Workforce Agility- the Holy Grail

Abstract

The competitive market, where rapid change and continuous innovation for customers are requirements
for survival, has indeed forced all manufacturers in all sectors to find a new production model, one of
which is known as agile manufacturing. Agile manufacturing includes different aspects where workforce
agility is an important component. This current discussion on workforce agility and the contribution of
the same to agile manufacturing has been focused upon very much by growing organizations these days.
Agility means different to different organizations under different contexts. The elements that capture its
essential concepts are cooperativeness and synergism, strategic vision that can thrive in the dynamic and
unpredictable changes, high quality mass customized products, nimbleness and intellectual and
empowered workforce as well. Firms who stay ahead of times adopt these practices to integrate
horizontally, to actively interact with customers and to operate in a peer-to-peer mode with an ideology of
enablement. These new management practices, which include Scrum, Kanban, and Lean, is often referred
to by the umbrella label, “Agile. “This study tries to find out the various ways in which organizations can
have an agile workforce, with special reference to manufacturing sector.