In an earlier blog, I discussed what Employee 360 Views are and which possible sources of information can feed them. In this blog, I describe why Employee 360 Views are important from various end users’ perspectives, what employee information they need to access, and how a consolidated view of an employee’s information throughout their job life cycle can help achieve those goals. 

Each use case presented in this blog includes:

• A Persona: the end user who has the need to access certain employee information to achieve a specific business goal. This could be an organization’s top executive, a team lead, or an employee.
• A Sample Question: the end user’s goal in the form of a question that describes what the end user wants to achieve. 
• Possible Data Sources: the information systems and data sources that would be necessary to pull information into the Employee 360 View and accomplish the end user’s goal. These may include Recruiting Systems, HR Systems of Record, 360 Feedback and Employee Survey Systems, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems, Project Management Systems, Document Management Systems (DMS), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems.
• Why it is important: the reasons why an Employee 360 View is an innovative and effective approach to achieve the end user’s goal.

Use Case 1: Project Resource Allocation and Projection

Persona: Operations Manager in a Consulting Firm 

Sample Question: Which consultants have the right accounting and project management skills and level of expertise to be assigned to this new project team and ensure success?

Possible Data Sources: Recruiting Systems, HR System, 360 Feedback System, LMS, ERP, Project Management Systems, DMS, CRM. 

An Employee 360 View can pull information about an employee’s current and past experience, their skills and strengths, how their supervisors and peers perceive their job performance, the knowledge areas and skills recently acquired through training, the types of projects and teams that they have managed, their current utilization rate, the expertise they have demonstrated through document authoring and publishing, and the type of clients that they worked with to better determine whether an employee is the right candidate for the new project team.  

Why is this important? Assigning an employee to the right project team can help them influence key project decisions, increasing the likelihood of a successful project. Consequently, this can make them feel that they are making a difference, increasing their morale, job performance, and the performance of their project team. Similarly, a good balance of project experiences can help employees gain new skills throughout their lifecycle at the company, increasing employee’s productivity, employee satisfaction, and helping the employee become more valuable to the company. By focusing on each individual employee project allocation, companies can become better at optimally utilizing all of their employees. As an additional benefit, organizations will be able to project organizational capacity and resource gaps using this combined data and analytics.

Use Case 2: Performance Evaluation and Promotion

Persona: Sales Director

Sample Question: Who from my sales department excelled at their job this year and deserves to be promoted to a manager role?

Possible Data Sources: HR System, 360 Feedback and Employee, ERP, CRM.

An Employee 360 View can help gather information about an employee, such as promotions and awards, feedback provided by their supervisor and colleagues, new leads acquisition, business development goals, sales targets and achievements, and interactions with clients to help determine whether an employee should be promoted to a sales manager role.

Why is this important? Promoting the right employees at the right time can help boost their motivation and morale. Consequently, this can result in high productivity and prevent losing valuable employees. Making an informed promotion decision requires having access to not only the skills and knowledge acquired or to whether the employee has achieved or surpassed their sales targets, but also understanding the highs and lows of their interactions with supervisors, peers, and clients.

Use Case 3: Training and Capacity Building

Persona: Marketing Director

Sample Question: Are there any good training courses that would help John achieve his marketing campaign targets and close more deals for a sustainable business growth?

Possible Data Sources: HR System, 360 Feedback System, LMS, ERP. 

An Employee 360 View can help gather information about an employee, such as what skills and knowledge they have acquired by attending past conferences or training sessions, what strengths they have developed by participating in specific projects, and also what areas for improvements their supervisors and peers see in them that could benefit from new learning activities or a coaching program. 

Why is this important? Providing opportunities for growth and development is key for increasing employee satisfaction and represents a strong motivator for employees, sometimes as much or even more important than a salary increase. Internal and external training programs, mentorship and coaching opportunities, and job swaps are only a few of the activities that employees expect from an organization to learn new skills and help them move up in their career. Businesses with happy employees due to better career growth paths will consequently benefit from increased productivity and more value from their staff. Training employees in new tools and approaches is an effective way to improve the collective capabilities of staff, achieve capacity building, and make a long-term impact in the organization.

Use Case 4: Identifying Employees Who May be at Risk of Leaving

Persona: HR Director

Sample Question: Which employees may be unhappy and could be considering leaving the company?

Possible Data Sources: HR System, LMS, ERP, DMS, CRM.

An Employee 360 View can help gather information about an employee, such as changes in their learning path (less interest in getting training), a decrease in the amount of content they create and share with their peers, lower productivity than before, an increase in the number of projects they manage, low feedback scores, lower quality interactions with their clients, and missed target sales. When isolated, these pieces of information may not mean anything, but when put together can help identify a specific employee who could benefit from some coaching, training, or simply from a discussion to help them make adjustments to their current jobs or tasks. 

Why is this important? It is equally important to invest in hiring good employees as it is to invest in retaining them. Identifying lower performers (that were once higher performers) early enough and taking action can help improve morale, engagement level, and productivity. Consequently, this can help the company retain valuable employees and save on hiring costs. 

Use Case 5: Expert Locator

Persona: Data Specialist in a Large Consulting Firm 

Sample Question: Which other consultants have expertise with designing data integration solutions for federal agencies who can help me answer a question for my current project? 

Possible Data Sources: Recruiting Systems, HR System, LMS, ERP, Project Management Systems, DMS, CRM. 

An Employee 360 View can pull information about other consultants including their current and past experience, their business and technical skills, areas of subject matter expertise, recent trainings, the projects and clients they have worked with, and the documents they have authored and published, so that employees can connect with people in their organization who have the expertise, skills, and knowledge that they are looking for. An Employee 360 View can act as an expert locator solution for organizations.

Why is this important? Having the ability to connect “the people who have the knowledge” with “the people who need the knowledge” at the right time helps avoid reinventing the wheel to solve similar problems and increases efficiency, especially in large organizations that employ hundreds or thousands of people. When staff don’t know who knows what, an enormous amount of time is invested in trying to find the answer or recreating knowledge that already exists within the organization. Employee 360 Views not only help building new project teams projects by finding various expertise needed (as it was mentioned in Use Case 1: Project Resource Allocation and Projection), but also helps employees ask questions to the right people at the right time. 

Conclusion

Whether you are a top executive, a team lead, or an employee, at some point you will need access to consolidated employee information to support key corporate decisions. Employee 360 Views help forecast organizational capacity and resource gaps, support performance evaluation and job promotion decisions, enhance capacity building, identify employees who may be at risk of leaving, and connect subject matter experts within the organization.  

At EK, we can help design and implement an Employee 360 View that meets your organization’s business needs. For more information, contact us.