happened recently, can mean that not all of the processes and platforms or tools were in place for remote teams to work effectively. With remote work being embraced more widely, and set to stay even post-pandemic, ensuring teams remain connected is a key management focus.
Swingvy recently hosted a webinar in partnership with Decode HR, where we shared our tips on how an agile mindset and culture within businesses can translate and be retained across dispersed teams. Below are some of the insights that were shared.
Download the presentation slides, and watch the on-demand webinar video below.
Author: Katie Ash, Swingvy
