Preventing Layoffs With 360 Degree Feedback

If you’ve been following the tech industry in the last few months, it’s clear it is in turmoil. Every significant player has announced massive layoffs, and many believe this is just the beginning of an even more important trend.

However, the trend isn’t necessarily linked to poor market performance. In fact, many of these layoffs could have been easily prevented through appropriate employee insights.

While every company strives to be innovative, most still need key ingredients to achieve that goal truly. More than ever before, now is the need for HR leaders to identify which ingredients are needed in staffing capability and engagement — and which employee styles can fill in the gaps.

The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, and now mass layoffs indicate that companies aren’t equipped to hear their employees’ voices and lack the data to see issues arise before it’s too late.

These issues shouldn’t be blamed on the employees; it’s an employer’s role to provide the best working environment to offset the effect of these situations. This doesn’t always mean throwing money at the problem. With the correct data, your team will be better positioned to find creative solutions to this issue.

The only way to get ahead of this issue is to have good employee insights and to update them regularly. This article will explain how to run a 360 degree feedback campaign and select the best technology partner to get the most out of it.

What is 360 Degree Feedback?

360 degree feedback, also known as a multi-rater or multi-source assessment, is feedback or analysis from a range of individuals working closely with a particular person within an organization.

This feedback can have many sources, typically from superiors and peers but can also incorporate other points of view, such as relationships with clients and outsourced purveyors. The goal isn’t just to assess employee performance and general happiness levels, skills/position fit and any other analysis vector required.

While these surveys usually are HR-led, 360 degree feedback can be used to make decisions across all departments and ideally has a company-wide impact. These evaluations often end up saving money down the line for the companies that run them.

The level of detail of employee insights varies for every industry and often from company to company. One of the most important aspects of 360 degree feedback campaigns is to keep them as flexible as possible in order to gather the most accurate data possible.

In fact, the data gathered must impact future campaigns, allowing you to tailor questions to the reality of your employees. This will not only make them feel more heard, but it will also allow you to fix the actual issues bothering your workforce.

What are the Benefits of 360 Degree Feedback?

When correctly done, 360 degree feedback is much more than an employee enterprise survey. It allows you to understand not only everyone’s experience within the company but their skills, how they are being applied at the moment and more.

This is how 360 degree feedback can help prevent layoffs. Companies tend to overhire for various reasons, but the leading one is the lack of clear employee data. Without this, overhiring situations happen in attempts to fix a problem that could’ve easily been solved through a reallocation of existing employee resources.

It’s a well-known statistic by now: Keeping a good employee already on your payroll is much cheaper than hiring and training a new one. While this trope usually refers to salary increases, many other efficient solutions to this problem can be uncovered via a 360 degree feedback program.

5 Things to Look for in a 360 Degree Feedback Platform

While 360 degree feedback is a great initiative for companies who want better data about their employees and how they are treating them, it can quickly become a resource sink without the proper platform to run it.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed while searching for the right platform, but a few will have the most impact on your campaigns.  Here are the five core features your 360 degree feedback platform should have to support you properly.

Automation

At its core, a 360 degree feedback campaign is a massive data-gathering operation, and you’ll need all your technology to talk to each other.

Ideally, your 360 degree platform will pull data from your organization’s HRIS, CRM, LMS, and other data sources for the most accurate and usable results.

Multilingual Support

Offering the survey in all languages present within your organization is crucial. It’s a considerate thing to do, and it puts employees in the right mindset to answer the survey in the language they are most comfortable in.

Additionally, offering to answer in a user’s mother tongue will give you the most accurate answers and might even allow you to uncover insights that might not have been revealed had the survey only been offered in English.

Configurable User Interface

Unlike other HR processes, 360 degree feedback campaigns are not “one size fits all.” You’ll need the capacity to tailor your survey around your existing data, competencies and other requirements. Like in any other assessment, the ability to ask the right questions is half the battle.

Smart Invites

The most important step of a 360 degree feedback campaign is communicating effectively with your respondents. Every message sent about the campaign should be personalized to incite the person to answer.

An excellent time-saving feature to look for is the ability to see who hasn’t responded yet to send them reminders with time or completion-based triggers.

Aggregate Reporting

Without this feature, a 360 degree feedback campaign is just a collection of anecdotes. The platform you choose should give you an overview of all trends across departments, locations, countries and any other relevant grouping.

A robust reporting tool is what will allow you to make the most out of the results of your 360 degree feedback campaign.

The Answer is Employee Feedback Analytics

The Great Resignation and layoffs are merely symptoms of a greater issue companies worldwide face: inadequate employee insights. Employers won’t understand why their hires don’t work out without the right data.

This is where the Explorance Blue – the Feedback Analytics Platform can help.  A unified, omnidirectional 360 degree feedback mechanism that can help companies identify their skills gap, drive employee retention & empowerment and build organizational agility.

Explorance Blue gives you the power and flexibility to build the 360 degree feedback process that is right for you. It comes in vendor-hosted and onsite versions to fit your security and IT requirements. With a large number of built-in integrations with all leading software, Explorance Blue will fit right into your existing tech stack without any changes or learning period.

This type of advanced data will allow you to retain employees by answering their issues before they lead to quitting. Additionally, you’ll be able to adequately assess your hiring needs and never end up in a situation where layoffs are your only solution. 360 degree feedback isn’t a “nice to have”; it’s a core function of any modern business.

Elevate your 360 Degree Processes with Blue, The Feedback Analytics Platform