VP and Head of People at Industrious, Shari Chernack- Creating Agile Organizations

Shari Chernack joined Industrious as VP and Head of People after a career at the intersection of people and transformation. She has consulted at Korn Ferry and Deloitte, run change management at an Omnicom-owned boutique, and held senior roles at SAP, Dell, and Neovia Logistics. She has watched what makes large organizations bend under pressure, and she has watched what makes them snap.

On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, Shari shares how she thinks about building agile organizations with future-ready talent and inclusive cultures. The conversation moves through onboarding, building trust beyond an open-door policy, and breaking the bias that quietly shapes hiring and promotion decisions. The People leader's job, in her view, is to design organizations that can keep changing without losing themselves. We unpack her playbook below, with broader research and patterns we see across AllVoices People team efficiency solutions.

What Makes an Agile Organization Different

Agile is not about Scrum boards. It is about how quickly the organization can sense change, decide, and move. The technology is downstream of the design.

The data on this is unusually clear. McKinsey research on enterprise agility finds that agile organizations see employee engagement climb 20 to 30 points, customer satisfaction rise 10 to 30 points, operational performance improve 30 to 50 percent, and financial performance jump 20 to 30 percent compared with non-agile peers. Those are not marginal gains. They are the kind of numbers that justify a complete redesign.

Shari's career maps onto that finding. The companies she has helped transform did not stop at process. They redesigned the work itself, the decision rights, and how People leaders showed up alongside the business. That last part is what most failed transformations skip.

Onboarding Is the First Test of Agility

Shari talks about onboarding as the place where culture either holds or fragments. New hires form their picture of the company in the first 30 days, and that picture is hard to repaint later.

What should the first 30 days of onboarding actually deliver?

Three things, in her view: clarity on the role, real connection with the team, and a working understanding of how decisions get made. Most onboarding plans handle the first one and miss the second and third. The result is a new hire who knows their job description but cannot read the room. Structured employee onboarding programs close that gap when they are paired with manager-led check-ins, not just HR forms.

How do you build trust outside an open-door policy?

An open-door policy is a passive system. It assumes employees will walk in. Most will not, especially when the issue involves a manager or a power dynamic. Shari argues for active listening systems, things like skip-level one-on-ones, anonymous feedback, and regular pulse surveys. The point is to lower the cost of honesty until people stop deciding whether to speak.

What Actually Works in Building Agile Cultures

Principle 1: Lead with behavior change, not slide decks

McKinsey's transformation research shows that organizations whose leaders modeled the behaviors they asked of employees were 1.6 times more likely to outperform peers. The slide deck is not the change. The senior team's calendar, language, and decisions are the change.

Principle 2: Listen continuously and act visibly

Companies that act on frontline employee recommendations are 80 percent more likely than peers to implement new and better ways of working. Listening systems only work when employees can see the loop close. Pulse surveys without follow-up training feedback fatigue, fast. The AllVoices employee survey platform sends results back to the teams that produced them, alongside the actions leadership committed to taking.

Principle 3: Treat psychological safety as a precondition, not a perk

Agile teams need to disagree productively. Workplace psychological safety is the variable that determines whether disagreement turns into better decisions or into resentment. Shari describes safety as something built through repetition, including how managers respond when an employee challenges them in front of others.

Where Employee Relations Fits in an Agile Organization

Agile organizations create more friction, not less. Cross-functional work means more interpersonal conflict. Faster decisions mean more bruised feelings. People leaders who do not invest in Employee Relations infrastructure end up reactive, with managers escalating every dispute to HR.

That is why centralized HR case management software matters in agile environments. It gives ER teams a single system of record for issues, with workflows that route the right cases to the right people and surface patterns by team and manager. The signal of a healthy agile organization is not zero conflict. It is a constant, visible, low-temperature stream of resolved cases.

How does case data feed back into organizational design?

Two ways. Case volume by team and manager flags where coaching or restructuring is needed. Case categories show whether the friction is policy-based, manager-based, or peer-based. Shari describes that loop as the core of workplace change management done right.

Frequently Asked Questions About Building Agile Organizations

What is an agile organization in HR terms?

An agile organization is one designed to sense change quickly and reorganize work without bureaucratic drag. In HR terms, that means small cross-functional teams, distributed decision rights, transparent goals, and managers who coach instead of command. The HR systems supporting it have to match — fast feedback, fast hiring, fast offboarding when needed.

How do People leaders create agile cultures?

By aligning three things at once: structure, behavior, and rituals. Structure means clear team boundaries and decision rights. Behavior means leaders modeling the change. Rituals means recurring practices like demos, retros, and pulse cycles that keep teams connected and learning. Shari Chernack treats those three as inseparable.

What is the difference between agile teams and traditional hierarchies?

Traditional hierarchies optimize for stability and control. Agile teams optimize for adaptation and speed. Neither is universally better. The choice depends on the work, but most modern People organizations operate hybrid models, with stable functions for compliance and operations and agile pods for product and customer-facing work.

How do you measure organizational agility?

The strongest metrics combine speed, learning, and engagement. Time from signal to decision. Time from decision to action. Engagement scores by team. Retention of high performers. Organizational development teams pair these with qualitative interviews to understand whether the speed is sustainable.

Why does psychological safety matter in agile environments?

Agile work requires people to challenge each other quickly and without political risk. If employees calculate the social cost of pushing back, the speed advantage disappears. Psychological safety is the operating system that makes agility possible.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Shari Chernack's argument lands in a clear place: agile organizations are not the product of new tools or new methodologies. They are the product of a People function that has rebuilt onboarding, listening, performance, and conflict management to keep pace with the rate of change.

The practical move for most People leaders is to audit the systems that already exist. Where does information move slowly? Where do issues get stuck in escalation? Where are managers underequipped? Those are the points where agility either compounds or collapses, and the People team owns the answer.

See how AllVoices supports agile People teams with case management, listening, and analytics in one connected system.