Agility in business is a description of its flexibility and responsiveness. The more agile a business is, the more capable it is of adapting to new circumstances and making changes in the face of new dynamics.
For example, if there is a new technology that begins changing the industry and a new competitor that threatens the business, an agile business will be able to devise new products, new strategies, or new approaches that allow it to thrive in this new environment. A company that is not agile will either not make these changes or will make them too slow to succeed.
Why is agility so important, and how can you make your startup more agile?
What Does It Mean By Business Agility?
Enterprise or business agility refers to an industry that has the potential to adapt and quickly make changes to address the rapid changes. Businesses that achieve this model can take advantage of this by meeting consumer needs in a responsive way.
Moreover, agility has to be a part of the overall business strategy. Organizational agility boosts employee engagement and has been shown to increase operational performance by 30%. The implementation of agile projects should be included in business strategy.
The Many Benefits Of Agility
First, it’s important to understand that agility affects many different areas of your business simultaneously, and your business’s agility can change based on thousands of individual factors. Even your choice of CMS solutions can affect your business’s overall agility; for example, a flexible platform like Umbraco is much better for facilitating long-term business growth in a rapidly changing environment.
Ultimately, if your business is more agile, you’ll have access to benefits like the following:
Easier scalability.
Agility allows you to scale much more easily. Because your business can adjust to new circumstances easily and modify its existing structure, there are few, if any, general obstacles to your growth. Hence, scalability is no longer a concern since your business is now ready to address any new challenge that comes in the way.
Faster issue resolution.
Dynamic agility also allows for faster issue resolution. If you encounter a hiccup in your production processes or if your customers voice a recurring problem, your agility will naturally allow you to investigate and solve the problem more rapidly than your non-agile competitors.
Dynamic responsiveness.
Agility facilitates a kind of dynamic responsiveness; agile companies are constantly adapting to the circumstances around them and at incredible speeds. Agile companies take advantage of new opportunities or potential areas of growth. When there are new threats or emergent weaknesses, agile companies can address them.
Institutional resilience.
Internally, having greater agility provides you with more institutional resilience. If all your employees are individually more agile, they can take on a wider range of different responsibilities and tackle a more diverse array of different problems. What’s better for a startup to be individually resilient and less dependency on others?
Individual autonomy and creativity.
Agility can also promote individual autonomy and creativity. If your business is inherently creative, responsive, and ever-changing, your employees will be much more likely to come up with innovative new ideas. This motivates them to speak their hearts out whenever it comes to business development.
How To Make Your Startup More Agile
After knowing the benefits of business agility, there’s no reason not to integrate it. So, what steps can you take to make your business more agile? Here are a few strategies to help you out in difficult times.
Bake agility into your core values and culture.
First, make sure agility is somewhere in your list of core values or that it’s a central pillar of your organizational culture. Merely stating that your organization is agile doesn’t necessarily make it so, but if you consider agility to be a top priority, it’s going to eventually work its way into more aspects of your business.
Recruit the right people.
In some ways, the idea of an agile business is a misnomer; a business is truly only as agile as the people running it. Accordingly, you should devote considerable time and energy to recruiting the right people so you can fill your organization with more agile-minded individuals. When recruiting and hiring, try to gauge the overall agility of each candidate as part of your evaluation.
Encourage more employee autonomy.
Giving your employees more autonomy, or independent decision-making, discourages the formation of bureaucracies and hierarchies that can make your business less agile. As an added benefit, autonomous employees tend to be happier and more satisfied with their work.
Avoid “marrying” strategies or approaches.
Too often, companies become bogged down by strategies or approaches that are considered indispensable or off-limits to reconsider. You can make your business more agile by avoiding “marrying” strategies and approaches like this. Instead, keep an open mind and always be willing to reevaluate your existing structures.
Make frequent cuts.
Oftentimes, adapting means cutting something. Businesses that are too reluctant to make cuts tend to be less agile than their competitors. Always be willing to cut waste however it presents itself.
Give yourself more options.
The most agile businesses are ones that have more options available to them, so always err on the side of giving yourself more options in the future. If you lock yourself into a platform or system that’s almost impossible to change, you’ll be at an inherent disadvantage compared to a business that adopts a platform or system that can flexibly evolve in the future.
Concluding Words
Through these strategies, you’ll be able to make your startup more agile. And if your startup is more agile, it’s going to be more innovative, more resilient, and more competitive. It’s not a guarantee of success, but it’s certainly a good quality to have.
And it’s a wrap on this comprehensive guide. I hope you got an idea about how to make your startup more flexible. If it did, share your thoughts in the comment box below. Till then, happy reading.
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