How Task Diversification Will Help Your Employees

Benefits to employees

Empowerment

When workers perform multiple roles, they tend to have an increased understanding of the wider business, a sense of responsibility, and increased control over their job roles, making them more interested in their work. As a result, engaged employees are empowered to become accountable for improving processes, reducing errors, eliminating waste and improving customer satisfaction.

Employees can think, behave, act, react, and control their work in more autonomous ways, including the responsibility for decision-making regarding their specific tasks. This allows decisions to be made at the lower levels of an organisation where employees have a unique view of the issues and problems facing the organisation. 

Upskilling

Professional development is all about helping employees to grow.  Providing the opportunity to perform alternative duties allows workers to move around and avoid falling into a rut with repetitive duties. Over time, they develop more skills in a wider array of tasks. Task diversification makes it more likely to retain these skills and employees can ramp up their knowledge quickly and start applying it.

This enhances their resume, potential job avenues and their professional prospects. One of the major challenges that presents itself when it comes to upskilling is time. This is especially true of the workers in full-time employment and Implementing diversification gives these employees a great opportunity to upskill.

Job Satisfaction / Productivity

Providing a range of different tasks or creating variation can be an excellent motivator for employees. When people are self-determining and self-managing at work, they have a greater sense of job satisfaction. This makes them more motivated and driven to do a great job. As a result, workers are more effective in their roles and more productive, not to mention happier. When staff get to try out new ideas and perhaps test new skills, they feel more motivated. They improve themselves and become more proficient. In turn, this makes them more satisfied with their job and better prepared to face the obstacles and challenges they face.

The diversification also offers health and safety benefits to employees, particularly reduced risk of repetitive strain injury. Exposure to the focused demands of one job can result in increased physiological stress, strain, and fatigue.  It solves the problem by bringing forth more variability in work roles, which leads to a reduction in injury incidents and severity. As a result, your worker’s compensation costs are lowered and your WHS performance is improved. This promotes morale around the workplace and employees are more satisfied with their job leading to increased productivity and quality gains.

Return to Work

Injured workers with a better variety of suitable tasks enable them to return to work at the earliest. Work is generally good for health and wellbeing. Long-term work absence, work disability and unemployment can have a negative impact on their health. The longer an injured worker is away from work, the less likely they will return. In addition, alternative duties play a pivotal role in preventing losing their job skills, self-esteem and identity in the community.

Ultimately, task diversification makes employees more valuable to their employers. There are many benefits you can reap from the implementation of task diversification in your workplace. As you move in this direction, you will need to put in place a consistent and systematic method of developing alternative tasks.

Learn how task diversification can help your employees and, more importantly, how you can implement it in your company.

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