In recent years, the world and the business environment have changed tremendously. To continuously exceed customer expectations and act head of game in the global business environment, building an agile organization has become a very hot topic in Asia.
In a business leader conference I attended around a year ago, plenty of business leaders has generously shared their insights and successful stories in building a corporate culture and structure that embrace agility in an organization. While listening to their sharing, I was very impressed with what we have been working on internally as many of our practices were in sync with the best practices implemented by top-tier organizations across the globe. Of course, I have also learnt a lot more and got inspired to execute more internal initiatives in building an agile team.
Being agile is very important for a fast-growing organization like eeVoices. While we are in business for 10+ years, we always want to stay young and maintain that agility we had during our early years. More importantly, to be able to handle massive number of background checks which kept increasing throughout the years, building an agile organization became one of our top priorities in 2019.
Below were some key initiatives we have done internally in building an agile organization:
- Define Agility: We took some time to discuss internally to define what agility means in our business and the day-to-day operation as well as the importance and implication for our business and customer experience.
- Communication and Sharing: We have then conducted morning sessions and weekly meetings to share our thoughts as to the desired behaviours and daily application scenario in being agile to improve customer experience and manage our team.
- Internal Story Sharing: We have inquired the team to share their stories as to how agility helped them personally in their daily work as well as any related client “wow stories”.
- Team Design: We have deliberately built up smaller teams with more authority delegation to assist our clients. Again, the individual members themselves need to stay agile!
- Communication Channel to Management: To stay agile and close to the market, all staff are provided with ways to have customer comments and new ideas passed on to executive management. This allows the overall direction of the organization and service offerings to be improved timely to the ever-changing customer needs.
After such exercise, we have realized that the teams and individual talent became more agile in different ways that help the organization to grow and run significantly better. In some of my previous jobs, I see a lot of people who were reluctant to new changes – be it beneficial for the organization or even themselves every day. At eeVoices, we do not see this. Indeed, what I personally experience now is a company full of talent who are proactively looking for ways to improve and change. That mentality of agility and making changes quickly to align with the market is really killing. This is also why I enjoy working at eeVoices and I can foresee such agility culture and value systems contributing to the strong culture foundation for our upcoming market growth in 2020.
This article was written by Christen Ma, Director of Client Relations, eeVoices Limited.