Empowering Your Employees With 360-Degree Feedback: Advantages & Challenges

Feedback is an integral part of every employee’s management. However, the usual way the companies take is to ask managers to provide feedback for their employees on an annual or semi-annual basis. But in a system where change happens every month, is this system of evaluation enough? Having a peer review system is important if you wish to have a 360-performance review and the best way you can achieve the goal is by integrating a 360-degree feedback system.

What is 360-degree feedback?

Consider you are a professional athlete, playing cricket on the highest level. With games changing at a never-seen pace, you would expect to have all the tools at your disposal. Despite having the best form of your life, there might be some weaknesses that can be exploited by the opposition team. Now with 360-degree feedback, you get an evaluation from all the internal and external stakeholders. You indulge your peers, your coaches, your analytics team, and in some cases, ex-players and experts. In a corporate setup, 360-degree feedback allows your managers to be evaluated by their peers, seniors, subordinates, HR, and clients/customers in some cases. This allows for a more balanced review of one’s performance over time. There are many advantages of 360-degree feedback that you just can’t achieve with a traditional feedback system.

Focus on self-awareness

Self-awareness is the best step towards empowering self. When you have a holistic view of your work performance in a professional environment, you get a better picture of your strengths and weaknesses. 360-degree evaluation allows you to achieve the same. With a better idea of your weakness, which would have been hidden in other cases, you can work on improving the gaps, thus providing improved performance.

Reduce Bias

Ask any subordinate and they would say that they are not equipped with resources to discuss their issues about their team dynamics or manager’s behavior. Hence with every annual feedback, they provide generic answers to an employee survey. With 360-degree performance appraisal, you empower your employees to provide honest feedback to their supervisors. This complemented with the fact that managers are rated by various stakeholders reduces the bias from your feedback system.

Create Culture of Openness and Accountability

In today’s corporate culture, brands are focused on creating a culture of openness and making sure everyone in their company is accountable for their actions. With 360-degree feedback, you can achieve both goals. This holistic feedback system allows you to break the barrier between the managers and their subordinates. With the tool to extract feedback from various touchpoints, you ensure that your employees are held accountable for their interaction with various members of the companies.

Reduce Employee and Leader Turnover

Many companies are today faced with the issue of employee and leader turnover. While your employees might be leaving for various factors, with this new setup, you can get feedback from your employees and ensure that your leaders or employees are not leaving because of some gaps in your employee engagement. Sometimes, a manager might be showing substantial results for company growth but he/she might not be the best fit with the team members. The 360-degree feedback provides you with gaps and blind spots that can be strengthened to ensure low employee turnover.

Support Skill Development

360-degree feedback is an important tool if you wish to identify the training needs of your employees. With the new system, your employees can track the areas that need their attention and they can go through the necessary training. This not only promotes the growth of individuals within an organization but also helps maintain a growing pace for the company.

Promote Dialogue

One of the biggest challenges companies face is ensuring a healthy dialogue within the company. With an annual feedback system, it gets hard to ensure that your managers are regularly interacting with their subordinates to promote a healthy work environment. With a 360-degree performance review, you create a channel through which a healthy dialogue can be initiated within team members with their supervisors and vice-versa.

Improve Company Culture

With a focus on improving Employee Experience, brands always hope to create a company culture that not only defines their company but also becomes a major reason people wish to work with them. In a bid to do so, 360-degree feedback can be your biggest ally. Not only does it empower your employees, but it also helps you understand your gaps in your employee experience programs. This setup ensures that every chink in your armor is known to the concerned individual and the focus is on fixing it too.

If you are looking for a 360-degree feedback platform to provide you with assistance to all your feedback requirements, check out Survey2Connect’s 360-degree feedback solution.