Workplace revolution
Is Spark’s radical move showing the way?
“Agile is not a fad,” declares Spark chief executive Simon Moutter, when I suggest that people might be sceptical about the workplace trend sweeping the corporate world.
“These ways of working are the future of work, all workplaces will start to look more and more like this.”
That’s a good reason why those of us who aren’t Spark employees, or shareholders, should care about the radical transformation going on at the telco giant’s Auckland head office.
But if Agile really is coming to a workplace near you, what is it exactly?
For those in the tech sector — particularly software development — the Agile way of working won’t be a new concept.
It was defined by a group of software developers back in 2001, though its roots go back further than that. It’s now the industry standard for that sector.
Numerous big corporates including Vodafone, The Warehouse and Herald publisher NZME run Agile units.
But its full-scale adoption across a company the size of Spark is something else.
A senior staffer at Vodafone — which has been expanding its own use of Agile — told me he was impressed by Spark’s full-company approach, even though he wasn’t quite sure how they were going to make it work. He wasn’t sure they realised quite what they were attempting.
“It’s something that’s not been done at scale in New Zealand,” says Spark learning and development lead Nick Mackeson Smith.
We chat at Spark Arena, where he is running a mass introduction session for hundreds of Spark staff who are getting their first taste of what Agile means.
Mackeson Smith, who is from Britain and has worked in corporate training and change management in numerous sectors, says even by international standards this kind of large scale transition is rare.
“It’s pretty groundbreaking globally,” he says.
It is, he says, a big switch in mindset — a choice people have to make about how they work. “They’re all smart people, they’re all adults and they’re all up for this. They want to be part of this journey. Our job is to guide them.”
But he’s conscious that for many, even those who are excited to be a part of it, Agile will mean accepting radical changes in the way they work. “It is challenging, it’s not all sunshine, rainbows and unicorns, it’s going to be hard for some people to adjust,” he says.
The media coverage of Spark’s Agile transition certainly hasn’t been rainbows and unicorns. The company seems to have copped flak from all sides.
It has had to overcome the scepticism of tech sector acolytes who feel a strong ownership of the concept, and doubt that a traditional corporate can be radical enough to successfully make the change.
There’s also been concern from unions, which worry that Spark’s move is too radical.
There have been suggestions that the switch to new Agile contracts was aggressive and that Agile is an excuse to cut staff and increase workload.
It all hit the headlines in May, when a statement to the NZX announced that Spark was accelerating the move to Agile.
The statement also noted that the move would ultimately see labour costs drop by $90 million, to an annualised $470m by the end of the first half of 2019.
Staff were given five weeks to decide whether they wanted to get on the Agile bus.
Old roles were effectively gone — everyone in an Agile workplace works in multi-disciplined work groups, or “squads”.
The president of the Council of Trade Unions, Richard Wagstaff, described the approach as “hard-nosed” and unethical.
But there has been no industrial action or obvious worker unrest.
In fact, Spark says uptake of the new contracts has reached 98 per cent of staff. The company won’t yet provide hard numbers on staffing levels, but says that’s coming at the annual result announcement on August 22.
They will say that fewer than 100 staff were unsuccessful in finding positions in the new structure.
The reality is that those most directly affected are middle managers with opportunities to move on if they chose.
Many now find themselves back at the coalface — developing new products as part of the flatter, less hierarchical structure that Agile uses.
Those I talked to were loving the change.
Moutter doesn’t shy away from the fact that Spark has to cut costs.
“In a company like Spark, where you’ve got older parts of the business which are structurally challenged and commoditising rapidly, we have no option but to do anything other than reduce the cost . . . because our customers expect to get more and pay less,” he says. “That’s the game.”
But he is adamant that cutting costs is not the reason for going Agile.
“We don’t do Agile for cost out,” he says. “In some areas it may reduce the cost. We do it to be more customer focused, faster to market and more engaging to our employees.”
All of this controversy is presumably why I’ve been invited to Spark’s Agile party, to take a look at the way it’s working and try to make sense of it all.
Does it makes sense yet? No? Well, it’s not easy to explain because Agile is both plainly simple and radically complex.
It’s a specific set of work habits but it’s also a vibe, an attitude.
That’s why Spark has employed heavyweight management consultants McKinsey to guide the process.
It’s why they have retrained many of their smartest and most adaptable managers to become Agile coaches.
It’s why they hired the rock ‘n’ rollsized arena to hold a staff training rally.
For the record, that looked like good team-building fun — although also the kind of event where I’d have been nervous about drinking the Kool-Aid.
Thankfully, none of that was on offer.
Essentially, Agile is a set of workplace structures and habits that puts customer experience at the forefront.
In fact, there is a manifesto. The 12 Principles of
Agile was written at the meeting of the software developers who codified it back in 2001, at a ski resort in Utah.
It’s designed to drive relentless incremental change and improvement.
If you look at the way in which tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Spotify constantly update and improve their products to enhance customer experience, then you can see its results.
The companies ruling the world right now are all tech giants that live and breathe Agile.
The question isn’t: why is Spark going agile? The question is: why wouldn’t it?