One of the great things about management theory is that it can give us some fantastic tools and strategies with which to improve our organizations.
Using some of these great tools can give us ways to really understand what’s going on inside the organization, right down to the ground floor. Picking the right tools and processes is paramount – without the right tools, you can’t build a better organization!
360 degree performance appraisals can be a great way of collecting feedback from a wide variety of sources in your organization, in order to get detailed feedback on an individual employee.
It helps to understand more about each employee from the viewpoint not just of management staff, but also from the viewpoint of other employees who work as peers with the assessed employee.
If you’re curious about 360 degree performance appraisals, then this article will teach you what they are, how they work, and the pros and cons of using the 360 degree approach in your organization. Read on to find out more – and remember, you can always use a great platform such as PulseHRM to get plenty of useful tools to help out with your organization!
What is a 360 Degree Performance Appraisal?
A 360 degree performance appraisal takes many viewpoints into consideration – the entire methodology is based upon an assessment of an individual employee by not just managers and supervisors, but a good number of their peers too.
Typically, there will be around 8 to 12 people taking part in this feedback process per individual – a mixture of peers, and those in supervisory roles.
The people giving feedback will be co-workers and supervisors who work with the assessed individual on a regular basis. This is crucial, as of course, it’s not possible to give good feedback on somebody that you don’t have interactions with. Getting the right people to engage in the feedback process is a very important part of the process! It’s essential that these people both know and work reasonably closely with the employee.
The people chosen to provide assessment and feedback are typically chosen as part of a shared process between the organization and the employee who is up for assessment.
These people chosen to give feedback in the 360 degree feedback process will fill out a survey of questions relating to the assessed employee. These will cover a wide range of competencies and workplace issues.
They’ll typically be asked to give a mixture of numerical/letter grade/star ratings on particular areas of the employees duties, tasks, competencies, and other things that might arise in the workplace.
The employee that’s being assessed will also take part in this questionnaire, being asked to assess themselves, and give honest ratings and written evaluations of work-related strengths and weaknesses.
While the people who are taking part in the assessment are of course known to, and in part chosen by the employee, their answers are anonymized. This is another essential element in the whole process.
The ability to give anonymous feedback means that co-workers can feel free to speak honestly. Without anonymized feedback, you’re far less likely to be able to get honest feedback – which would essentially render the whole process pointless.
This feedback is then collated and assessed. It’s typical for a report to be created by supervisory staff at this point, in order to provide both the company and the employee with a solid basis for understanding the feedback, and coming up with a solid development plan for moving forward with.
This report will be shared confidentially with the employee, and discussed in a meeting with their direct supervisor. This enables both the supervisor and employee to discuss and reflect upon the feedback, and come up with a plan for improving on any weaknesses in the work competencies of the employee.
What are the Objectives of Doing 360 Degree Performance Appraisals?
The overall point of 360 degree performance appraisals is to get a snapshot of feedback relating to an individual employee at a specific time. They’re intended to help the company find out the strengths and weaknesses of each individual employee, by collating and acting on honest feedback from people who actively work with and around the assessed employee.
By collecting feedback in this anonymous, peer-focused way, it’s possible for the company to ask questions to and get answers about their employees from the people who work with them most closely. These people are uniquely placed to know how the employee works, and their workplace strengths and weaknesses, better than anybody else.
By getting feedback on an employee from people who work in close proximity to them – whether that’s physical proximity, or as part of the same remote team – the supervising staff are (so the theory behind the 360 degree feedback system) able to get more accurate assessments of the employee.
ANother goal is for the employee to get an accurate assessment of how they perceive their strengths and weaknesses at work, compared to how others perceive them. This can enable an employee to identify areas where they’re doing less well than they think, and areas where they’re exceeding their own assessment of themselves.
Both the employee and their manager can then work together to understand the reports, and to implement plans to help the employee to work on their strengths and weaknesses, with a view to an overall improvement from the employee based on concrete and honest feedback.
Pros of 360 Degree Performance Appraisals
- 360 degree performance appraisals help to provide a much broader perspective on an employee than an appraisal just by a manager or two. By seeking feedback from not just those in supervisory roles, but also with peers of the employee.
You’re able to get feedback on all levels – and those closer to the ground floor than management staff may well know more about the employee than those in more supervisory roles, as they work with them more closely.
- In a broader sense, the 360 degree feedback approach to employee feedback can also help management staff get a better understanding of what’s going on in the group or company as a whole.
This can be especially true when upper management staff are based in different locations – if their only reports on what’s going on in remote locations come directly from management, they could well be missing out on the bigger picture. Local management may not even know some things about what’s going on on the ground floor – but those actually handling the work will.
- Looking at various factors and components in the working routine of an employee can help both the employee and employer to get an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the employee that might be missed out on by some other metrics. For instance, an employee might be completely outstanding in one key area of their work, to the point where this strength outweighs a weakness that they have in another area of their work.
With proper understanding of an employee’s strengths and weaknesses in particular areas of their job, and the correct weighting given to the importance of these areas, it’s possible to use 360 degree feedback assessment to get a much deeper understanding of how an employee works.
- 360 degree assessments help to provide understanding of how an employee is perceived by their peers. This can help identify assets that might not have been recognized by the company without these assessments – such as the ability to work well in a team of people, and the general character of the employee. They can also help identify positive traits such as leadership effectiveness.
- Feedback from the 360 degree approach can help an employee to take more active charge of their career direction. By knowing more about where their core strengths and competencies are, and by learning their perceived weaknesses in the workplace, employees can use the information to help further themselves in their career.
They’ll have great feedback on how others see them, and what others think of their abilities in certain areas. They’ll be able to use this feedback to enhance the areas that let them show their strengths, and to work on the areas in which they appear weakest to their peers and supervisors. This can help them to make better decisions for their career – they’ll be able to grow as employees and individuals.
Cons of 360 degree performance appraisals
- Without a properly thought out implementation process, 360 degree performance appraisals are a waste of time at best. At worst, they can actually be harmful to your organization!
This becomes more and more true if these appraisals are used to make large amounts of changes to the company. No change should be done on a whim, and making changes without a proper understanding of the process that lead to making these reports, and how to properly interpret them, can be very risky for your business.
- If you don’t get enough information – or the right information – then the 360 degree appraisal process breaks down. This means that it’s imperative to ask the right questions at the right time – which can itself be a difficult task.
However, it also means seeking answers in the most useful format.
- Numerical, star, or letter grade ratings might seem like they offer a range of useful ways that those questioned can answer and provide feedback. However, they can well be too wide to be useful. Not everybody will use a five star rating in the same way.
For example. Some may use 5 stars to mean “good job”, others might use it to mean “literally perfect” – and it’s not possible to tell what one 5 star rating means compared to another, if those answers are taken in isolation.
- 360 degree performance appraisals are a tool, and not the whole toolbox. They can provide great information – but it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that they’re the only way to get the whole story, and that they’re all your organization needs to implement and act upon.
- If you don’t make any attempt to connect the 360 degree process (as well as other management and improvement processes) with the overall aims of your organization, then they just won’t be as useful a tool in helping the organization succeed in its aims.
- The 360 degree approach can make it far too easy to focus on perceived negatives and weaknesses of employees. This might seem at first like a great way to squeeze more out of your employees, but it can well have the opposite effect.
If your employees are great at something, you might well be better off encouraging them to be great at that thing, and filling the gaps in with other people who can excel in the missing areas – rather than in trying to fix what isn’t broken, and in doing so risking burning out a valuable employee.
Too much of a focus on weaknesses can lead to strengths being ignored – and in the long run, this can lead to employees feeling undervalued. Their strengths can end up being underused, and they can be made to feel less useful as a result of focusing upon their weaknesses.
- Whether done well or implemented badly, there’s one sure thing about a 360 degree appraisal process – it takes time and money. There’s simply no avoiding the fact that a considerable amount of working hours will have to be spent on this process. Each employee will have to fill out an assessment questionnaire, for each employee that they’re part of an assessment group for.
This could easily be multiple questionnaires for some, or even all employees. These reports then have to be collated and analyzed, and findings presented and discussed with each employee in an individual meeting. The whole process for each employee can easily take a few weeks to a month – and this has to happen for every single employee who will be assessed using the 360 degree performance appraisal process.
- Done poorly, the process can prove to be a real detriment to your organization. It’s possible that the entire process saps morale from your teams and employees. Many employees won’t feel comfortable “telling tales” on other employees, and will be incentivized to provide neutral or positive feedback by default, so that they won’t have to feel as if they’re “stabbing someone in the back”.
Others might well take the feedback process as an excuse to settle scores, and might even outright lie in ways that can’t be proven, and are just attempts to blacken the name of an employee.
What is the 360 degree approach a good and bad fit for?
The 360 degree feedback process is a good fit for some things, but not for every single need that an organization and its management may have. It’s most useful for dealing with perceptions and opinions – and consequently, less useful when dealing with matters of objective fact, such as quotas, targets, attendance records, and so on.
It can be used to get great feedback on how an employee is perceived by those around him, and can give great information on their workplace behaviors, competencies, and skills – such as listening, planning, leadership, and goal-setting – and the overall character of an employee. It can’t, however, really be used to see if employees are meeting basic job requirements, or as a way of measuring performance objectives.
Conclusion
360 degree performance appraisals can be an extremely useful tool when it comes to improving your organization, and helping your employees to develop their strengths and work on their weaknesses. A
lthough it isn’t a magic bullet – and can be costly and time consuming to implement – it can still be a useful way of helping management and supervisory staff to learn more about their organization, and about the individual employees within the organization.
