360 degree feedback in healthcare: have the right conversations
By Kirsten van Enk | 20/02/2023
As an HR manager or team leader, you probably have regular conversations with your employees. About their goals, where you can support them, what is going well, and much more. But employees can only really develop well if they not only get feedback from their manager, but also from each other. So what does 360 degree feedback in healthcare look like? And how do you secure 360 degree feedback in your feedback cycle?
What is 360 degree feedback?
Giving feedback is an important way to encourage employees’ personal and professional development. Ideally, you should do this regularly and not just during an annual performance review. Give feedback when it is still fresh and employees can do something with it right away. But in addition, it is a good idea to also enable employees to give feedback to each other as colleagues. And not just colleagues – all the people involved in the employee’s work. So also customers, relations, other departments or layers of the organization … You name it. That’s what 360-degree feedback in healthcare is all about.
Feedback helps employees understand their strengths and weaknesses. And who can see these better than immediate colleagues, who know what the work entails and are on the floor with each other every day? Or stakeholders with whom the employee has daily contact? You can give feedback verbally, but to embed it even better in your organization and your interview cycle, you can use an online feedback form.
Why is 360-degree feedback in healthcare important?
So giving and receiving feedback is essential if you want to encourage professional and personal development. But some people find it tense to do, especially if the feedback is not necessarily positive. So how can you ensure that your employees can easily give each other feedback?
Creating an open culture
Do you want to create effective teams? And allow employees to give feedback in an open way? Then it is important to work on the culture in the teams. Healthcare typically employs people who are very committed to each other. As a result, they may not want to voice it if they think something could be better or if they disagree with something. But to move forward as a team and as individual employees, this is very important. An open culture where you discuss these issues with each other helps. And: practice makes perfect.
Make it easy with an online feedback tool
We mentioned it above, but to make feedback a standard part of the interview cycle, a tool is very useful. This ensures that you can save the feedback given, discuss it, attach goals to it and come back to it at the next meeting.
In addition, the employee can request specific feedback from colleagues and they can fill it out online. This makes it easier to illuminate an issue from everyone’s perspective and set goals based on this. This is how you help advance the employee’s development. The 2DAYSMOOD tool helps with this: with the 360 degree feedback module, employees ask and give each other feedback easily and quickly.
Why 360 degree feedback in healthcare?
Many organizations suffer from it, but healthcare in particular is often in the news for it. Workload, overwork and tightness in the labor market are topics that come up often here. And you don’t solve that easily, but you can find ways to deal with it all together.
By giving each other feedback throughout the organization, you also know what employees may be struggling with. Where the process can be improved. Or where extra hands are needed. In this way you can quickly identify areas for improvement in the team, the department or the entire organization and respond accordingly. In addition, feedback is important for social cohesion in a department and provides a sense of ‘doing it together’, which can make a significant difference to the perception of workload.
More insight into your teams? Use data!
Besides giving 360 feedback in healthcare, do you want more insight into the performance of your teams? Then get started with 2DAYSMOOD’s tool. Do a baseline measurement to see how happy your employees are and what factor from the Employee Happiness Model can help the employee experience move forward quickly. Or measure the mood of your employees and discuss this in teams to quickly spot stress and dissatisfaction and act on it.