Disadvantages of Job Rotation

Job rotation is a process which enables individuals to know and work beyond their domain and also gain from other team members’ expertise and knowledge.

A multiskilled employee delivers more as compared to someone who works only for salary and hates to accept challenges in life. Like every other process, job rotation has also got some disadvantages as well.

Let us go through the disadvantages of job rotation:

Lot of time as well as effort go in motivating and persuading employees for job rotation. You just can’t expect your team members to willingly work with people of other departments whom they don’t even know at the first attempt only.

Superiors have to sit with each and every individual in person and explain the benefits of job rotation first and then motivate him/her to contribute in other domains as well.

Convincing employees for job rotation can sometimes be a time consuming process. As a Boss; you just can’t concentrate on any other work but keep on encouraging your immediate juniors to say a yes to job rotation.

Another disadvantage of job rotation is that individuals take some time to acquaint to a new process, set up, be friendly with other employees and so on.

Expecting miracles out of a marketing professional who has been asked to contribute in the accounts department as a result of job rotation is foolish.

Individuals working beyond their expertise would definitely be able to contribute but their output would certainly not be at par with the experts. Efficiency may be lost as individuals do not become proficient in a particular task all of a sudden.

Upgrading skills is no rocket science and takes time. How can a sales professional know each and every thing about the accounts team or all the softwares used by the IT team in just one day?

In the same way, an individual from the MIS team would also take time to know about the specifications/features of each and every product and would never be able to convince clients to invest in the organization’s products or services, the way a hard core sales professional would do. Work suffers at the end of the day and eventually the organization is at loss.

Job rotation also leads to stress and anxiety among employees. Employees are reluctant to come out of their comfort zone and hardly contribute in other department. For them, job rotation is another formality or process imposed on them. They simply have to follow the same as their Boss has asked them to do so.

Individuals take time to open up in front of new people, express their ideas in a new team and often turn negative. They are very comfortable working with the people they have known for sometime but when it comes to new colleagues, they find it extremely difficult to adjust and thus create all sorts of problems.

Another problem of job rotation is that it does not take into account the time wasted in training someone who is not worth it and does not deserve to be in the system also. One sometimes tends to pick the wrong employee for job rotation who not only creates problems for everyone else but also misuses other departments’ information and data.

If someone has willingly volunteered for job rotation, the company has to give him/her an opportunity, irrespective of the fact whether he/she is actually capable of the same or not?. Anyone who is denied of the same would all of a sudden speak ill about the entire organization and lose interest in work. It is extremely difficult to find the right and deserving candidate for job rotation.

Another disadvantage of job rotation is that sometimes, employees even after working for few months, in another department hardly learn anything. All your efforts go waste when the end result is a zero.