Why managers should encourage employees to switch roles
Tuesday, March 22, 2022
Rotating employees at their jobs equips them with new skills, and are also able to discover their hidden potential.

If you do similar tasks in the same company for years, it’s pretty obvious that boredom will kick in with time. Not forgetting that you won’t be learning anything new or adding more value to the company. 

This is reason enough for companies to encourage their employees to switch roles every so often and work on something new.

Moving employees between diverse tasks helps promote experience and encourages change. It reduces the boredom of doing the same type of job every day and yet discovers the hidden potential of an employee. 

Experts emphasise that such an approach intends to expose employees to a broader choice of procedures in order to assist supervisors in sightseeing their veiled talent. 

In the process, they are moved through a variety of tasks so that they can improve mindfulness about the actual working style of the organisation and comprehend the problems that arise at every stage. Through this process, managers recognise what a particular employee is good at, and accordingly, he or she is assigned a specific task.

Bertin K. Ganza, the founder of Afflatus Africa says that employees need to learn more skills at any job, if you’re a cashier, there is no harm in getting skilled in marketing, customer care, how to handle pressure, public speaking, networking, and so forth. This is because it permits you to grow and know your potential.

"This helps employees to discover their passion, gifts, strengths, and weaknesses so that they can improve where necessary, thus advancing and refining their performance, which in the end impacts the productivity of the company,” he states.

Ganza carries on that when employees are encouraged to switch roles, they are accessed and positioned where their skills, competencies, and capacities are used to the uppermost conceivable extent.

He also points out that when employees rotate in different skills or departments, they will build more friendships and relationships, which would impact individuals and the organisation.

After learning and discovering their possibilities, they will give back more of what they are equipped with to the company. That way, the corporation can use the few employees they have, instead of employing more, just in case some resign.

James Monari, a lawyer and businessman says that, among the many practices organisations use to manage their staff, is the job rotation approach where employees are shifted between two or more assignments or jobs at regular intervals of time in order to expose them to all verticals of an organisation, this is intended to achieve such objectives as; 

"To get the best out of its staff by testing the employee’s skills and competencies in order to place them at the right place to give the maximum output. In the event, they are not assigned the job or position that they are good at, it leads to lower productivity thus not meeting the required results for the organisation. Therefore, fitting a right person in the right vacancy is one of the main objectives of job rotation.”

He also explains that such allows employees to experience different type of jobs and motivates them to perform well at each stage of job replacement. To him, the concept is also practiced for purposes of succession planning. 

It helps to develop a pool of employees who can be placed or tasked to handle different assignments in the event a need base such as when one has retired or left the organisation. This definitely offers the best continuity of a skilled worth employee from within the organisation.

"It also boosts the career growth of the employees as they become more efficient. Exposing them to working in different departments generates a better understanding of how the company works, but also keeps them motivated and creative, throughout their journey in the organisation.”