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New to 360 Feedback
What is it?
360 feedback is a process which evaluates employee performance by getting feedback from an employee's co-workers, managers, direct reports and internal and external customers. It also allows individuals to assess themselves. That's why it's called 360 - it looks at how a person is perceived by those all around them.
Most 360 feedback processes are anonymous - you get feedback from your co-workers but you don't know exactly who has said what. The results are primarily used as a starting point for development activity.
The main purpose is to help an individual to understand how other people perceive them and as such is often quite a reflective process for the individuals concerned. In this sense it acts as a 'mirror' to help you see the things you do well and not so well.
What's so good about it?
Because it involves multiple people (it's sometimes called 'multi-rater' feedback) it's much less subjective than a traditional one-on-one feedback process. By collecting multiple inputs the whole process becomes more objective and statistically errors are reduced considerably. Getting feedback from a number of different directions is also more reliable and accurate than simply relying on one viewpoint. Employees find the results more compelling than traditional feedback based on a single supervisor or manager's perspective.
Done well 360 feedback can be a very powerful development tool. If you haven't tried it you should definitely give it a go. Our guided tour shows you how easy it is to set-up, and you can test it on a small number of employees initially. You also don't have to have a full 360 approach - some people prefer to use 180 feedback which involves getting feedback from above and below, but not sideways.
I like the sound of it, but will people be honest?
We have developed and deployed 360 feedback approaches in many different ways over the last 15 years of organisational design, change and management development programmes. In our experience if the feedback process is managed well, particularly with regard to the expectations created for both individuals and raters then yes people are very honest. In fact often if the organisation has not used a process like this before it is considered quite refreshing for people to be able to appraise their colleagues in a managed and formal manner.
In essence, the process gives them the ability to highlight issues that have previously been kept hidden because the environment in which to air those issues was inappropriate. In practice 360 feedback can be used as a powerful tool to help you change your organisation for the better.
What's the catch?
Complexity is an issue - because it can involve a lot of administrative work in collecting and collating results from many people. For example a 360 feedback exercise on a team of 20 could result in over a 100 separate questionnaires! Putting the whole process online effectively solves this administrative nightmare and makes 360 much simpler and quicker to deploy.
It still involves a lot of effort on the part of individuals - one individual may have to rate 5 others at a time - and often very little help is given to raters on giving feedback. Our approach tries to provide as much help to raters as possible and fosters a deeper understanding of the competencies used in the appraisal process. If raters don't really understand the competencies and see how they relate to their work environment the results will be at best inaccurate and at worst useless.
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