Is Your Team Understimulated? Try Task Trading

Authors: Shuba Gopal and Rebecca Fraser-Thill

Consider this: You’ve been managing a team of six employees for about a year. You have regular check-ins with them, and most people seem generally happy. But recently, some team members say they’re feeling understimulated. While they enjoy their jobs, their colleagues, and the work culture, they feel like they’re not growing or learning new skills.

What can you do?

The obvious advice is to help them upskill or provide them with professional development training to expand their capabilities. But as a manager, you may not have the ability to influence the programs your organization offers. You could also try an approach called task trading, which involves shifting focus from the work of each individual team member to the work of the team as a whole. Through our work as a people analytics consultant (Shuba) and a career coach (Rebecca), we’ve seen both the direct and indirect positive impact that task trading can have on individuals and teams.

Here’s what task trading is, and how it works.

What Is Task Trading?

Many teams include several employees with distinct job descriptions and daily responsibilities. For instance, a coordinator on the marketing team may be responsible for communicating timelines for deliverables and planning trade shows. A designer on that same team might be entrusted with creating marketing materials for different channels (the website, social media, and so on). A data analyst in that same group might focus on analyzing customer behavior and engagement across those channels.

As a manager, your instinct is most likely to assign your employees tasks and goals that will allow them to grow within the specific lane of their role. There’s nothing wrong with this, but when your employees are feeling disengaged, you may need to switch up your approach.

That’s where task trading comes in. A team doesn’t have to be a toolbox filled with individual, highly specialized tools. Instead, the team can be seen as a collection of Swiss Army knives: multifunctional people who collectively get the work done, even though they might be specialists in certain areas. Task trading is a type of job crafting that enables people to learn new skills by swapping some small activities (or tasks) with their teammates. 

For example, let’s say Joana is a coordinator on the marketing team, and she wants to learn more about targeted marketing on social media. She might ask a teammate who specializes in social media marketing to teach her how to craft a LinkedIn post and then offer to help design the next post to highlight a new product or service. In this way, Joana has learned aspects of a new skill while also contributing to the team’s daily work.

The Advantages of Task Trading

Through extensive secondary research and Rebecca’s experience, we’ve seen that task trading has two primary advantages.

It can boost employee engagement

Research over the past few decades has shown that disengaged employees can fuel burnout among their teammates. It also shows that employees who feel that they can’t grow professionally rapidly exit their organizations.

In contrast, employee engagement is contagious, and career development and skill-building are critical components of engagement. By giving your employees the autonomy to customize their own career paths and select the skills they want to learn, you can reengage an unmotivated team.

It can result in a more productive, adaptable, and knowledgeable team

When your employees use the tasks of their coworkers to upskill, everyone wins. Your team members learn something new while also contributing to the productivity of the group. In addition, when absences or resignations occur, the team is more adaptable because skills are shared across more than one individual.

What’s more, by learning new tasks and understanding the work of their peers, your employees can gain a better understanding of how their roles fit into the larger team and organization. In time, this knowledge can help them (and you as their manager) spot opportunities to grow professionally, both within your smaller team or on another team within the company.

How to Task Trade

The good news is there’s no single right way to task trade. It can happen at many levels: One person can seek out a task to learn; two people can swap tasks with each other; an entire team can trade tasks in multiway swaps. Any of these options garners the benefits of task trading. Here’s how to begin.

Step 1: Get your team on board

As a first step, you’ll want to introduce the idea to your team members and explain why it’s in their benefit. They’ll likely want to know how much effort it requires and what’s at stake. Meet with them as a group to explain what task trading is and what it would entail.

You could say:

I recently read an article about task trading. It’s a way for team members to support one another’s career development by swapping a few small job tasks. It has no financial cost, takes little time, and when organized well, it can make you feel more motivated and engaged with your everyday work.

The article noted that task trading can give us an advantage as a team, too. It can provide us with a broader set of skills and a way to maximize our collective work, using our actual aspirations and passions. In the end, I think it will make us more resilient. Are you interested in learning more?

Step 2: Take stock of tasks and skills

If everyone is on board, the next step is to ask participating team members to individually think about what’s currently on their plates and what new skills they want to learn. Ask your team to take a day or two to create three lists.

List 1: This list should include their daily tasks and the skills required to do them. Ask each team member to think about their dominant skills—skills they are highly proficient in and believe to be important to their roles.

For example, Brent is a champion when it comes to user experience—conducting user testing and identifying user needs. Jenna has product design skills, such as evaluating new product ideas, defining new features, and designing the user experience for those features.

List 2: This list should highlight the tasks from List 1 that they could teach their teammates. Encourage them to think about tasks they could use help on or handoffs that could free up their time to learn new things.

While creating this list, employees should be mindful of tasks that can’t easily be shared or swapped. Work that is complex or requires specialized tools and education, such as coding or complex design, should not be swapped. That type of work would require a significant amount of time and effort to teach and may actually slow both people down.

List 3: This list should include skills they want to develop and any tasks they believe would help them do so. Ask them to think about the work of the team as a whole when identifying tasks that would help them learn the skills they’re passionate about.

For example, Brent wants to learn more product design skills (a match for Jenna’s tasks), and Jenna would like to gain user experience skills (a match for Brent’s tasks).

Step 3: Swap tasks

Now that everyone has submitted their lists, it’s time to gather as a group.

In preparation, make a master list, either physically or digitally, of all the tasks that team members are willing and able to teach (List 2). Give people five minutes to review the list and see which tasks best align with the skills they’re interested in developing (that is, their List 3). Your goal is to help your team members set up short-term task-trading experiments, matching their List 3 to the options presented. This can be accomplished in a round-robin format in order to understand which tasks team members are interested in trying or learning.

Write individuals’ names against the tasks as you go around the team. Take a look at the list. Do you see overlaps—multiple people interested in learning the same task? These can be assigned and swapped rotationally.

Finally, review the swaps and ensure that each team member is satisfied with their task trades. Remember that the swaps could also happen across multiple people.

For example, Brent might ask to learn how to design a product road map and offer to teach a team member about user testing. Jenna can then ask to swap with Brent. Creating a design road map is a task that Jenna can teach Brent. It helps Brent learn some of the product design skills he’s interested in. In turn, Brent can teach Jenna how he gathers input during user testing.

Our experience suggests that the task-trading assignments should typically last around three months. This is enough time to give the swap a solid try and gather data surrounding its effectiveness. It’s also short enough to avoid any high-stakes, negative outcomes.

Step 4: Check in

In the end, you need to know if this is working for your team, if they’re finding it useful, and if they’re actually learning. For that, agree on some parameters. These could be questions you would answer as a team at the end of the three months.

Here’s a sample list:

• Is the team as a whole still on track with its deliverables? If anything is lagging behind, what exactly is it and why?

• To what extent do team members feel they’re learning and benefiting from the tasks they’ve traded? In what specific ways? Have individual team members experienced more or less engagement, energy, and interest at work as a result of the task-trading process?

• How has task trading impacted the team as a whole? Have there been any positive or negative impacts on team communication, workflow, conflict, and related variables?

• What toll, if any, has the task-trading process taken on team members? Has the workload remained manageable? Does teaching colleagues feel draining or overwhelming?

• Are the overall costs worth the overall benefits?

• If there is sufficient ROI, what additional tasks could be traded next?

Can task trading falter? Yes. Task-trading experiments fail if the tasks traded are not granular enough. In our example, Brent could try to teach Jenna everything he knows about the user-testing process. That would be an overwhelming time commitment for both of them. Instead, how he gathers user input for a specific feature in a specific way (for example, through one focus group) is a task she can learn. It’s one step, rather than the entire user-testing process.

That’s the key to a successful task-trading effort: Think small, granular steps, not grand solutions. Over time you may very well end up with a team of highly engaged, effective individuals who are thinking cross-functionally. That’s a pretty good result from some free trades.

Shuba Gopal is principal at Glean Signals LLC, based near Boston. She applies data science and analytics to solve key challenges in the workplace, identifying patterns that help people thrive at work. She then works with organizational leaders to translate those patterns into high-impact actions with measurable outcomes. Her work has been showcased at the Wharton People Analytics Conference, NEHRA, LeapHR, and other venues. Rebecca Fraser-Thill is an ICF-certified career design and leadership coach who owns a Maine-based private practice. Drawing on two decades of teaching and research in psychology, she coaches clients around the world on their management, delegation, and communication skills, and supports job crafting and career decision-making to optimize engagement and impact. Her coaching has been featured by the BBC,Business Insider,Forbes, and Bloomberg Businessweek, among other outlets.