Task diversification offers employees the opportunity to perform alternate duties. This allows your workers to be able to fulfil more than one role in your organisation. Employees are able to gain new skill sets and as such are able to expertly perform a wide range of tasks in the workplace.

This can enable your employees to have experiences in multiple fields equipping them with the ability to be able to call back on those experiences and be flexible when approaching tasks. Moreover, it makes employees more open to taking on new roles. Job task diversification can be the springboard for enhanced creativity and innovation, problem-solving capacity, and flexibility among your employees.

Benefits to employees:

 1.  Empowerment

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

Employees are able to 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. 

2.  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 are able to 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.

3.  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 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.

4.  Return to Work

Injured workers that have a better variety of suitable tasks enables them to return to work at the earliest. Work is generally good for health and well-being and 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 it is that they will return. In addition, alternative duties play a pivotal role in preventing the loss of 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.

To learn how more about how task diversification can help your employees and more importantly how to you can implement it in your company, you can make enquiries here.

Alternatively, our consultants love to have a chat, so go ahead and give us a call on 1300 OHS RTW (647 789).