Teresa Gu has over 20 years of HR experience across manufacturing and service industries. With expertise in strategic business partnerships and change management, she has led HR transformations at Ennovi, ING Bank, and TE Connectivity, driving HR strategies, performance Culture, and leadership development.

In an insightful interaction with Global Woman Leader, Teresa explores the integration of agile HR in traditionally rigid manufacturing environments. She addresses the transformative value agile can bring, overcoming systemic barriers, rethinking hierarchy, and measuring resilience, adaptability, and team learning velocity.

How do you reconcile agile HR practices with the rigidity often seen in manufacturing? Where do you think agile adds the most transformative value?

Manufacturing industry is evolving and getting more dynamic nowadays. Automotive is one of the key segments for Ennovi. The transformation towards EV market in automotive industry marks an interesting era for all. The rapid changes in the industry demand that suppliers like us respond more swiftly to EV OEM requirements while maintaining the high quality of our products to ensure safety. Organizations must evolve to match up with this transformation. A critical focus area for becoming a more agile and responsive organization is our people and organizational structure. To start, we must prioritize our internal customers – our employees. Traditional HR practices are no longer sufficient to address the individual needs. It’s time to rethink organizational structure, breaking down hierarchies, and bridging gaps between traditionally siloed teams. Empowering frontline employees and fostering adaptability makes the organization more dynamic and better equipped to thrive in a rapidly changing environment.

What invisible or deeply embedded psychological or systemic barriers have you observed that resist agility in manufacturing? How do you identify and dismantle them?

The biggest barrier is driving mindset and behavior changes effectively, how to tackle the resistance of change, resistance doing things out of our comfort zones. To tackle this barrier is exactly a change management process – prepare the team ahead of the transformation and bring them along the journey. Help the team to understand the urgency and needs of the changes. Help the team to understand how it relates to them as individuals and what are the benefits of the changes, highlight and recognize the role models for the team. Ensure the team has a clear transformation scope in mind, feels safe about the transformation, and has the right tools available for them to be successful with the changes.

Manufacturing often relies on clear hierarchies, but agile thrives in flatter structures. How would you radically rethink hierarchy in a factory setting?

This would be my dream organization set-up. To have a real agile organization, you will need a mature team who is accountable, embraces self-initiatives, and very good on cross-function and cross-regional communication.

What we are doing in Ennovi is to do some pilots. For example, we are piloting a rotating leadership in one of our key locations. We encourage three talents to step into a senior leadership position and share a consensus responsibility. The three rotating talents could take turns in leading, and gain insights into each other’s strengths and perspectives. This is also a good way to groom talent development. With this practice, we create a sense of ownership, empower talents, give talents visibility to the senior management team, and also foster the trust and effective collaboration between the team members. To transform to be an agile organization is a long-term journey for manufacturing industry, small steps help.

How would you build a culture that encourages micro-innovations by employees on the manufacturing floor?

This is not a new concept in manufacturing industry. Traditionally, we have continuous improvement process in all sites to encourage every single employee to propose innovative ideas and implement the ideas. This is embedded into our daily operations already for many years. To ensure this approach is sustainable, we also recognize positive behavior. We have five brand pillars in Ennovi; they are Global, Speed, Innovation, Best Talent, and Sustainability. Every quarter, we recognize the individual employees/ teams according to the five brand pillars during our global town hall. Innovation is a key pillar. The winners are recognized by CEO directly. We aim to drive continuous improvement to enable a culture of Innovation.

How would you measure abstract qualities like resilience, adaptability, and the velocity of learning among teams?

To assess the agile transformation is not always easy, as the quality of certain attributes are not easily measurable. My advice is to start with a set of focus metrics, linking to the end results the organization wants to achieve. It is also very important to explain the metrics to ensure team members understand the metrics. NPS and velocity are some of the common agile metrics. For example, the velocity prediction accuracy improves with every iteration because they are based upon past velocity. Understanding the team’s average velocity helps measure sprint velocity accurately. However, velocity is relevant to a single team. To compare the velocity among different teams could be misleading. Another common approach to measure agile success is to gain insights through anonymous surveys. If the organization prefers not to engage external consultants, conducting simple sentiment surveys using internal resources is a good start. This quick and straightforward approach allows team members to share how they feel, how well are they doing as one team etc. The team morale is an important indicator of the performance. When you see the team is not happy, it is a good opportunity to ask why and listen to the team. To act quicker via simple sentiment surveys will help to adapt and have the improvement action in place, and eventually bring the success of the projects.