How to Create Dynamic Work Environments
Performing the same job year after year is a recipe for boredom, coasting, and low productivity. Entrenched, stagnant employees protect their turf, resist change, and create roadblocks. In addition, they build power bases that instinctively fight off innovation from “outsiders.” Resistance, gossip, and manipulation become typical tools to protect the status quo.
Some organizations, on the other hand, require employees to change jobs at given intervals, IBM and McDonald’s for example. This makes sense to me except for highly specialized professionals like doctors or employees in small organizations.
During economic belt-tightening, lateral movement in the place of vertical promotion often retains new employees.
If the thought of rotating jobs every two years is too much to bear, consider rotating job responsibilities between people in the same job classification. This may give HR a coronary but it’s worth exploring.
The process of creating dynamic work environments using job rotation is challenging but benefits may justify efforts.
Job rotation helps:
- Motivate stagnant employees.
- Stabilize organizations. When employees leave unexpectedly cross-trained individuals fill the gap.
- Inspire creativity. New eyes looking at old positions open new possibilities.
- Reduce burnout and increase job satisfaction.
- Provide opportunities for individuals to learn new skills.
- Provide opportunities for individuals to learn how to teach others.
- Open teams to new players.
- Fast track high potential employees.
- Develop leaders with wide knowledge of the organization.
- Enhance new employee retention.
Challenges:
- Highly regulated industries.
- Union guidelines.
- Internal resistance.
- Frustration of high seniority employees.
- Training needs.
- Consistency and planning.
What suggestions can you offer for implementing job rotation?
If job rotation is not applicable or too disruptive, how can leaders create dynamic work environments where employee motivation, engagement, and innovation are high?
**********
Don’t miss a single issue of Leadership Freak, subscribe today. It’s free. It’s private. It’s always practical and brief.
Go to the main page of Leadership Freak by clicking the banner at the top of this page, look in the right-hand navigation bar, enter your email and click subscribe. Your email address is always kept private. Note: if it doesn’t arrive, check your spam filter for a confirmation email.
Dan I am new to your site and I am already hooked. I heard about you through the Dave Ramsey EntreLeadership podcast and I am glad I did.
I especially like this installment, I am one of those types of people who get bored quickly with the routine and am constantly looking for change. When I was younger about 6-8 months was all I could handle before looking for the next thing. Now I am close to about 1 1/2 – 2 years before I feel it’s time to move on to something else. What do you guys think is a typically good amount of time before moving around?
I am now a leader in a pretty specialized field where there isn’t a lot of opportunity to shuffle my team members around. What to reccomend for keeping things fresh when changing positions and responsibilities is less of an option?
Hi Greg,
I’m a little restricted in my ability to move folks around too, so here’s what I do. I have an ongoing focus on improvement. Each employee is encouraged to look for better ways to do his or her job, and each department tries to find better ways to get the work done, or new ways to provide better service to down-stream processes. Additionally, employees are regularly given the chance to work on project teams to implement or study improvements for the company as a whole. This gets employees involved in looking at new technology, new vendors, outsourcing, etc. In addition to all the forward momentum for the organization, it keeps things feeling fresh for team members. And their jobs grow over time, even if they continue to occupy the same slot. Even line workers seldom do their work the same one year to the next.
Dear Dan,
I think concept of job rotation is good. But before, that employees need to be trained and motivated to take responsibility. In the organizations, employees usually develop a comfort zone to work in a particular office or department and that is very difficult to break.
Employees are generally hesitant to work in areas where they have not worked. They tend to avoid. Leaders should create faith in them and assure them not to worry about mistakes. Leadership support to bear mistake actually encourage employees to take more and new responsibility.
I think when job rotation is full of risk and less of innovation, leaders should own higher responsibility to prove positive result. They should exemplify before assigning higher duty to others. They should strengthen reward system. Creating dynamic work environment need leadership transparency, support, equity and justice across all the levels. The dynamic work environment need a strong platform for healthy competition where each group compete on quality. This is the way leaders can create motivation, engagement and innovation.
Hi Dan,
Suggestions for job rotation?
ALWAYS make room for employees to CHOOSE. Employees MUST have at least some degree of choice in where they are going, or we risk eroding or ruining levels of engagement. There are (rare) combinations of maturity and personality type who will make the most of any situation, and engage wherever they are for their own benefit. But, for many in the workplace today, a feeling of empowered choice is hanging by a thread, and a wrong or careless move by leadership can snap that thread. Let’s not forget, that true engagement is all about emotional buy-in.
Where job rotation is not “applicable?”
Establish inter-departmental incentive and review. In other words, how well does finance work with sales and sales work with engineering and product development work with marketing, and so on? Setting up 360º departmental reviews with every department reviewing every other, and incentives based on interdepartmental performance, with everyone having skin in the game will change the game. The sudden shift of perception and required focus that his kind of expanded universe encourages is a challenge for many employees and can prove out as invigorating for the whole company.
Best to you, Dan…
Mark
I agree that personal choice is huge. Employees are trying to build a life just like we are, and just like us every change is percieved mostly in relation to whether it makes that life better or worse. That’s why you can manage money and machines, but people need to be led. Getting the most from people involves a lot of two-way communication and a desire for things to be good for everyone. Forcing a job rotation, even to what we think is a better place, could very well become a huge negative.
I’ll add that some may say that giving employees a choice is not always practical. Well, is lowered engagement or losing key employees MORE “practical” than giving them a choice? 🙂
I’d like to hear from people who have actually been in this situation and see some statistics showing that it produces results.
In today’s rapidly changing technical and business environment, employees should be incentivized to continually improve their processes and skills, and find ways to leverage new technical and market developments.
But to do that effectively, employees need experience and maturity in their particular area- something you lose by rotating positions. And employees need the satisfaction of seeing strategies through- something that is also taken away with job rotation.
If employees’ jobs are so routine that they’re not continually learning and adapting, the job might be a good candidate for automation.
Bingo on the automation. Maybe that job is routine and boring because leaders won’t allow judgment or variation. If you don’t want those two things, buy a robot. If you do want them, then there should be some room in that job for learning and improvement.
Here’s a thought- have employees spend a week or two every year shadowing people in other positions. This would give them a better view into how their role fits into the bigger picture and encourage a sense of community.
What suggestions can you offer for implementing job rotation?
If job rotation is not applicable or too disruptive, how can leaders create dynamic work environments where employee motivation, engagement, and innovation are high?
If job rotation is just not an option, I would suggest having employees be “customer for a day” or some other mechanism that can get them out of their usual silo (if they’re in one!) and having to experience the cycle through which your customers must go – people need to see how all of the pieces relate.
One great outcome of our Quality Management System is the opportunity for employees to audit other departments. That’s different than being a customer, but they are encouraged to look at the processes as though they were customers.
I cannot address job rotation.
The underlying challenge, it seems, is how to create and maintain a healthy learning environment that then continually improves. Yesterdays LF posts might be useful for some specifics to start each day (not just Mondays).
A team project of seeking out benchmarks from other industries and seeing how to transfer and apply them within your work does provide an opportunity to see fresh approaches. (Perhaps in a different post from Dan, folks could contribute suggestions.)
If your training budget is limited, getting some used books on new/different techniques and developing a periodic study group might bring in a perspective not considered. Or craft a project to find some of the best internet process improvement sites/blogs and study them as a group.
Having read Dan’s blog for a bit, there have been probably hundreds of excellent books suggested, culling back through past articles here can be a resource. (My reading ‘to do’ list is still in the high double digits!)
Doc, you’re right on as usual, this time in what you say about learning environments. I’m fortunate enough manage multiple plants. This gives me the chance to send employees to another plant for a week to work alongside peers in that location, exporting ideas and absorbing some of their own. No real rotation, but some great learning.
Nice post, Dr. Deming notes that if you do the same job year after year you essentially have one year of experience. The job rotation points you have noted will greatly reduce this from happening. especially empowering others to be creative and innovative.
We have a rotation system at work, so now instead of me performing all my tasks on a daily basis I am performing each task every 3 months. I am not learning anything new just getting bored with performing each task for 3 months instead of having a variety of tasks all the time. This is just managers wanting control. I don’t see them rotating, we still have the same manager year-in year-out. Every time we rotate it disrupts the service as we all have to learn the new task again because we haven’t done that task for a year. year-in