Agility is one of the buzzwords of the moment in business, particularly when it comes to resource. This has only been accelerated by Covid-19, but how do businesses gear themselves to turn agility into competitive advantage?
We’ve lost count of how many conversations we’ve had recently where the word ‘agility’ has been used liberally. The challenge is making sure it’s more than a buzzword and turns into a clear plan that delivers a competitive advantage, particularly when it’s about agile resourcing.
We asked our Strategy and Marketing Director, Gordon Neil, for his views on how brands can gear themselves for success.
How brands deploy resource is key to success, all the insight and digital connectivity in the world can only succeed if the resource using it can be agile as well, because at the end of the day, brands succeed and fail on the basis of people. To deliver success with agile resource, brands need to take 4 steps.
If you know what you want to deliver as a brand, whether that’s overall strategy or objectives, you can work out what the purpose of agile resourcing is. Without that, you’re just following a market trend or fashion. Everything a brand does should start with a purpose, but when it comes to people, that’s truer than anywhere else. Make a mistake in resourcing and not only will you fail, you’ll personally impact on the people involved. Get it right however, and success beckons.
Once the purpose is clear, you should be able to work out what it is you need people to do and when you need them to do it. This is key, because it starts to enable you to work out the type of resource you need, when they need to be able to work and whether it’s required year round, at specific points in the year, or whether it’s highly variable and ad-hoc.
Knowing what you need people to do enables you to start to map out the skills required to deliver the job. This is critical to working out your final solution. Too quickly, we see brands look to the gig economy for a solution, often driven by a trend and the fact it appears efficient. Don’t get us wrong, the gig economy can play a vital role in any resource solution, but only where skill sets are matched to need. Often, there’s a gap between skillset required and solution deployed, because a decision has been taken without truly understanding the skills required to deliver the objectives.
Now that you have a purpose, understand what people need to do and when, and know the skills you require so you can find the right solution for you. A range of resource options are available, from permanent, to part time, to seasonal, to skilled ad-hoc and crowd through gig economy. Often, the solution lies in a mix of resource, with a modular approach to building across different resource types to fulfil the end purpose.
All of this might seem simple, but the reality is that it’s often done in the wrong order, leading to the wrong resource solutions operating in the business with no defining purpose. Getting it right leads to efficient growth for the brand, and an agile resource solution that delivers a purpose rather than follows a trend.
At McCurrach, we’ve focused on building resource solutions across the spectrum. This means that whatever purpose and needs a brand has, we’re able to provide the solution by building a modular service proposition, providing the ultimate agility whilst delivering a clear purpose.
Join us over the rest of this week where we’ll take a closer look at the topic of agile resource through the lenses of Field Marketing and working in an agile way with permanent resources. Later in the week we’ll also share a case study from the Online Restaurant Delivery sector, which demonstrates the value that can be gained from following the steps in this article.
Follow our LinkedIn page to keep up to date and get in touch if you want to find out more about how we can help you with an agile resource strategy than delivers real competitive advantage.
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ABOUT THE EXPERT:
For more information on Gordon Neil, Group Strategy and Marketing Director, visit his LinkedIn page.