In any office there runs the risk of having more than one person performing the same task. Duplication of duties can be easily managed by effective time and project management. Keeping track of individual tasks and checking in with employees on a regular basis will help to alleviate the ongoing risk of having too many hands in one pot.

On the other side, there are also times when you will have one person performing duties that should actually be shared among other staff members. This can be a sizeable issue in Accounting, and so many other departments within your organization.

With the cutting being made to staffing in many organizations, you may feel tempted to double up the duties of certain employees in your company. Perhaps that seems like a great idea on the surface, but consider the fact that in certain departments duties need to be effectively separated to provide accurate checks and balances as well as a clear definition of individual roles.

If your Consumer Relations department is run by your company’s Legal Counsel, you have to believe that at some point the two positions will counteract one another. There may come a time when these two positions clash as one should be out for the best interest of the customer and the other is looking out for the company. It will be difficult for you to clearly reconcile issues with customers when your legal counsel is advising you don’t have to do more than “x” to quell the situation. If the customer is expecting more concern from you and doesn’t feel they have received that, you will begin losing customers for reasons that will, initially, be unknown to you.

Cost cutting is essential in times of financial downturns; however, you should do so strategically. Set forth effective plans for job function reconciliations. Begin the process of rewriting job descriptions to make the changes official, even if temporarily. Sit down and discuss these changes with those who will be taking on these additional tasks – they will be the ones most able to give the most valuable insight. If the job duties will cross in a potentially hazardous manner, it won’t be worth it to your company to make the change, even on a temporary basis. With all that can happen and go wrong in the course of a business day, you don’t need to find ways to create conflict of interest issues for yourself and your staff.

Checks and balances aren’t just for accounting. You should apply this logic to every department in your company. Any chain of events occurring in your company needs to include the appropriate steps and measures that will check and subsequently back the efforts that came before. Allowing one person to manage roles that are essentially opposite one another is setting yourself and that employee up for ultimate failure.