When Traditional HR Falls Short – And What We Did Instead To Design Agile HR 🚧

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When I joined a Swiss SME working with software developers, agile project management teams, and sociocracy 3.0-inspired structures, HR was primarily an administrative and operational function. The focus was clear and familiar: supporting recruitment and employer branding, managing onboarding and offboarding, and ensuring salaries were paid accurately and on time. HR worked reliably in the background as a “Stab” function. Important as a service provider, but not strategic as a system designer.

At the same time, the organization had a clear ambition: to strengthen self-organizing teams and move towards a more agile and strategic understanding of HR. That shift changed the central question from “How does HR manage people?” to “How does HR enable the system people work in?” 🔄

One of the first visible changes was letting go of some “sacred” HR processes. 

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools! 🤝

For example, the annual performance review was stopped. Not because feedback was suddenly unimportant, but because the format no longer fit the reality of agile, team-based work with distributed responsibility. Instead, domain reviews were introduced - closer to the actual work, roles, and responsibilities people held.

Onboarding, on the other hand, was intentionally designed. 🌱 New employees experienced a structured process with regular weekly and later monthly retrospectives and peer feedback sessions, facilitated by me. The guiding questions were simple:

• What is good?

• What could be improved?

• What actions follow?

Feedback was timely, concrete, and effectively embedded in the collaborative process. During the probationary period, this worked remarkably well.

The gap only became visible later. Once probation was successfully completed, organized feedback sessions became rarer. Not because people avoided feedback, but because there was no longer a shared structure holding it in place. Autonomy increased while clarity around feedback rhythms quietly faded. This is one of the key learnings I took with me. 💡 While we value individuals and interactions more, there is still value in clear and simple processes and tools.

Budget and team size also shaped our HR setup. A comprehensive HRIS was neither realistic nor necessary. Instead, we worked with what was already part of daily collaboration: Miro boards, Confluence, and Jira. And yes, in traditional HR we would scream: “But what about the given transparency with those tools??? That's impossible!” ⚠️

But let me tell you: It's possible to bring more transparency even in HR processes. Because you cannot begin to build trust until there is transparency. 🔍 It emerges through clear roles, visible decisions, shared documentation, and explicit feedback loops.

Another key learning for me was this:

Self-organization does not reduce the need for HR. It increases the need for a thoughtful people-centric design.

HR shifts from controlling processes to enabling clarity, flexibility, coherence, and learning across the system. Which means for leaders and HR professionals navigating similar transitions: Don't ask if HR still matters. Ask how to design it consciously.

Ready to design HR that actually fits your reality? Let’s talk. ☕️

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How the HR role shifts in self-organizing environments.