Companies use job rotation as a technique to increase worker efficiency.

By Chuck Leddy

A job rotation program moves employees through a variety of positions within or among departments, enabling them to gain exposure to different parts of the business while growing and expanding their skill sets. While job rotations can offer a multitude of advantages for employee and employer alike, there are certain areas in your organization that will reap greater rewards than others.

Here are three of those areas.

1. Employee Motivation and Retention

Job rotations motivate key, high-potential employees because they are seen by those employees as a company-made investment in their future. They retain talent because they foster learning opportunities. If a talented employee doesn't see any kind of growth opportunity, or if he or she is kept in the same position for too long, there is a turnover risk. By rotating that employee, you create more challenges, test adaptability to a new environment and manager and get the employee learning new skills.

2. Skills and Organizational Capacities Increase

Job rotations broaden skills because they expose employees to different functional areas of the company. When a research and development employee rotates to a sales position, for instance, they learn more about building relationships with customers, understanding their needs and how the whole sales cycle works. Employees gain a fuller picture of how the business works, which benefits all involved.

3. Rotations Build Employee Networks

Just as job rotations broaden skill sets, they also broaden employee networks, further preparing the rotated employee for leadership roles. Employees learn the different working styles and cultures within each area, as well, which encourages collaboration. They also provide the company with cross-functional capabilities, meaning that when someone suddenly quits or gets sick, the organization can call upon a deep bench of talent who is capable of filling different functional roles.

Hurdles to Success

HR leaders should be precise when implementing job rotation programs, maximizing benefits and minimizing problems. They should align rotations with the organization's HR strategy and use them to prepare high-potential employees for assuming leadership roles.

Here are four common challenges faced by HR leaders when implementing a program and four possible solutions:

1. Establishing value

Leadership doesn't recognize the value of job rotation, seeing it as a potential creator of chaos/musical chairs.

Solution: Gain the commitment of your leadership team by making the business case for job rotation as a tool to motivate, broaden skills, retain employees (especially younger ones) and develop cross-functional capabilities.

2. A loss of specialized skills

Job rotations can lead to a generalist mindset within an organization, meaning that employees know something about multiple areas while the company may prefer employees to know a lot about one area (i.e., have a more specialist mindset).

Solution: Define the departments and functional areas suitable for such a program. Remember, it may not be a good tool to develop the technical expertise your company needs, but it could be great for developing generalists and leaders. Setting up a leadership track alongside a specialist track may represent the best of both worlds. As job rotation experts Lisa Cheraskin and Michael Campion explain in a Workforce Magazine article, organizations "must have other ways to get specialist skills, such as using vendors for specialist tasks or using different career-management systems in technical areas."

3. A decrease in productivity

You'll be rotating someone out of a position where the employee is highly productive into a new position where they have a steep learning curve ahead, so you'll have to provide more support when rotating the now less capable employee into a new position. The rotated employee's new manager and colleagues may also find themselves less productive in the short term as they provide coverage.

Solution: Develop policies and standards to help managers and rotated employees navigate the program and introduce a structure of support, such as training, orientation for the rotated employee's manager and colleagues and mentoring programs.

4. Success Metric

How do you measure the success of job rotation programs?

Solution: Define criteria to evaluate the results. What skills has the rotated employee learned? How has the rotated employee used best practices from previous positions? How has the employee's manager and team learned from the employee, and vice versa? You'll likely want to collect regular feedback from the rotated employee, their manager and colleagues.

Although implementing a job rotation program may seem complex (it is), such programs offer tremendous benefits for employees and organizations alike.

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Boston-based Chuck Leddy is a freelance journalist who has contributed regularly to The Boston Globe and Harvard Gazette. He also trains Fortune 500 executives in business-communication skills as an instructor for EF Corporate Language Solutions in Cambridge, MA.

Does job rotation make an employee more efficient?

Plus, it often helps employees feel more confident in their role and gain more knowledge of the company overall. In one study, 89.6% of employees felt that job rotation fulfilled their need to gain various skills. As a bonus, 96% of them also said they became more productive 89.6% became better problem-solvers.

How job rotation is helpful for the employees?

Why is job rotation important? Job rotation allows a company to see employees' potential and invest in teaching new skills throughout an organization. It can also help reduce turnover and keep staff that is familiar with how an organization works, even if additional training is needed for a specific role.

What is job rotation technique?

Job rotation is the practice of moving employees between jobs in an organization. These rotations are predominantly lateral, meaning that they happen between jobs on the same level and are not considered promotions. They are also often temporary with people moving back to their original job after a certain time.

How does job rotation improve productivity?

2- Job rotation stimulates staff Staff who can rotate roles and develop their skills and talents are more motivated in their jobs, resulting in improved overall performance. Thus, job rotation creates a sense of motivation that helps employees achieve company goals and thus increase production.