Almost all organizations aiming for company-wide improvement seek tools that are easy to use. One of the key tools that you can include in your inventory is 360-degree feedback. You must be wondering — “How can feedback boost business growth?”
A focused approach to feedback solicitation and distribution can catalyze employee and team performance.
This will eventually produce better results for the company as a whole. To help you achieve this, we will take a closer look at 360-degree feedback from all angles.
We will discuss the concept of 360-degree feedback including its pros and cons and application. Let’s unpack 360-degree feedback and learn how it can potentially benefit employees, teams, and businesses.
Collect feedback with JustFeedback
JustFeedback helps your business increase profits and reduce risk by improving your customer experience
What is 360-degree feedback?
Let’s start by learning about the basic concept of 360-degree feedback.
To put it in simple terms, 360-degree feedback is a tool that can deliver structured and formal feedback. In real terms, this means that team leads and managers can use this tool to solicit and share feedback related to employee performance and behavior.
Once configured in accordance with the company’s requirements, 360-degree feedback can provide extra insights and produce in-depth details related to team ethics, work styles, competencies, and areas of improvement.
In other words, you can use 360-degree feedback to anonymously generate frequent and constructive feedback on employee and team growth.
Pros and cons of 360-degree feedback
What are the pros and cons of using 360-degree feedback to improve team performance? Let’s discuss them below —
1. Pros
The advantages of 360-degree feedback are unending. This tool allows managers to provide structured feedback to employees from a variety of sources.
The insights generated through the 360-degree feedback survey can help develop and strengthen teamwork and accountability. If used effectively, this tool can facilitate bias and discrimination prevention across the team.
It can reveal gaps in existing workflows and procedures, and help you understand how the loopholes impact employee performance evaluations and growth.
In addition to this, you can use 360-degree feedback to discover career development areas by offering constructive feedback to employees. It can also be used to focus on training in order to provide team members with a complete growth package.
2. Cons
There are several cons when it comes to 360-degree feedback. If not used properly, it can cause organizational issues and hinder performance plans.
Since the entire review process is anonymous, recipients can fail to grasp the complete context behind the feedback. Most importantly, 360-degree feedback requires large data collection to be effective.
What are the key benefits of 360-degree feedback?
Now that you have understood the basics of 360-degree feedback, let’s dive deeper and look into its various benefits —
1. Boosts self-awareness with constructive criticism
The most critical aspect of any 360-degree feedback process is self-awareness. The 360-degree feedback process has a unique way of exposing our perceptions and views to the reality of the world around us in order to adjust our judgments and behavior.
When conducting a survey and soliciting honest feedback, you should know that most participants will find the overall rating complies with their own view.
Even if disagreement with the score occurs, the process will help you perceive the feedback appropriately. Self-awareness increases when you recognize the contributions of each stakeholder in the process.
2. Focuses on measuring the “how” (constructive feedback)
The “how” behind 360-degree feedback is equally crucial.
This is because the process that runs 360-degree feedback matters, despite being ignored by many senior-level executives.
Leaders in an organization are responsible for interaction with their team members and debriefing individuals in their performance reviews.
The participants in the process get the opportunity to figure out where they stand in terms of collaboration, strategy, and overall development. The process allows them to identify their core competencies.
This will then facilitate better results. Leaders can also use the 360-degree feedback process to foster an improved work-life balance.
3. Helps improve work relationships
This is one of the most important aspects of a successful organization is the relationships team members have with each other. This matters because a team contributes collectively towards a particular goal or objective.
360-degree feedback is an excellent tool to interact with other people in the team and highlight events and areas that can impact their ongoing work relationships.
Factors that can be included in this aspect of 360-degree feedback include clear communication, constructive feedback, fair treatment, and mutual respect. The idea is to use the tool to strengthen relationships at work.
4. Fosters accountability with direct reports
Accountability and ownership are factors that can have a huge impact on the success of an organization.
This is because team members who prioritize accountability will make sure their work is complete and also that they don’t negatively impact the work of other team members.
Leaders who use 360-degree feedback can make sure there is no ambiguity in how work is completed or presented.
This is achieved when leaders use the tool to focus on specifics. As they focus on these specifics, leaders can check, verify, and demonstrate whether or not a team member is accountable for a particular behavior.
5. Helps enhance employee performance
Can 360-degree feedback help boost employee performance? Yes, it can certainly serve this purpose if used effectively. It depends entirely on how leaders in the organization use 360-degree feedback.
Leaders will have to make sure that all participants are catered to and provide proper feedback and support.
They should be held accountable for their behavior and performance, which will help them achieve clarity in terms of their existing position. Moreover, leaders can follow up with the employees to conduct a post-assessment and measure growth.
6. Encourages personal development
Personal development matters to all the employees in an organization. How does 360-degree feedback help with this? Organizations relying on 360-degree feedback can use the tool to provide employees with a constructive development plan.
The plan will help employees understand where they are currently lacking and how they can improve. The feedback can be coupled with employee strengths, weaknesses, and feedback from leadership.
360-degree feedback can also be used by senior-level officials to grade team leaders and prioritize personal development.
7. Pushes stakeholders to have a dialogue
An organization with key departments experiencing a communication gap will cease to perform efficiently.
We highly recommend providing all people involved in any conversation with complete clarity during the 360-degree feedback reporting. This is because participants might inquire about the reasons behind their low or high scores.
The participant might follow up with managers so that they can effectively align their expectations. Such conversations will happen only when companies use 360-degree feedback as a main tool.
Participants should look at 360-degree feedback as a tool to break the ice and move toward becoming better employees.
8. Better leadership development programs
The behaviors of stakeholders should not go unnoticed. That’s why a 360-degree feedback survey can work wonders if business owners make sure all key stakeholders receive feedback insights.
Once they receive these insights, a plan to improve behavior can be drafted to boost the quality of interactions within the organization.
At the same time, this feedback can be coupled with in-depth details about how certain behaviors have helped improve the culture within the organization. The level of detail within the 360 reports can have a huge impact on overall culture.
9. Strengthen company culture
Almost all business owners and high-level executives want to improve company culture and make it more consistent.
However, the lack of an effective plan and direct reports keeps them from achieving this goal. A 360-degree feedback survey and report can help.
Once the survey is conducted and analyzed, business owners can make sure the insights related to company culture and its upliftment are shared with every employee within the organization. This will ensure that all teams and their members are on the same page.
Team leaders can be pushed to enforce actionable insights and boost company culture from the ground up.
10. Fights managerial or team bias
Did you know that over 60 percent of employees report being impacted by bias within an organization? Bias within a company can impact the happiness, confidence, engagement, and overall well-being of its employees.
Bias can sometimes result in a hostile working environment. This is why we highly recommend using 360-degree feedback surveys and reports so that employees within the organization are subject to fairer and more balanced assessments.
Key applications of 360-degree feedback system
360-degree feedback is highly useful for managers across all industries.
This is mainly due to the fact that the feedback can produce deep insights in terms of team performance and behavior. It can generate insights about employees and their ability to contribute to any set objectives.
If you are looking for a tool that can track communication, leadership behavior, teamwork, conflict resolution, and other key factors, you should be using 360-degree feedback.
When using it for employees, managers must ensure that the tool is deployed essentially for employee development. But how do you use 360-degree for employee development?
The tool has proven to be highly helpful for managers as it allows them to showcase any key areas of improvement. When used effectively, this tool can present opportunities that employees can use to develop their skill set.
Additionally, the tool can be applied to performance management and leadership development programs. Extensive performance management is possible with the help of a 360-degree feedback process.
This allows managers to set up systems that run on competencies. In other words, the positions in an organization are not filled simply in terms of ability. Companies can use all 360-degree feedback data to make such decisions.
Final thoughts
There you have it. We have shared everything you need to know about using 360-degree feedback as a high-performance tool for faster business growth.
We have discussed the basics of 360-degree feedback, its benefits, and applications. This tool should be the cornerstone of your approach toward fostering teamwork and employee recognition.
Once you start using direct reports extensively across your organization, you can package them as a multi-source anonymous feedback program that can produce exceptional insights into relevant personal development.
To achieve this, you will have to use 360-degree feedback (multi-rater feedback) in conjunction with an actionable development plan.
Did you find this post helpful? Stay tuned for more informative posts.