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    The Benefits Of 360 Degree Feedback For Your Business And Its Workforce

    According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 360 degree feedback is “a performance appraisal method that gathers feedback on an individual from a number of sources.”

    Sources such as the individual’s colleagues and customers can help managers understand the contribution they are actually making to the organisation. This is often difficult to discover by other means, as the employee may be part of many different teams and engage in autonomous or semi-autonomous relationships with colleagues and customers.

    But in addition to being given a more in-depth insight into an individual’s worth, what are the other benefits of 360 degree feedback for your business and its workforce? Here to explain is recruitment and HR specialist Skillsarena.

    Identify strengths and weaknesses

    Identifying an employee’s strengths and weaknesses not only allows you to acknowledge their value but also improve upon areas that need attention. From there, you can come up with a tailor-made training plan unique to the individual, which ensures that learning outcomes will be beneficial.

    While you may want to focus on a member of staff’s weaknesses, developing their strengths is perhaps more important for career growth as well as the organisation’s effectiveness.

    Better self-awareness

    Employee empowerment can do wonders for a workforce’s confidence and competency, which is why you shouldn’t underestimate the power of 360 degree feedback to bring about better self-awareness.

    By giving your employees the ability to discover their own abilities along with how others perceive them, you can establish a framework for greater assertiveness and assurance.

    Establish more trustworthy relationships

    The problem with traditional review systems is that they invariably disrupt and damage employer-employee relationships. For example, employers tend to base their appraisals on recent performance, whereas employees will look at expectations for the entire year.

    But 360 degree feedback encourages an environment based on trust, where relationships can grow and blossom. If employees work together to help each other gain a better understanding of their performance and behaviour, employers can benefit from positive outcomes and more genuine results.

    Leaves bias out of the equation

    Even though every organisation hopes that senior members of staff do not skew appraisal results because of their own personal preferences, this can’t always be guaranteed. Besides the fact this is unfair on innocent individuals, it can also affect the business by favouring those that might not be pulling their weight.

    Thankfully, 360 degree feedback can eliminate bias by collecting results from multiple, often unconnected sources. Furthermore, it might even identify supervisors or executives that aren’t providing an honest opinion.

    Greater job satisfaction

    Perhaps the biggest benefit of 360 degree feedback is that it’s a two-way street. Employees are given the opportunity to rate or review their employer, proving that management actually cares about its workforce’s thoughts and feelings.

    There is every chance that employees could then witness positive changes in employer behaviour as a direct result of their feedback. In turn, they are bound to feel more satisfied in their jobs, with such power and influence over the whole organisation.