Like all other spheres, people in HR and talent-development arena are always looking for a new tool. Currently, data analytics is capturing attention of business leaders finding a fresh way to improve performance, productivity, and talent alignment.

However, as much as we embrace it, there are still tried-and-tested talent-development methods that, when applied appropriately, can be integral components of HR programs designed to get the most out of people. Of them, 360-degree feedback process is one of the best.

In the HR realm, the 360 Feedback is the precursor of People Analytics. Not only does it provide a broader view of performance, it also enables you to sort data in numerous ways.

As a multi-dimensional leadership development tool, 360-degree feedback allows you to receive clear, actionable feedback from your peers, employees and managers, thus helping you improve your performance and manage people more efficiently. Additionally, as there are multiple perspectives involved, 360-degree feedback is much more comprehensive and less prone to individual bias.

Here are a few points you might want to consider when carrying out 360-degree feedback for leadership development:

If your workforce doesn’t have a clear definition of leadership or has conflicting views, why not address the question to your employees?

While you would know your company’s strategy and vision as a leader, your employees can tell you how to achieve it. Educate your team on your intentions, the objectives, the process and the importance of keeping your 360 feedback confidential to make the most of this tool.

Find out from you team members whether the managers are walking the talk and if your strategy is being implemented on the ground. Ask employees about the behaviors they admire in their peers, direct reports or managers.

One of the biggest impediments to changing a company culture and delivering on a strategic vision is managerial engagement. With 360 Feedback, you can unravel the current state of play.

Once you have defined the qualities and traits needed to become a leader in your organisation and have educated your team, it’s time to assess your current crop of leaders and identify new high potentials.

Ask a leader’s direct reports, peers and managers to assess them against this leadership criteria. This will ultimately give you an idea of a leader’s strengths and weaknesses and allow you to highlight areas for professional development. Using the results of 360 Feedback, you can also create tailored training programs to develop certain leadership skills.

It’s important to be clear on what you’re going to use the 360 feedback for. I advise that you don’t succumb to the temptation of secretly using the results of your direct reports for performance decisions.

Also, avoid to suggest a 360 feedback process for an under-performing employee. Rather, be courageous and have an authentic conversation with the individual about their performance and find ways to improve it.

Leaders naturally have an aversion to micromanagement. In fact, one of the most significant drivers for job satisfaction among leaders is autonomy. This is why it can be challenging to combine performance measurement as well as let your leaders do their thing.

360 Feedback offers a less intrusive way of monitoring leaders. The results can prove to be quite useful for leaders as well since it allows them to see how their team perceives them — in contrast to simply hitting targets or having one-to-one appraisals with a manager.

360 Feedback shows how one is viewed as a leader in the truest sense – how much they inspire and motivate team members, or how their efforts to drive change and improvements are being considered.

The dramatic spread of COVID-19 has disrupted the way organisations work, with many experiencing adjusted goals, furloughs, and even layoffs. In order to better respond to the current context, it has become necessary for organisations to re-evaluate aspects of their performance management system – and in some cases adopt an entirely new system.

Even experienced managers and employees may find performance management conversations daunting when they are not carried out properly. And during this period when we are already dealing with a lot of uncertainty and economic downturn, employees’ worries are likely to escalate.

Here are some points you need to consider when managing employee performance in the age of COVID:

When it comes to getting a 360-degree review, managers need to actively solicit feedback. And now organisations are placing an equal – or greater – emphasis on peer reviews as they do on a manager’s review because they have proven to accelerate an employee’s skillset and leadership development.

With their willingness to share candidly “the good, the bad, and the ugly,” peers can provide insights that lay the groundwork for focused leadership development or executive coaching.

Here is another reason why it’s important to incorporate team-based feedback into performance conversations. A research by Gartner reveals that there is a 3.5% increase in the utility of performance management and a 14% increase in employee performance when employees are evaluated by peers with interconnected work and shared goals.

Notwithstanding, in a 2019 Gartner survey, 99% of respondents said that direct managers evaluate employee performance whereas only 17% said they are evaluated by their teams.

As a manager, solicit feedback from other members of the team to learn about a person’s strengths and areas for improvement. Also, make sure that you collect information on an employee’s ability to work remotely. Find out whether they are effective at communicating while working remotely and if their productivity has increased or decreased since moving to remote work.

When you’re gathering feedback, it is crucial to keep context in mind and fully acknowledge the varying circumstances your team members are operating under. If an employee, for instance, has faced trying circumstances outside of work, such as a family member with COVID-19, do not disregard it. Similarly, if it has not been possible for an employee to do their full job remotely, you should also factor that in.

With the emergence of COVID, the targets that were set for this year are no longer applicable. Instead of judging your employees against the company’s pre-pandemic objectives, concentrate on your individual employee’s growth and learning.

COVID has hit people’s mental health in different ways. So be compassionate and empathetic, and give people a little more latitude. Acknowledge and reward your employees’ resilience and capacity to adapt during these challenging times. And they may in turn become more engaged with your organisation.

Even if you cancel bonuses, award ceremonies or merit increases, don’t stop tracking performance and communicating to your employees that you appreciate and need high performance.

Truth be told, traditional performance management systems are likely to disengage your people in normal times and thus will do far worse harm today. Now is the time to burn the boats and leave old practices behind. As an employer, you must adopt a performance management strategy that is not just adaptive and responsive but also calibrated to the new workplace.

This shows that the need for fundamentals of good management is stronger than ever: agile goals, extraordinary coaching and high accountability systems. When the smoke clears, you need to know who your stars were – and you have to keep those people engaged.

Organisations typically approach building team alignment by setting and sharing a company vision. However, their efforts often fall flat because they fail to resonate with team members on the ground. Additionally, leaders overlook the importance of communicating to the individuals how they personally contribute to the bigger picture.

From the top-level managers down to the entry-level employees, everyone needs to share a mission and set of values to stay on the rails.

Here are some techniques to help align your team around what you need to do and get everyone on the same page.

As a business leader, you must be quite familiar to the exercise of annual goal planning. Setting and aligning goals tremendously impacts the overall team performance as well as boosts employee engagement. Plus, everyone understands what the prize is and what they are working towards.

While it may be a daunting task to define company, department, and team level objectives at the start of each year, with a disciplined approach your team will have a crystal clear idea of what they are trying to accomplish. Even better, when your employees understand how their individual work contributes to the organisational strategy – and to the society as a whole, their individual performance and employee experience is likely to receive a boost.

So collaborate as a team, determine your priorities and then break them down into individual objectives. But of course, this process doesn’t just end with setting and forgetting goals. Driving alignment entails that you constantly update the status, celebrate even small successes, and re-orient the challenges along the way.

In case you’re thinking this is too obvious, let me share an MIT Sloan report with you, according to which only 28% of executives and middle managers tasked with strategy execution could list three of their company’s priorities. Yes, only 28%. The alignment only gets worse as you move further away from the decision makers. So start with the basics and measure your goals.

As much as it is crucial to focus on your team as a collective whole and ensure your team members feel connected to their coworkers, the importance of one-on-one meetings cannot be disregarded.

Managers, especially executives, have the luxury of seeing the forest for the trees. One-on-ones serve as good venues to identify opportunities and problems, allowing you to see across your team to create alignment. They give you a chance to understand their motivations, fear, challenges and concerns.

In times of crisis, it is extremely important to leverage the power of one-on-one meetings to keep the employees reassured and aligned on the new and often shifting priorities. As workday pressures and time constraints may get the better of us, it is a good idea to jot down a list of bullet points that you’d like to discuss and ask your direct report to do the same.

A research by Deloitte indicates that 72% of employees don’t have access to the information they need from their company systems. What’s surprising is, this is the information they need to perform their tasks efficiently. Alignment comes afterwards.

Employees are not only overwhelmed with the crises affecting the world today, they are also staggered by the state of work. To crown it all, at least 85% of employees are already disengaged.

Leaders wanting to drive team alignment must help their teams stride across the noise and clutter of the workplace. You need to ensure your team members find purpose in their work and understand how they are a part of something bigger. Your employees shouldn’t have to struggle to obtain basic information like customer case studies or the product roadmap if you want to make them feel valued for their contributions.

An important part of your alignment strategy, therefore, has to be easy access to the basics. Make sure you team resources are readily available. Also, perform an information audit to get rid of the distraction and clutter caused by outdated information. Doing so will save your team from spending time working through useless content.

Running an organization has never been easy. In addition to attending to managerial duties, leaders are also occupied with planning for the future. And this does not even begin to cover the interpersonal complexities of managing a team.

Bosses are responsible for providing team leadership and coaching, focusing the team on tasks at hand and internal/external client/customer needs, coordinating team logistics, and carrying out all the many separate tasks that these responsibilities entail.

Now add the challenge of leading from behind a computer screen, hundreds or thousands of miles away from the office.

That’s right. As modern business trends take over, a growing number of leaders now find themselves in virtual relationships with their direct reports.

You may be separated by time zones as well as physical distance from your team; perhaps for a month or two, or perhaps for good. This type of management presents its own set of hurdles.

When first thrust into this unfamiliar territory, many leaders flounder. Of course, commitments are made to stay in constant touch, to always talk through every step and phase and give real-time updates – but circumstances seem to get the better of you.

You find yourself struggling to communicate effectively, you find it nearly impossible to stay aligned, and you find yourselves miles away from achieving the desired goals.

So, what does it take to lead remote teams effectively? Here are some basic guidelines:

One of the biggest concerns – or rather, fears – of remote leaders is wondering if their team will remain productive in this virtual work arrangement. Will they become slackers who merely give the appearance of being engaged while procrastinating work?

It becomes abundantly clear whether your team is actually engaged or not once you’ve established clear expectations as follows:

Let your team know from the get-go when you expect them to be reachable by call, text, email, chat, or otherwise. Ensure that your team outlines hours (such as 9 AM to 5 PM) where they would be available not only to you, but also to the rest of the team or clients.

During these hours, if they will be unavailable for any amount of time (e.g. for a doctor’s appointment), they should communicate this to you beforehand just as they would in an office environment.

Your team’s output should be the same as it would have been if you were sitting just a few feet away from them. To accomplish this in a virtual working arrangement, define measurable objectives and direct your team members to check in with you and share their productivity at the end of the day.

A combination of defining objectives and end-of-day reporting will eliminate the need to micromanage your staff for fear that they are slacking.

Speaking of micromanaging, that practice is dangerously easy when you’re present in the office. All you have to do is walk around and look at your employee’s screens. But when you can’t physically keep an eye on your team, you may feel the need to resort to other ways to control them – but this is unlikely to lead to improved productivity.

Just like managing a long-distance relationship, managing your team from a distance requires a lot of trust. Although this seems like an obvious thing to say, it must be said because oftentimes, remote leaders mistake delegation for trust.

In other words, simply handing a team member a task and telling them to do it is completely different from entrusting them with a task they feel supported enough to accomplish on their own. Now, in order to lead with trust rather than micromanaging or using command-and-control tactics, remote leaders have to be a lot more introspective.

The best place to start is by empathizing with your team. It isn’t healthy for you – or your team – to constantly wonder what your team members are doing at every moment.

To understand the context of your team’s work experience, ask yourself how they must be feeling about achieving the objectives you’ve set for them. Will they be feeling empowered? Confused? Or stressed out?

Next, reflect on your role in bringing about these possible reactions. And don’t forget that trust often begins with a personal connection. So, it’s important for remote leaders to set aside work and spend time getting to know their employees – even if it is remotely, like making sure to discuss news, pop culture, hobbies, and family. With you working to become more empathetic and open, your team will learn to trust you more.

The success of your remote leadership can and will be measured by your team’s output and achievement of set goals and objectives. To make this happen, remember the significance of communication in this non-traditional work dynamic.

Yes, you’ve set clear expectations regarding availability hours to ensure that you can reach your team members if and when you need to communicate with them. However, building community is an equally important part of the remote leadership equation.

Building community is critical to keeping your workforce engaged from a distance. And technology is thankfully available in abundance to help us accomplish just that. Create dedicated spaces to celebrate company milestones as well as community recognition.

Take advantage of the many online spaces and applications to keep your team connected to you even when you are not directly in contact with them all day long. This includes shared Drives and Cloud spaces, productivity/workspace management software, and business communication apps.

These tools will help you stay connected with members of the team and ensure that they are engaged with the work – and with you – on multiple digital spaces in real time.