Toàn quốc: Eight Arguments Why You Should Not Forget About 360-degree Assessment Processes

It’s alright, even good practise, to ask colleagues what they think when choosing 360-Degree assessment processes. This is singularly true the more tough or urgent the decision you need to make and its effect on your organisation.

Peer evaluations in 360 degree feedbackrefer to situations in which rater and ratee are from the same organizational level. Peer evaluations have been found to be valid and reliable. However, this does not mean that they are free from biases. It’s a rare occasion when managers and HR leaders will need to gather 360 feedback from the entire workforce. Any given employee only works with a finite number of colleagues in their given team and department, so company-wide feedback will result in a lot of irrelevant data and create an unnecessary workload. The key thing to do with negative data in a 360 degree feedbacksession is to make sure the participants keep the doors open and their mind open to what it might mean. Usually the truly upsetting conclusions are only answered in proper dialogue in real life, not looking at a personal 360 degree feedbackreport. Your colleagues may have areas of skills and expertise you're not aware of, and can provide really useful suggestions for your own professional development that are as important as a direct manager's plan. Without the right training or understanding of the purpose behind 360 surveys, these reviews can backfire and actually have a negative effect on employee productivity and workplace culture. If you are one of the recipients in a 360 review, you will be getting feedback from your peers and managers. In principle, this is the time for you to figure out the opportunities to grow. In reality, what you are likely to face is an avalanche of comments and opinions based on various observation and interpretation. In the best scenario, converging positive feedback comes from all sources. However, there often is a large variety of comments and sometimes contradictions.



New data can give you a fresh perspective, as you may be viewing the organisation using new distinctions or models. A fresh perspective can lead to a whole new way of thinking. Emotional control and professionalism kick in duing feedback sessions and 360 degree participants try to hide their emotions. Being upset at work is not really considered OK. So you have to look and listen and feel really carefully. This is your “deep listening” – listening beyond the words they are saying. Listen to how they are talking, listen to the subtlety in the wording they use, listen for the sense in their talking. When an employee knows they are getting 360 degree feedbackfrom multiple sources, and don’t see the process as biased, they are more likely to take the learnings of the feedback process and implement them in their working life. The multiple perspectives of 360 degree feedbackare important, as the immediate boss may be assumed to be pleased with the high-potential person's past performance or that person would not have received such a designation in the first place. The person may already know what the boss thinks. But it is possible for a young manager who has received glowing reviews from a boss to be shocked to find that subordinates think she is a bully and peers consider her to be uncooperative and overly ambitious. The specificity/anonymity conundrum takes another turn when the idea of 360 degree feedback is involved.

It Is Acceptable And Valuable To Ask For Feedback
It is tempting to think that you can use the summary charts to interpret a 360 degree feedbackreport – in fact sometimes that is all you have. This can look like it is painting a very clear picture of how good the data is overall and how it varies across the model – the weakest and the strongest competency. However, the validity of such interpretation is totally dependent on the quality and integrity of the 360 degree feedbackinstrument. What can you do if you cannot change people? You can be an agent of change in so many ways and can really make a profound impact on any organisation should there be certain conditions in place. The HR role is a unique one – it is often not clear what your accountability is or whether you are adding value, and if you said to an ordinary line manager that you were there to facilitate them changing you would not necessarily be welcomed or indeed get thanked. When you collect 360 feedback from team members, you need to make sure that the questions are all standardized. Even a slight change of the wording in a question can mean a completely different response. While this may offer you more information, it does make it harder to compare answers. A survey has a standard set of questions that mean it is only the interpretation of the respondent and not your way of asking that can affect the outcome. When 360 degree feedbackis implemented in the context of performance appraisal the questions will be of a more practical and transactional nature. In this case the questions could look at input, output, method and integration. 360 degree feedbackoffers obvious benefits, yet only a few organizations use this process for appraisal and pay. Among the reasons that this method is not widely used is that most users substantially underestimate the work involved in designing a 360 degree feedbackproject. Another is the lack of a good road map that charts a path around the predictable obstacles. Looking into 360 appraisal can be a time consuming process.

Doing a 360 degree feedbackcan be a bit like going to the dentist. You know it can be really great, you know overall it is going to be “good for you” and you know that it may be quite painless. On the other hand you also know it could be pretty painful, if not totally traumatic. But either way, given a choice, you would prefer to go to a good dentist. The dentist does not change the starting point state of your teeth and gums but they are likely to make a big difference to the experience and potentially also the end result. Gathering feedback on your company’s 360-degree feedback process is crucial, especially if the organization lacks experience with this process. Such feedback will help managers and HR leaders to refine the questions included in the process and ensure participation in the process is optimal. It is easy to have broadly defined dimensions in your 360 degree feedback, eg “Leadership” or “One Team”. They sound great and can give clear messages about what is important but if they are too broad they will not work in a 360 degree feedback. If they are broad they will need a large number of questions to properly cover them. People differ in terms of their needs. You can check out your own needs in relation to the SCARF model online. If you are delivering data to an individual, see if you can guess their needs – if you cannot, then assume they have them all and ensure you manage them all carefully. The key to satisfying all the conditions – and the SCARF needs too – is privacy. If you can be sure people have privacy when they get and look at their data then most aspects are taken care of. Managers and employees want pay and promotion decisions to be fair. Research across large sets of employee groups indicate that users perceive 360 degree feedbackto be more fair than single-rate processes. When these decisions occur in a culture where rewards are based on performance or contribution rather than on seniority or politics, they will be fair. Keeping up with the latest developments regarding 360 degree feedback system is a pre-cursor to Increased employee motivation and building the link between performance and rewards.

Mapping The Impact Of 360-Degree Feedback
Over the years, organizations and management experts have experimented with using the 360 degree feedbackprocess as method for assessing performance. The challenge is that performance reviews attempt to measure a concept that is far different from what is measured when using a standard 360 degree Assessment. Some organizations use 360-degree feedback as a strategy to communicate to employees that a new skill set will be needed for an anticipated organizational or culture change in work methods, work content, work flow, or work demand. Just as 360-degree feedback may be used to communicate a key skill set, organizational strategy, or a business need, so may the monitoring of change using 360-degree feedback maintain the focus of the organization's members on where they stand relative to those goals, and on the very fact that the organization is making these changes. Most 360 degree feedbackdata is designed to be easily read and digested by untrained readers. The statistics are not that complicated, the figures not too tricky looking and the graphs are straightforward. This can lull you and all others involved into thinking it is easy to interpret. On completion of the 360 degree Feedback, a detailed report is presented to the recipients to help understand their strengths and weaknesses and build a development plan. The individual responses are, of course, kept confidential. They’re presented together along with others from the same respondent category(e.g. peers, subordinates, etc.) to preserve anonymity. A benefit of 360 feedback for small businesses is that it provides more insight into personal strengths and weaknesses than would be possible for a manager who only interacts with one employee at a time. 360 degree feedback can give a manager the information he needs in order to take leadership on issues and make regular morning meetups into targeted coaching sessions. Nonetheless, a keen understanding of 360 feedback software can be seen to be a multifaceted challenge in any workplace.

Highest ratings in 360 degree feedbackreview tell a great story of what most reviewers are rating highest. This will indicate the key characteristics that are strongly coming across in their current role – their brand if you like. However, the fact they are high does not mean they are OK. You might be rated high on areas of “Engages others in goals”, “Inspires a positive attitude to work” and “Dynamic and driven”, but this energetic inspiration could actually be a bit of a problem for some people, depending on what others need from you. In spite of the background noise about individuals taking charge of their own careers and their own development, most major organizations still believe it is important to do succession planning-to identify and prepare individuals who will be ready to lead the business at some future time. Core to most succession-planning programs is the identification and development of high-potential employees who will provide continuity and bench strength to the organization. Organizations then take an active role in designing programs of feedback and development for these strategically important employees. Any one rating in a 360 degree review might be changed if the reviewer completes the survey at a different time. This is a well-documented phenomenon which has led the world of psychometrics to work to standards of reliability for their instruments. There is an acceptable level of reliability of 0.6/0.7 which implies that the best you can aim for is that 60–70% of the results will be the same the second time you complete it compared with the first time, ie it will be mostly the same. The best practice for 360 feedback is to always give one positive for every negative. No-one can be a horrendous employee, otherwise you probably would have let them go a long time ago. So peers might think that they are arrogant or unfriendly but customers always like the level of customer service they get. These should be combined in their presentation. An initial, small 360 degree feedbackproject can be delegated to a clerical person to administer; however, without efficient application software, coordinating the process quickly becomes far too difficult. Many organizations initially used people instead of technology before they migrated to automated technology solutions. Others terminated their projects because the process, without adequate automated technology, required far too much administrative time. Making sense of what is 360 degree feedback eventually allows for personal and organisational performance development.

The Purpose Of 360-degree Feedback
When a competency model has been developed, it can be translated for a number of applications and rolled out across the full range of HR processes so that it serves to integrate all the relevant conversations and decisions. This way it sets the behavioural language and represents the future culture, and 360 degree feedbackcan be a useful and visible tool in this bag of tricks. Survey development, also called instrument development, is often the most difficult and lengthiest task of the 360 degree feedbackproject because of the importance in achieving content validity and user support. One excellent way to select the competencies for the survey is to organize a focus groupa cross-functional group of employees from various organizational levels who will use the 360 degree feedbacksystem. Developmental 360 degree feedbackcan sustain organization culture change as well. For example, Eastman Kodak created behavior feedback exclusively around creativity to recognize and reinforce individuals who most contribute to innovation in the organization. Westinghouse and Borden created a developmental behavior feedback process that focuses on safety behaviors. Culture change initiatives regarding diversity or continuous learning can be reinforced and rewarded by creating a feedback survey that recognizes and rewards those who most exemplify the behaviors associated with the new culture. One can unearth additional intel regarding 360-Degree assessment processes at this NHS entry.

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