How Smart Job Rotation Policies Can Enhance Organizational and Employee Effectiveness

What is Job Rotation and How It Can Enhance Organizational Effectiveness

Job Rotation or the practice of moving employees between various projects in organizations can enhance organizational and employee effectiveness. By ensuring that employees do not stagnate or remain stuck in a particular project for extended periods of time, organizations can actualize motivated and inspired performance from the employees.

As the employees start fresh projects after a year or a few months, they can look forward to different experiences and opportunities to enhance their skills as well as retain the freshness with which they approach work.

Indeed, smart job rotation policies can go a long way in eliminating or even reducing the demotivation and demoralization of the employees. In this way, organizational outcomes can be made more efficient in addition to productivity jumps as well as innovation and inventiveness from the employees.

Smart Job Rotation policies can contribute to employee wellbeing as well as organizational and personal health and longevity. Moreover, Smart Job Rotation policies can help employees experience the pleasures and joys of working afresh in each project giving them the experience that is akin to changing jobs.

It can also be said that job rotation helps in reducing attrition as the employees by being rotated among projects can feel like they are taking on new challenges within the organization instead of seeking external pastures for their need for the actualization of fulfilling and inspiring work.

Apart from this, a well thought out and efficiently implemented job rotation policy can help reduce or even eliminate the friction between managers and employees due to personality clashes and differences over working styles and nature of work as well as concerns over discrimination that are likely to crop up between them after appraisals and performance reviews.

Job Rotation Per Se without Planning and Implementation would not Help

It must be noted that job rotation per se would not be the panacea to all the problems described in the previous sections. Indeed, thoughtless and routine job rotation can exacerbate some of the problems as shifting projects by itself does not reduce the frustration or the demoralization of the employees within the larger organizational ecosystem.

For instance, job rotation just for the sake of shifting employees between projects can increase the lead times it takes for employees in new projects to hit the ground running and start contributing as soon as possible.

Since familiarization and acclimatization with the new project and the managers and other peers in the project takes time, this can result in decreased productivity as well as slower performance due to the time it takes for employees to adjust to the new project and familiarize themselves with the new environs.

Moreover, if the skills of the employee are not transferable meaning that employees rotated between projects have to learn new skills and attributes, this would result in a waste of time and precious resources on “reinventing the wheel” which means that employees would have to start again from scratch thereby losing time and spending effort in the process.

Need for Smart Job Rotation Policies

Thus, it is clear that what is needed are Smart Job Rotation policies where the complementarities between the projects that the employees are being rotated are high.

In other words, there has to be a model where employees are rotated between projects that have similar skills requirements and have synergies between them.

Indeed, the key term here is synergies wherein employees rotated between projects should be able to transfer their skills to the new project as well as ensure that synergies between the projects are actualized.

Also, Smart Job Rotation policies are those that take into account the needs of all stakeholders and not only the employees or the managers or the wider organizational interests.

In other words, job rotation has to be such that the managers in both the old and the new projects have to be in alignment with each other and with the employees as well as the larger organizational needs and attributes.

This would mean that any job rotation is done only after all the managers in a specific group or division or between divisions and functions get together and decide whom to rotate and whom to retain.

These discussions should not be held hostage to political and personal considerations and at the same time, there has to be buy-in from the Human Resources Manager so as to ensure that the softer skills such as communication abilities, team player attributes, and other aspects are also in alignment with the requirements of the managers and more importantly, with the wider organizational goals and needs.

Keep out Politics and Politicking

Apart from this, the managers must not play favorites during job rotation wherein they shift those employees who are out of favor with them and retain those who are their loyalists and favorites. Indeed, one of the main reasons why job rotation is done in organizations is to prevent such an occurrence wherein some managers play politics with their employees and promote them or rotate them based on their personal agendas.

Thus, it is clear that job rotation should not be held to ransom by political agendas and power center politicking. An effective way to prevent this would be by giving the HR managers greater say in the job rotation meetings as well as involve senior managers in the process so that the interests of the group and the organization are aligned with the interests of the individual employees and their managers.

To conclude, Smart Job Rotation policies can indeed enhance organizational effectiveness if carried out after due diligence.