Role Switch Day!

What are the ways we can switch roles at work?

Direction action for imbeciles:

At work, switch roles periodically. Maybe for a day, etc. This is more than just ‘shadowing’—literally switch roles. I have no idea how to implement this. But it would be awesome.

Inspiration lists for the ADD:

Maynard James Keenan having the Deftones switch instruments in writing The White Pony (their best album), ‘shadowing’ the CEO like GitLab’s Sid Sijbrandij’s “CEO Shadow Program”, the show Undercover Boss, Chris Bakke’s 'undercover CEO’ idea, body-swapping movies like Freaky Friday, etc., “Bring Your Kid to Work Day,” switching roles/projects every X months to stay inspired (e.g. “job rotation”, “job swapping”), probably the Beatles, etc.

This would also be a good TV show.

The actual thing for people who like to think:

Companies should have a day (it could be a week, whatever) where they have everyone switch roles.

I don’t know if it’s random, by choice, whatever.

Obviously, if everyone switches roles, then the company probably grounds to a halt (or maybe gets better, haha).

I don’t know how it works.

Does the company advertise this in advance to their customers, etc.? Probably.

Otherwise, someone has a call booked with the CEO, and they show up and there’s some random person there who can’t answer their questions.

This isn’t really ‘shadowing’, although it could be combined with that idea, or reverted back to that idea.

At a high level, I view these ideas on a pseudo-spectrum (it’s not really a spectrum, but just pretend) like this:

Shadow ←→ Switch roles for day/week/etc. ←→ Switch roles every X months

Shadowing just means people rotating around and ‘following’ other people in the company—attending their meetings, sitting over their shoulder while they make spreadsheets, etc.

It would be super-helpful to have a random or semi-random rotational program where everyone eventually winds up ‘shadowing’ everyone else over the course of, say, a year. (It obviously depends on how many people you have in your company—and I haven’t done any of the math on the permutations, so if you want to do it, please drop a comment explaining how a rotational ‘shadow’ program could work!)

This would be really good to give people insight into what other people do, but it’s not as fun as actually doing the job. (Whatever that means.)

On the other side of the fake-spectrum is the idea of people switching roles/focuses (foci?) every X months. Some companies do this. But it really only works within teams or groups where the skillset overlap is high enough that this will be a win-win-win (good for people, good for the company, good for marketing).

A product manager rotating around within a big company would be an example of this. An engineering team having people switch roles (to the extent they were capable) every 6 months would be another example.

Switching roles/foci every 6 months or so (baking in some overlap time) allows everyone to feel fresh and excited about their work, allows for new ideas/voices/QA/reversioning (in theory) to be baked right into the operational mechanics of the company, etc.

A bonus touch is, when people are rotated back in to an area they were working on before, they get to go from working on the v1 to the v3, and can both admire the improvements their predecessor made as well as see more clearly what areas can be improved (and, hopefully, how to improve them).

This rotation program works to the extent that there’s some overlap period where the predecessor can ‘show’ the replacer what they were doing and why. Without this, by the time the replacer got ramped up (if they ever did!), it’d be time to be replaced by someone else.

Also, it’s important that each replacer actually ‘owns’ the area they are taking over. They don’t just consult and report to the predecessor—that would be no different than just getting ‘feedback’, and wouldn’t force the sort of systemic skepticism that a true replacement would. (Although it could be interesting to have a ‘feedback’ rotation program, where the ‘owner’ of a certain area had to explain it to various random or semi-random people in the business, in order to get non-obvious feedback, especially from people who hadn’t already drank the kool aid. This feedback could be anonymous, etc. in order to ‘protect’ people lower down on the ladder from any negative perception from their ‘superiors’, etc.)

Anyway, the ‘rotational program’ idea is very interesting, but that wasn’t the original point of this thing. (Although, if you’re doing something like this successfully, please let everyone know what’s working!)

The main idea for this thing is to have a fun ‘one day a year’ or ‘one day a quarter’, whatever, where everyone in the company switches roles. It’s like “Bring Your Kid to Work Day” (remember that? Was that a real thing or only in TV shows?), except instead of bringing your kid to work, everyone (randomly) gets assigned someone else’s job for that day.

I have no idea how this works with remote work and Zoom, meetings, etc. I have no idea what it means to ‘do someone else’s job’ when you are literally incapable of doing that job, e.g. if you get assigned to be a software engineer for a day and you can’t code. Actually, God forbid you can.

The point of this day isn’t really to get any work done, but to have fun, highlight at a high level what everyone is kinda sorta doing/focusing on, connect everyone throughout the company, celebrate, and maybe, you know, negotiate a major deal with an overseas contractor (if you’re, say, CEO for a day).

I don’t know what it means. I just know that I’d love to come into work one day this year and have it be… Role Switch Day!

How could it work?