A Comprehensive Guide to the 360 Feedback Software

As more and more employees focus on their own career development, more and more organizations are using 360 feedback to conduct more meaningful employee interviews. But what exactly is 360 feedback? How does it work and is it suitable for all organisations? In this blog post, we explain the basics of this comprehensive approach to employee interviews.

What is a 360 feedback software?

360 feedback, also called multi-rater feedback, is part of the employee interview that enables employees to receive feedback from those they work with. Employees are usually evaluated by colleagues, managers and subordinates.

Let's say you lead the HR team in your organization and want to evaluate the performance of one of your recruiters. Let's assume that this recruiter worked with the marketing department to hire employees for the marketing team. To get a useful evaluation, you can ask the marketing manager to assess the recruiter's performance and give constructive feedback, since he or she has worked closely with the recruiter. If the recruiter has direct reports and you want to evaluate leadership qualities, you can ask the direct reports to provide feedback on how well tasks were delegated and whether they understood what was expected of them when they were assigned tasks.

360 feedback can be anonymous or not, depending on the employees' needs. Managers can then use the answers to set meaningful goals and offer relevant training programs to employees.

What are the advantages of 360 feedback?

Here are some of the key benefits of including 360 feedback as part of the employee interview:

Improves performance

When you get feedback from all your employees, both the managers and the employees themselves gain a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. This, in turn, will enable employees to take better action to build on their strengths and overcome their weaknesses during the upcoming performance period.

Strengthens teamwork

360 feedback can strengthen teamwork and lead to better collaboration between employees, since each individual gives constructive feedback to facilitate their colleagues' career development. This creates a culture characterized by trust and continuous development.

Reduces implicit bias

When managers receive feedback about their employees' performance from different sources, they are better able to make fair decisions. The managers also become better acquainted with all aspects of the employees' performance, which promotes a culture characterized by openness and transparency.

Keeps employees happy

By using 360 feedback in the organisation, you show that you are interested in helping employees to develop in their careers without being prejudiced. Since development never stagnates, employees will feel satisfied and engaged.

What are the disadvantages of 360 feedback?

One of the biggest disadvantages of 360 feedback is that if the employee and the evaluator are not on good terms with each other, the evaluator may end up focusing on the employee's negative aspects instead of giving constructive feedback. Another problem is that some evaluators may not have enough time and fill out the surveys just for fun, instead of thoroughly assessing the employee's performance.

This is how you implement 360 feedback in your organisation

If you plan to use 360 feedback in your organisation, here are five tips you should keep in mind to get the most out of the new system:

Set clear expectations

Before you even start the process, you should have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with 360 feedback. In most cases, this system is implemented to help employees become more aware of their own achievements and speed up their career development. When you begin to define the system, you should determine what behavior you want to evaluate. Once you are aware of this, you should make your employees aware of how this new way of giving feedback will help each of them. Elaborate on what they will be evaluated on, and help the evaluators understand which performance aspects they should take into account before giving feedback.

Decide how you will collect feedback

Once you've helped your employees understand what's expected of them, you need to have a clear idea of how to facilitate the process. It may be a good idea to decide what kind of questions you are going to ask the examiners when they are to evaluate different competences. For example, if you are evaluating an employee's communication skills, the questions can focus on important aspects of communication, such as listening skills, empathy, openness, respect, presentation skills and body language. Once you are done with the questions, you need to figure out how to collect the responses from the employees. Remember that most performance management systems have a built-in system that allows for 360 feedback to be collected as part of the evaluation process, so that data is collected in a single system.

Select the evaluators

It is important to select the right people so that you get the useful insight you need to improve your employees' performance. It is important that the evaluators have worked for a long time with the employee being evaluated, and that they have a good working relationship with that person. It may be a good idea to check that the relationship is ongoing or based on a recent collaboration, and not on interactions that are too far back in time. Choose at least eight assessors, so that you get a complete picture of the employee's performance without preconceived perspectives. Make sure to give the raters plenty of time so they don't have to give ratings and feedback in a hurry.

Communicate with the employees

Once you have received all the feedback, you can encourage the managers to draw conclusions and communicate the findings with the employees as part of the evaluation process. Encourage the managers to also talk about how employees can develop their strengths and deal with any blind spots. If possible, ask them to create a development plan with goals and KRAs for the upcoming period. Remind them that they should also ask for feedback from the employees being evaluated.

Use 360 feedback

360 feedback is an effective tool that can help employees to develop their careers. However, how successful it will be largely depends on how well you implement it in your organization. We hope that this blog post has given you a clear idea of the benefits and processes involved in a 360 feedback software.

In conclusion, IceHrm provides a comprehensive solution for implementing a 360-degree feedback system, offering organizations a streamlined approach to employee evaluations. With IceHrm, businesses can harness the power of multi-rater feedback to enhance performance, strengthen teamwork, reduce bias, and keep employees engaged in their career development.