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If you’ve been keeping your ear to the ground with respect to HR Tech news, you’ll know that there’s a slow revolution taking place with respect to employee performance management and 360 degree feedback. The performance review process is being not so quietly being linked with 360 degree feedback.
This is not a death knell for the performance review process as such. But it signals that nobody has patience for the old ways of carrying out a performance review process anymore.
360 feedback is a very important tool for any organization, but if not used properly it can have negative impact on the entire organization. In this article we explain to you if 360 feedback should or shouldn’t be linked to performance reviews.
Performance review is a process to measure and evaluate the performance of your employees and it can also be used to gather feedback from superior employees. Performance reviews help employees to get an understanding of how to improve their individual performances. They give employees a clear direction to work towards.
On the other hand, 360 feedback is a tool which helps employees learn about themselves and grow as professionals. It doesn’t measure employee performance. 360 feedback allows employees to provide feedback to their peers as well as superiors on their competencies, interpersonal behaviors or their job conduct.
Now that we know what these two tools are actually meant for, let us see how the picture looks when we link 360 feedback to performance.
People usually tend to think that multiple opinions are better than one. This thinking leads to the linkage of 360 feedback and performance.
In present times however, there are a lot of conflicting ideas about what constitutes performance management. Many companies which were once pioneers in the performance review process, such as General Electric, Enron, IBM, Motorola etc have either done away with the processes that brought them recognition or have themselves dissolved.
It is important to decide in advance on how long you have to carry out the work and set time frames for designing the survey, distributing it and analyzing the results.
Performance reviews can be conducted annually or half yearly because employees are evaluated based on their performance and based on how they achieved their goals. But 360 degree feedback purely depends upon your organization’s work culture and your leadership approach.
The main objective of a 360 degree feedback is to provide individuals with constructive feedback that helps them develop themselves. As long as a 360 degree survey motivates the employees to develop themselves, it is ideal to have them twice a year. Create a specific plan for employees and evaluate employees based only on how they meet the goals from the developmental plan. This not only gives you the benefits of having multiple reviews but also allows your employees to excel as professionals as they now act on goals set by multiple people.
Most employee performance appraisal software applications come with a whole host of features that help aid the performance review process. Engagedly for instance, also has the OKR module which allows you to add and monitor goals and objectives for employees, 360 multirater feedback module, a continuous feedback model, all of which can be utilized during the performance review so that managers have a broad and comprehensive overview of how their employees are doing. Additionally, these features also make tracking an employee’s performance a lot easier.
Engagedly is a performance management application with elements of employee engagement. To find out how we can help you improve performance management and engagement at your organization, request a demo today!
