Not so long ago, the country's largest HR conference ‘HR Savaitė Lietuva 2021‘ took place with Danske Bank Lithuania as the main sponsor this year. Indrė Sakalauskienė, Head of Human Resources at Danske Bank Lithuania, and Ieva Stalnionienė, Senior Manager of the Finnish Customer Service Team, share their key insights after the conference.
  • Inherent in the Agile working methodology used in today's organisations is autonomy, which means empowerment in decision making, responsibility, allowing mistakes and learning
  • Creativity becomes a critical skill – the freedom to think differently and the courage to speak up
  • Only lifelong learners retain the most significant competitive advantage

Indrė: “Agile work organisation practices are increasingly often applied in modern teams, and they go hand in hand with promoting autonomy. Empowering teams and their individual members to make decisions and act autonomously allows to remain competitive and productive. However, trust can be a challenge for some organisations, since the latter seem to lose control. In reality, however, the opposite is true. When control becomes trust, the goals are achieved even more seamlessly. The world is changing, therefore, let's give our colleagues more autonomy to act here and now, rather than adhering to traditional decision-making practices.”

“There is a lot of talk about employee empowerment and growth, but most of the time, this value is created in a rather conventional way, through the prism of corporate needs. Meanwhile, we should take into account the priorities of employees, to understand how they want to develop, and support them on this path. Obviously, such autonomy does not mean complete freedom, dissociation from the corporate structure or rules. Rather, it is about empowerment to take decisions and the responsibility that entails, and the opportunity to learn from mistakes.” 

- Ieva Stalnionienė
Indrė: “Autonomy in organisations, as a successful implementation of Agile practices, means the speed to make decisions immediately and to overcome challenges in a timely manner, without significant negative impact. It creates flexibility, because trust in the team, as we have seen particularly clearly during the pandemic, can be the key to business survival. Finally, autonomy increases employee engagement and allows their true potential to evolve.”

“Meanwhile, autonomy goes hand in hand with courage and unleashed creativity. Creativity is critical competence, the freedom to think differently, the courage to speak up. Let us embrace challenges as a gift, because the latter foster creativity and give us the opportunity to use our experience, knowledge and skills. By the way, have you ever thought that creativity is also fostered by rules? After all, finding ways to solve a challenge constricted by limitations or doing things more conveniently and quickly makes us more creative.” 

- Indrė Sakalauskienė

Ieva: “Only those who learn continuously and do so proactively will maintain the greatest competitive advantage in today's world. It is worth looking at examples, sharing experiences, rather than following rules or theory alone. Build the widest possible social networks. Interact not only with your closest colleagues, but also with people from other teams, fields or organisations. By discussing issues with them, you will see problems from a different angle, develop creativity, find new ideas, different solutions, and learn.”