“MMR Research Associates greatly appreciate your team of developers who have worked hard to accommodate all our changes and requests. It made our review process easier. Thank you!”
Carrie Mills | Office Manager | MMR Research Associates
The case study is about a marketing research firm that was looking for the right solution to automate their 360 degree feedback process.
MMR Research Associates was using the ADP Payroll and Employee Database system. They wanted a 360 degree feedback solution that could be easily integrated with ADP. Our client got to know about Empxtrack and its offerings from the ADP team.
ABOUT CLIENT
MMR Research Associates, Inc. was launched in 1999 as a small, boutique service provider. Soon after, the company evolved into an agile, full-service marketing research company serving hundreds of global companies. The company is led by a team of talented, highly experienced and educated marketing research professionals.
Currently, our client is catering to the needs of various industries, including retail, financial services, healthcare, media and communication, restaurants, consumer goods and many more.
THE NEED
The client was manually conducting 360 reviews for their employees. As a result, the multi-rater feedback process was turning out to be tedious, inaccurate with a long turnaround time. Moreover, the delayed feedback from respondents limited employees from identifying their strengths, weaknesses and areas of improvement in a timely manner.
Hence, the company needed an affordable, secure and fully automated 360 degree feedback software. An online solution that would speed up the feedback process and increase its transparency and objectivity.
THE CHALLENGE
Initially, the client didn’t have a proper mechanism to conduct a 360 degree feedback process. It was being conducted manually by using excel sheets. Besides being a cumbersome process, there were multiple challenges faced in manual 360 review.
HR used to share excel sheets with the reviewees and reviewers asking for their feedback. Each one of them filled their responses in the sheet and submitted it to the HR manager.
Not only did the HR face delay in receiving feedback, but also had to spend a lot of time on regular follow ups with the reviewers. As a result, the whole process of conducting 360 reviews turned out to be lengthy, tiring and inefficient.
Besides the above challenges, few more issues faced by the client were:
- » Complex manual process. Due to complexity of the manual feedback process, reviewers were not able to complete 360 feedback on time.
- » Bias in ratings and comments. Instead of providing constructive feedback, most of the reviewers gave biased feedback to the reviewee.
- » Misuse of rights. It was observed that some reviewers used derogatory language in the feedback. Hence managers needed edit rights to rewrite reviewers’ comments in such cases.
Hence, the company wanted to soon implement an online 360 degree feedback to overcome all the above mentioned challenges. In fact, they wanted to introduce a holistic process to identify employee development needs and performance gaps.
THE SOLUTION
The search for the right solution began on ADP Marketplace. The MMR Research team was already using an employee database and payroll from ADP.
The experts from the ADP team recommended Empxtrack 360 feedback software to the client. Empxtrack was already serving many U.S. based companies with its Performance Management solution.
Soon the company connected with Empxtrack and discussed their challenges in detail. They wanted an affordable, easy-to-use 360 degree feedback software that didn’t require much training.
Empxtrack offered a specially designed 360 degree feedback product that could be easily integrated with ADP. The product offered comprehensive and highly configurable features to map client needs. In addition, HR could access various feedback reports with actionable insights on employee capabilities.
Automatic reminders could be sent to employees or reviewers for completing feedback in a timely manner.
A few promising features provided in Empxtrack 360 feedback solution were:
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Comparative study of rating scores for an employee
Empxtrack provided a customized report where HR could compare the feedback score provided by various reviewers.
The scoring process was simplified where reviewers could provide ratings and comments for the reviewee. In addition, Empxtrack provided reports that made it easy to view comparative scores given by reviewers for each attribute.
Furthermore, the report also provided an average rating by each reviewer for a specific attribute. These scores were thus helpful in calculating the group average score for all attributes. As a result, this completely made the scoring transparent and accurate.
Comparative scores for all attributes
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Inclusion of multiple reviewers
The HR manager configured multiple 360 feedback plans for different groups of employees. MMR Research was easily able to include multiple reviewers in the 360 feedback process. Feedback could be solicited from subordinates, peers and seniors.
Feedback dashboard for a reviewee
Availability of multiple feedback reports
Empxtrack offered comprehensive feedback reports to the client. Individual review report, summary report and 360 feedback cross tab report, to name a few. Each of these reports had their own benefits.
- » Individual review report – Presented ratings and comments provided for each attribute by a specific reviewer.
- » 360 feedback cross tab report – This report displays ratings and comments provided for each attribute by all reviewers.
- » Feedback summary report – This report displays feedback and interpret results. It shows average ratings grouped by competency family in a tabular form as well as a radar chart.
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Editing rights for managers
With Empxtrack, editing rights were provided to the managers of the reviewees. Once the feedback was received from the reviewers, the managers were allowed to make changes in case foul language or derogatory comments were mentioned. Thus, managers could easily view and edit feedback.
IMPACT
The client gave a very positive response post implementation of Empxtrack 360 degree feedback process. Managers, reviewers and HR could easily use the system without any training which helped the company in many ways:
- » Introduced full transparency and objectivity in the feedback process
- » Provided 360 degree feedback software that was well integrated with ADP
- » Accelerated feedback process without regular follow ups
- » Identified employee strengths, weaknesses and areas of improvement
- » Reduced inaccuracies and eliminated bias from the process
- » Completion of 360 reviews in a timely manner
- » Encouraged participation of multiple reviewers across the organization
- » Provided customized reports to get actionable insights
- » Provided dashboards for real time monitoring of the process
- » Increased employee engagement and satisfaction
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Disclaimer: Maintaining security of our client data is our prime responsibility. The images shown in this case study contain dummy data.
