Empower Teams with Role Rotation Technique

While Job Rotation is an organization-level policy to enable employees to develop knowledge in other jobs, Role Rotation is an opportunity for team members to play various roles in a Team.

A typical team consists of a mix of roles and associated repetitive activities. Some activities are assumed by the role and some are taken up voluntarily. When a team member is handling a set of activities continuously and other members may not understand those, which creates knowledge gaps within the team.

It’s not limited to the team member level activities, even the Team-Lead can also try rotating his/her role with the team members to give team members the experience and make them ready.

The Idea of Role Rotation is to rotate the activities/responsibilities between team members so that everyone gains knowledge & skill in all areas.

We can witness these benefits with the Role Rotation Technique:

New Skill is a Plus: We all agree that continuous learning is essential for growth. Well, we are allowing team members to learn new skills by doing the new activities on a rotation basis. Every time we rotate the activity, the new member gains more knowledge.

Brings Respect: There may be activities that are not appreciated well. When such an activity is given to a new member on rotation, the member learns and understands the approach better and finds the importance of that activity, and starts respecting other members doing this so far.

Add Innovation: When a set of activities are done repetitively by a single member, it gets monotonous and the chances of optimizing it or making it better may be sleek. When the role is rotated, new members can see new perspectives and new ways to perform it, which is an innovative way to make things better.

Career Development: When the Team Leader/Manager gives a chance to their team members to play his/her role, they get to understand the responsibilities involved. This approach not only brings awareness but makes them ready for the next role.

Less Dependency: When you have a team of members who can do any activity, you have the best team. Role-locking on a particular member is removed and that gives freedom to take up other roles with ease.

Prevents Boredom/Burnout: There is no doubt - repetition results in boredom at times. Rotation of roles can be very interesting, as there is a huge change in the activities. At times, taking up a different activity can be very energizing/relaxing.

Empowerment: When the whole team is aware of the ways to get things done and they have experience doing it, it empowers the team to do things in the best possible way.

Some Team Activities for rotation:

• Running the meetings (Stand-up / Retro / Reviews)
• Preparing Project Reports
• Collaboration with Stakeholders
• Updating Sprint/Project Dashboards
• New Member’s orientation training
• Quality Reviews
• There are many more you can identify…

There can be disadvantages to this technique:

• Not everyone can learn quickly and they will take time to understand and perform
• Quality of outcome may be less initially and we have to go through cycles to achieve perfection
• Consistency may not be achieved because of personalities

While there are some drawbacks, overall this technique greatly helps the teams to grow well.

Please share your views and experience.