Why Job Rotation is Beneficial?

Some employees are paid more for they are presenting that they are worth a greater amount since they can perform more than one job function and thus makes a higher incentive for more employees to be able to perform better in the workplace. It is a common perception to see that employees who normally opt into the program of job rotation that these individuals tend to have "higher perceived skills" and are more likely to be promoted.

Sometimes job rotation is practiced for the individual workers health benefit. This practices helps rotates the individual tasks and muscle movements. It reduces the stress of an average workday so that the workers do not feel the tension in their muscles as well as can keep up in their demanding workplace.

Job rotation will be used in a situation where an organization has a series of routine jobs that cannot be combined or enriched. In such a case, the employees may be shifted from one job to another in order to provide some variety so as to minimize monotony and boredom. Thus, in job rotation, a person is required to perform one job at a time but he is rotated at different jobs after certain period of time. When an activity is no longer challenging, the employee could be rotated to another job, at the same level, with the same skill requirements. It has the same effect as the job enlargement.

Job rotation is considered as an effective tool for successful implementation of HR strategy. It is about settling employees at the right place where they can deliver the maximum results. In today’s highly competitive world, this can be proved as the best strategy to find the immediate replacement of a high-worth employee from within the organization. Finding the most suitable people and shifting them to take on the responsibilities of a higher level is a tough task. Job rotation helps HR managers determine who can be replaced by whom and create a suitable and beneficial fit.

Advantages of Job Rotation:

• Job variation reduces the boredom and monotony through diversifying the employees activities.
• Employees with a wider range of skills give management more flexibility in scheduling work, adapting to changes and filling vacancies.
• It broadens the range of experience of employees and is an effective training technique.
• Helps managers as well as individuals identify their Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes. It can be used in determining who needs to improve or upgrade his or skills in order to perform better. This helps in analyzing training and development needs of employees so that they can produce more output.

Job rotation is a well planned management approach that is beneficial both for employees and management. But there will be some disadvantages as well.

Drawbacks of Job Rotation:

• Work is disrupted as rotated employees take time to adjust to a new set up:A common disadvantage that comes with job rotation is that individuals tend to take up a lot of time to get acquainted to the new process. Work does suffer towards the end of the day and it stops the organization from functioning normally.
• Leads to a whole lot of stress and anxiety: Employees feel very stressed out and anxious during such periods. They are expected to step outside their comfort zone and end up not contributing enough in other department. From them, the job rotation happens to be a process or some sort of formality. They are genuinely not interested in that. Individuals do not tend to open themselves up in front of new people. When it comes to having new colleagues, they find it very hard to just adjust and create all kinds of problems.
• It can demotivate intelligent and ambitious trainees who seek specific responsibilities in their chosen specialty.
• Individuals take some time to acquaint to a new process, set up, be friendly with other employees and so on. Efficiency may be lost as individuals do not become proficient in a particular task all of a sudden.
• Training costs are increased.

Importance of a Planned Rotation Programme

A smart job rotation policies can go a long way in eliminating or even reducing the de-motivation and demoralization of the employees.

The nature of business plays an important role in deciding whether job rotation would be beneficial to the organization or not. For example, the concept of job rotation would not be very effective in manufacturing organizations where every department needs skilled employees with detailed knowledge of every process.The human resource team and to some extent the functional head need to make the employees aware of the importance of job rotation and how would it make them a complete professional.

References

• Whatishumanresource.com. (2018). Job Rotation - What is Human Resource? (Defined) Human Resource Management-whatishumanresource.com-Labour Laws. [online] Available at: http://www.whatishumanresource.com/job-rotation [Accessed 3 Jun. 2018].