Job Rotation

A purchasing scenario

Another thing we could implement within our company is job rotation, that there are certain jobs that get rotated within the company to stop abuse from happening.

Let's give a little scenario here. Let's say our company has a process where we choose a vendor and product, we cut a purchase order, that is, fill out a form that has information on who we are buying that from and what product we are buying, we go through an approval process, and we write a check. Maybe there is some sort of checks and balances with this, where we create some sort of report about this.

Now let's give a little scenario. Let's say accounting writes the check and does the audits with this, so they will perform audits and cut the reports and everything. One thing that happens with this is that whoever is cutting the check and the audit adjusts the audit to cover up some sort of checks that they are cutting. This allows for embezzlement. This allows for somebody to be able to write their own check, maybe to themselves, and then alter the audit or the reports that come after, so that way it does not look like they are writing themselves a check.

If we had job rotation set up here, the accountant that would normally write checks would maybe move into another position, somebody would move into the writing checks and the auditing and drafting the reports, and they may catch these irregularities or these concerns that come up. So they can start investigating this and figure out what is going on here, and catch something like embezzlement.

What job rotation looks like

Job rotation is just a way where you cycle through jobs. Maybe first of all you are in an assembly line position and you are assembling the different pieces of equipment, maybe you are doing some soldering, or maybe you are assembling it together. But then you move on to equipment operator, and then you move on to inspector, and then you move back into assembly. So you are going to rotate through these jobs, so that way you are not maybe taking advantage of one of these positions, and if somebody were to rotate into that position, maybe they would recognize that there has been some abuse in the past.

I would say a big other advantage to this as well is that you get certain people that have certain ways of thinking things. So when somebody moves into a new position they are taking it from a fresh perspective, and may question, why are we doing it this way, how about we do it this other way. I have noticed that certain employees look for efficiencies in how you operate, and so by rotating through these positions you could also have that person who tries to look for those efficiencies step into these positions and improve things.

Where it works, and where it does not

Now, in reality, I have not always been able to implement job rotation. I do try to distribute some of the workloads and some of what we have amongst multiple people, and cycle through to a certain degree, but a lot of who I have worked with are very professional level positions and they have specialties in what they do.

So I have found that if you have more of a basic job you could do job rotation and be successful with that, or maybe you are a large enough company where you have this similar type of people where you can do job rotation within there. But what I have found is there is a lot of specialty, like accounting people have certain roles within accounting, we have certain roles within people who do purchase orders and choose products for certain areas of the company.

So job rotation does not always make the right sense. It is something that we could try to implement where we can see that it is really practical to implement, and we can think that there are a lot of benefits to implementing it, but in a lot of the scenarios that I have been involved in, I have not seen that there is a real strong reason to do job rotation.