How To Be An ‘Agile’ Employee

Let’s start with what the word agile means: In everyday situations, agile means to move quickly, move easily, and effectively. What does being agile mean for employees? Today’s world is fast; technology is changing everything at lightening speeds, and that means the technology can change job roles quickly, it can also make jobs obsolete just as quick. Becoming an agile employee is the way to go, think about it if your job role changes you need to be able to adapt quickly. The worst scenario is that your job role becomes obsolete, you must be able to be agile enough to fit another role immediately otherwise you’ll be left on the shelf. You’ve probably heard that if you work hard, you’ll go far, I’m sorry to say that’s not enough anymore you also have to work agile. What do you need to become an agile employee? Hit the ground running You must have this ability; you should be able to take on a new role and learn it while you’re doing it. Every day new jobs emerge, your company may all of a sudden need community managers, conversion specialists, ethical hackers, there are new job roles appearing every day because of technology. New jobs are always great news, the not so good news is that you now have to do one of those new jobs because your role is no longer required. The good news is that just as employees are expected to be agile, so are businesses, today they employ for culture, knowing that the skills will come as you grow into each job role. So, remember when one department closes, and it’s clear that everyone has to work differently to keep up with the competition, you have to hop to the new department and take to it like a duck to water. Like learning You have to like learning. Agile employees are continuously learning because they know their skills of today could be in the history books tomorrow. To be agile, you should be absorbing everything happening in your industry so you can always be one step ahead. A perfect example is the retail industry; many changes are happening there on a daily basis. If you don’t keep up with the changes then before you know it you’ll be replaced by a robot who’s better at customer service than you, always stay one step ahead of the robot! Forget job titles If you’re a person who likes to have a job title and is content to be restricted by a job description, then being agile will be difficult for you. Due to the speed of everything job titles will eventually be replaced by mission titles. That means that every employee will be mission led, every department will collaborate to make sure the mission is accomplished, which will mean the mission is more important than the job title or the job description. Not being able to do something because it isn’t in the job description will be a thing of the past, all employees should be agile enough to share jobs when required to make the mission happen. Agile employees are not job title ego trippers! Anticipating change To be truly agile you need to be slightly psychic, don’t worry you won’t need super powers, you just need to be ahead of everyone else. You do need to be able to see into the future, but it can be done by closely following trends and anticipating what will happen next. Sometimes it will be easy to predict because you’ve spotted a pattern, other times it might just be a hunch. Agile employees won’t waste time having lots of meetings to decide whether they should do something about a possible change, they will anticipate it, make a decision and act immediately. Be Spontaneous Agile means that at any moment you could be completely spontaneous; that could be in the middle of writing a big report. Let’s say something is trending on social media which is relevant to your company and you know that by providing some content could generate extra traffic to the website. You can’t let the content creator know because they’re having a day off, so do you just go back to your report? No! You create the content, drive traffic to the website, convert some of that traffic into customers and then go back to writing the report. All work environments are now fast changing, the question is, are you?