Is the company trying to faze out my position?

Dear Moses,
I am working with a law firm. A few weeks back, I was told that I would be working under a different supervisor. With the new supervisor, I am being asked to do things totally different from those I was meant to in the job I applied for three years ago. Today, I am on the desk more than the field. I believe they are fazing me out, I need guidance. Roland. 

Dear  Roland,
It’s only you who can deduce the intentions of your bosses when they shifted you around. In the first place, it would have been ideal if you had asked your boss directly why you have been shifted from your job to another. 

However, for reasons best known to you, you have deduced that the bosses are doggy because they trying are edging you out.  My advice however, is to look for the silver lining in the cloud and read into what it might mean, and then flow with flow.

Form the employer’s perspective, one of the chronic headaches for leaders in organisations, irrespective of size, is matching the right people into the right roles.

 Many people are recruited and appointed into roles only to discover a few months down the road that there have become a glaring mismatch. The antidote to this is to try as much possible to move people around within the organisation, which is referred to as job rotation. 

This might be the likely scenario in your law firm, though this otherwise beneficial process hasn’t been properly sold to you, pointing to the usual lack of professionalism when organisations are implementing job rotation programmes. 

Ideally, job rotation allows employees to learn  different skills from different departments and the same process can be used to eliminate employee fatigue and low morale caused by boring job assignments, though this doesn’t appear to be in your case. When people get moved around in an organised way, the benefits to the organisation and the individuals are immense.

 When implemented professionally, job rotation is an effective way for employees under new assigned supervisors, to gain better understanding of the business processes and better appreciation of what’s happens in other departments. However, when implementing this programme, the leaders should take into account the following:
1.    Not all jobs and departments are a good fit for job rotation.
2.    Short-term productivity losses and product quality issues may happen as employees learn the ropes in the new roles
3.    Some workers may not take easily to rotation because they have an “easier job/supervisor” compared to where they are being assigned.

Moses Ssesanga,
Head of Human Resource, 
NMG Uganda
[email protected].