A 360 Feedback is a procedure through which feedback on an employee's performance, suggestions, concerns, and the like, is collected. The feedback, in turn, is analyzed by the company in terms of its positive and negative aspects. The analysis of feedback will aid in improving your employee's performance and interaction with other employees. Thus, it will be beneficial to improve business output.
One of the main roles played by 360 Feedback is that of employer. In order to monitor whether or not employees are happy with their working environment and are contented with their working responsibilities, employers take help from this form of feedback. The basic function of providing feedback is to find out what is standing in the employees' way between success and failure. As such, it helps managers as well as supervisors to identify and correct these obstacles. However, 360 Feedback cannot be used as an effective management tool unless the feedback is provided from peers.
The two main forms of 360-degree feedback are the Horizontal axis feedback and the Vertical axis feedback. In Horizontal axis feedback, you can have inputs coming from three sets of people: the leader, the partner, and the workers. The feedback received here can help in providing leadership development for the leaders and employees.
On the other hand, in the vertical axis feedback, the input comes from five sets of individuals: the leader, the partners, the workers, the customers, and the other team members. While providing 360 feedback, the companies use both positive and negative words, gestures, and even body language of the team members. This form of feedback has been found useful in the work settings, particularly when the feedback is provided from the leaders and the managers. Moreover, this form of leadership development has also been found to enhance performance among team members.
As per a study, the companies that use the Horizontal axis feedback pay more attention towards the results of the review conducted while the Vertical axis companies pay attention towards the methodology of the review. These two forms of leadership reviews focus on two different areas of the organizations. The companies which use the Horizontal axis reviews look into areas like planning and organizing, performance, and the development of new ideas and products. While, the companies on the other hand, focus on areas such as leadership, motivation, communication skills, goal setting, delegation, supervision, and leadership styles. Thus, both these types of feedbacks provide leadership development for managers.
Leadership competencies can be defined as an individual's behavioral patterns that reflect their performance as managers. These competencies may include motivation, assertiveness, and leadership, communicating and negotiating, and ownership, communicating, and trust. This way, the feedback provided by the 360-degree feedback is targeted at improving the managers' competencies. There are some behaviors that are usually considered to be weaknesses such as not sharing and caring, being argumentative, not making eye contact, and lacking a sense of humor among others.
While the Horizontal axis and the 360-degree feedback provide the same information, they differ in the way they are interpreted. Both the Horizontal and the 360-degree feedback can be used in various contexts including, training, team building, sales, technology implementation, customer service improvement, and change management. In many organizations, the two types of feedback are being applied to improve on the competency of the managers by identifying the flaws in their performance. However, it must be kept in mind that different tasks require different types of feedback. One can get the idea about the different types of feedbacks from the many organizations using 360-degree feedback.
The basic difference between the Horizontal axis and the 360-degree feedback processes is the difference in the level of customization that is available in the two. The former has more customization options, while the latter have less. For instance, the Horizontal axis has the ability to provide the managers with feedback on the basic performance of their employees or a group of workers while the 360-degree feedback are more localized and less generic. It makes sense to use the two types of feedback in a different context in order for the managers to be able to fine tune the processes that they are implementing. The multi-rater feedback is one useful aspect of the performance management system that helps the managers to be able to customize the processes that they want to implement.
