What is it called when employees are trained to do different jobs so that they can be rotated between them?

• Target Group : Employees
• Time Frame : Long Term

NON-Monetary

What is Job Rotation?

Job Rotation involves the employees’ shift between two or more assignments to expose them to all verticals of an organization and to provide them with different expertise necessary in the various sector of the company. It helps to reduce the monotony of the work routine and give them a wider experience and gain more insights. It’s recommended to do a pre-planned approach that aims to test the employee skills and competencies in order to understand where the right place is for him or her. Thanks to this approach it will be possible to explore the hidden potential of employees, avoiding the borrowed of doing the same tasks every day. The process is useful for both managers and employees. It helps managers in discovering the talent of employees and gives workers the chance to explore their own interests and gain experience in different fields or operations.

What are the objectives of job rotation?

Reducing Monotony and repetitiveness of the Job, allowing employees to experience different type of jobs and motivating them to perform well at each stage of job replacement.
Succession Planning, to create an immediate replacement of a high-worth employee from within the organization, especially when someone gets retired or leaves the organization.
Creating Right-Employee Job Fit, as fitting a right person in right vacancy gives the maximum output, increasing employees’ motivation and productivity.
Exposing Workers to All Verticals of the Company to make them aware how company operates and how tasks are performed, understanding the entire working of the organization.
Testing Employee Skills and Competencies, by moving them to different jobs and assignments and determining their proficiency and aptitude. This increases their on-job productivity.
Developing a Wider Range of Work Experience and different skills and competencies. It is necessary for an overall development of an individual.

How to implement an effective job rotation program?

Here some useful suggestions on how to implement an effective job rotation program:
1. Get leadership commitment for the program, by making the business case known.
2. Determine critical positions to include in the program, analyzing the overall business plan, the number of people ready for retirement, the turnover risk and future growth plans.
3. Conduct a job analysis to determine the most important components to learn, by picking the most important competencies and tasks, or those that people use most frequently.
4. Determine the ideal “bench strength” for each role, by training a minimum number of people, especially for critical roles.
5. Create job readiness assessments and evaluation processes to determine candidate readiness and current skill level and to tailor the job rotation experience.
6. Develop job profiles and development maps to determine how to implement the program and how to support employees in reality (using coaching, mentoring, online learning, etc.)
7. Determine readiness periods, estimating how long a job rotation program should be.
8. Develop the selection process for the program, determining how many job rotations can happen simultaneously.
9. Develop and implement internal communications and initiatives, such as succession planning or career development.
10. Orient the team to let people understand what their roles are, what they’re responsible for and when and how to do something.
11. Support the process using check-in milestones to ensure that progress is being made against the program goals and employees are seeing the benefits of program participation.
12. Measure and reward success by conducting skills assessments during the program, communicating progress and rewarding the manager, the team as well as the employee.

Next steps after the completion of JOB ROTATION

Post-implementation evaluation is necessary to ensure that job rotation has been effective and employees have not facing difficulty performing new tasks. This can be done by conducting follow-up interviews and surveys and comparing metrics such as efficiency, quality, turnover, and employee satisfaction to determine effects of the job rotation.

Necessary human resources

To implement this practice, any additional HR is required. Managers organize job rotation program and employees will join it.

Skills that managers & employees need to develop in order to implement the practice

Organizing, facilitating making in practice a job rotation program involves a variety of skills, such as:

1. Communication skills
2. Proactivity and flexibility skills
3. Empathy
4. Active listening skills

Expected impact

Beyond the positive effect on the company’s innovation processes and outcomes, job rotation can also have effects, such as:

• Eliminates boredom;
• Encourages development;
• Strengthen decision-making process;
• Gives employees a break from monotonous job duties;
• Helps managers identify where employees work best;
• Gives managers a plan in case an employee leaves.

Example(s) of prior application

Company name: JO Group (group of SMEs)

Number of employees: 15
Location: Catania

How the WPI was implemented?

JO Group is a group of SMEs founded in 1998 with core business in digital transformation, research and development in ICT, agritech, development of eLearning platforms, production of online courses and serious games, eHealth, blue technology, energy efficiency, business consulting, digital marketing. One of the most important value for the company, is to take care of the continuous professional improvement of employees. In order to have people always motivated the company adopt job rotation, where possible according to the specific competencies needed for that specific role. A concrete example is young employee who worked for one year as marketing specialist and then, was moved to European Project Office, changing not only his role but also his area of activity. This change had a positive effect on the worker who felt more motivated to catch up with all the activities, improve his knowledge and enlarge her portfolio of competencies and soft skills.

Results obtained

Implementing job rotation had positive effects on staff motivation and therefore on productivity because the employee has experienced the advantages of changing roles and business areas. Although initially She thought she was not capable, then she understood that changing from one area to another would help her improve vertical but also transversal skills (soft skills) such as multitasking, proactivity and creativity. On company side, there has been a clear improvement in the performance of that HR: driven by the desire to learn new job is motivated to achieve its objectives day by day.
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Reference:
https://www.jogroup.eu/jo_journal/job-rotation-e-welfare-aziendale-il-caso-jo-group/

What is job rotation training method?

Which term shows the shifting of the employees from one job to another?

Which are the types of job rotation?

What is a rotational placement?