Background:
Companies using 360 degree feedback provide workers with a more accurate sense of
their personal strengths and weaknesses. 360 degree solutions should therefore primarily
focus on the behavioral ‘soft-criteria’ traits of performance on how an employee
conducts his or her job. With the advent of 360 degree survey feedback systems,
employees enjoy an increased sense of control as they not only get reviewed, but
have the ability to review themselves, their manager and peers. Traditionally
speaking, the downward (manager to employee) assessments lagged the sincerity aspect
of the assessment rendering it as a ‘judgment’ call. 360 degree feedback systems
offer a more ‘balanced’ perspective as more input is received from different rater
groups. This reduces a certain degree of tension. For instance, if an employee is
'grid-locked' with his/her manager (creating a bias) the end results, when put into greater perspective,
supplemented by peers and direct reports, will offset any personal misjudgments.
360 Degree Feedback Review & Planning
The following will provide you with some guidelines of how best to plan, implement
and evaluate your 360 degree feedback software system.
Plan Well Beforehand:
360 degree feedback systems are employee intensive ventures.
When deciding whether 360 degree survey reviews is appropriate for your company, be sure
to plan well ahead. Answering the following questions will improve the success factor.
Does the 360 degree feedback process share sr. management support?
Senior Management
must believe in the process and better yet communicate this throughout the organization
so that employees gain trust and are able perceive their efforts as constructive to the overall process.
Does the feedback system enjoy credibility among employees?
Communication is often
an important first step before deploying any feedback management system. Communicating the development, self-help and the pursuit of full potential
is in the interest of the employee as well as the organization.
Conduct 360 degree feedback for the right reasons:
Avoid setting up feedback metrics programs to address bonus pay structures or employee dismissal strategies. The purpose of a 360 degree feedback system is to
stimulate employee development, productivity and performance. Conducting a 360 degree survey for the wrong reasons will
result in employees becoming disenchanted with the entire process and ultimately become weary of opening
up to the organization.
Build
Trust:
Allowing a third party provider to administer the system helps increase the
trust level among employees. Third party vendors provide an unbiased perspective.
For employees to fully embrace the process, expertise and support increases the sense
of openness in the feedback process.
Survey Software and Questionnaire Implementation
Describe one behavior in a question:
Often the case when companies create their own questionnaires, they address two or even three behaviors in one question when it
is possible that the employee can
score higher on one behavior while scoring
lower on another.
Maintain Consistency:
Approaches vary on how to layout a survey. Will
the survey form be job, group, department, company specific or a combination? All have their advantages
and disadvantages. The more specific you get the more difficult it will be to aggregate
results over different departments or company level, risking employees
feeling disavowed with process due to differentiating criteria.
Perhaps one survey form on a company-wide level may be too broad not taking issue
with the specific competencies on different employee and management levels. We often
advise companies to conduct one or two forms and keeping them general enough to
address common behavioral traits shared in your company culture, vision, mission
and work expectations. Especially larger companies should consider retaining
certain oversight with structured consistency.
Benchmark:
When considering any 360 degree feedback software system, consider benchmark functionality.
Any one survey taken in one moment’s time will provide you with 60% insight, while
conducting them annually or even bi-annually will provide you with comparative
analysis of progress or lack of. In the long run this approach will provide much more tangible
benefit. See our 360 degree feedback tool for more information on this.
Positive Question Formulation:
Formulate your question in a positive manner avoiding negative
constructs. As administrator of the metrics program you are setting the tone. It
is never productive to start negative from the outset. Having faith and trust in your organization will render significant participatory results as opposed to starting
out with a low morale survey.
Avoid Survey Overkill:
Keep you 360 degree review forms simple and short. Especially with 360
degree feedback systems which are quite labor intensive, you will want to keep employees
engaged and not give reason to lose interest by the use of overloading
surveys with too many questions. Always ask ‘Is this question relevant to our company
vision, mission, work ethic or work expectation?”
Survey Evaluation & Continuation
Provide Follow-up:
Data collection is one thing, however if you don’t do anything
with it employees will not reap the full-potential. 360 degree feedback reviews
will provide you with a structured basis to illustrate and show employee performance
challenges and performance strengths. Although a self-reflective report may, to a
large extent, be self-helping as employees will want to correct certain deficiencies,
it is up to your development goal strategy to follow through on the continued success
and talent development. It is important to consider providers that show top high
scoring and top low scoring per rater group, as these will provide each employee
with the most urgent areas of focus to be addressed.
Use Common Sense: The best gauge we always go by is to use common sense and give yourself
the time to think through what you want to accomplish. The answers will in most
cases present themselves. If not it is advisable to engage your third party provider
or consultant on how best to go about your deployment strategy.
Other Factors to Consider
When deciding on a survey feedback system, depending on your budget and company
size and growth, consider a system that allows multiple surveys and survey types
running at the same time so that you centralize your data collection instead of
having multiple vendors your employees have to get use to. Search vendors that provide
a host of solutions in an "all in one solution" so that you have a centralized
database of respondents that allow you to simply pool groups to different types
of surveys for re-use instead of a one "fly-by" survey.
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