The challenges of keeping a 21st century employee motivated at work are vast. Today, an organisation has very few options at hand, thanks to the ever increasing competition.

Keeping an employee interested is not an easy job which is why employee retention is a major challenge that most HR teams face. This is where ‘Job Rotation’ helps. Job rotation has many advantages. One of them is that it keeps the employee interested in his work as he gets different job profiles and his work does not become monotonous.

One of the other major advantage of job rotation is that it gives an employee a chance to learn a lot more than he normally would. He becomes multi-skilled and this is an asset that is always helpful.

For example, if an employee falls sick or is on leave and can’t report to work and if there is a shortage of staff on a particular day, then thanks to the practice of job rotation, an organisation has enough skilled manpower to replace the employee temporarily and take up his job. Many organisations use job rotation as a tool to curb absenteeism. The reason being, if an employee gets something new to learn, he would be more willing to report to work.

Clearly, job rotation has a lot of advantages and one feels that every organisation must have it. However, every silver cloud has a dark lining. In order to ensure that job rotation is done properly and efficiently a proper policy must be in place.

This is because a lot of employees may initially resist for job rotation as they may be skeptical about it. This is why goal setting is very necessary in job rotation. This would help in convincing an employee that this policy would be for his own benefit and they would stand to gain a lot from it.

Job rotation ensures that an employee does not feel ‘stressed’ out from the job, as this is a major issue that HR teams face today. To develop a good job rotation programme the organisation must assess its needs and requirements. This kind of a programme can be used either for promotion , sideward movements or succession planning. Whatever the need be, it should be clearly identified before making such a programme so as to help the organisation know in which direction it is moving.

Job rotation programmes are known to help an organisation develop management talent as well as it help in improving its competitive advantage over its rivals. It is a known fact that for an organisation to succeed it is of paramount importance to ensure that the top management is very skillful and is aware of the happenings in the industry.

With so much competition today, decisions made by the top management can change the fortunes of an organisation drastically. Thus, whatever training and advantage that can be given to them is an added bonus.

One of the most difficult issues that an HR team faces would be the criteria on which job rotation should be done. The amount of experience, education, leadership assessment as well as management preference has to be kept in mind. This makes it very complex as a lot of details need to be looked into before selecting the right employee.

Employees with a good amount of experience generally are preferred as their experience would help them adapt to different situations in a better manner compared to a fresher who’s just joined the organisation. What further works in the favour of an old employee is the fact that he has been around for a longer time and thus is likely to feel cheated if a fresher was given a chance to learn something new before him.

Clearly job rotation has its advantages but making a fair policy for the same is not easy. However, if the organisation succeeds in doing this then it surely will have long term benefits in the end, a fact that every organisation needs to looks into.