Exploratory Development

As a human being it’s hard to understand how other people perceive us and our behavior. But having such understanding is a way to get additional information about us, possibility to get a view from “outside”. People can approve or disapprove our behavior and thus give us possibility to react and improve ourselves. Sometimes negative feedback is even more important then positive, but people rarely give negative appraisals being afraid of conflict. 360 degree review is a method to get as positive so negative feedback from different angles.

360 degree review is developed to be used inside a company. It is based on getting opinions about a person from his subordinates, his colleagues and his boss. Results of this review can be used in several ways:

• Evaluate performance of a person
• Evaluate strengths and weakness of a person
• Provide him with feedback

Evaluation of performance or strengths and weaknesses is not the topic of this article. I’ll concentrate on using 360 degree review for providing people with feedback about themselves. Results of such review are a good base for self-development. In addition correctly organized 360 degree review can make corporate culture more open.

How to make it effective

For successful and useful 360 degree review it is important:

• Set clear goals and expectations
• Create open atmosphere
• Secure anonymity
• Ensure that providing feedback doesn’t require too much efforts

Clear goals and expectations

Define clear goals of a review. If the main goal is to provide feedback as a base for improvement then it is a smart move to stress that, and to underline that this review is not to be used for some administrative decisions.

Explain what people can expect from this review and what they can’t.

Open atmosphere

Open atmosphere is a crucial component of successful review. Organizer should explain that this review is to help their colleagues, not to punish. Remind about mutual advantages of being honest – if you share your real thoughts you can expect that next time you will get honest feedback too.

Anonymity

Anonymity is a very important thing for 360 degree review, especially in a company with distrust atmosphere and culture. Without anonymity it is hard to get adequate results, people do not share their real thoughts and opinion.

Little efforts

Procedure of providing feedback should very easy. If a reviewer has to install a lot of special software it’s very likely that he will try to avoid participation.

Questionnaire should not be too big – if it takes much time a reviewer is more likely to answer automatically without giving real thoughts.

Examples of questionnaires

List of statements

This questionnaire consists of list of prepared statements about a person getting feedback. And there is a scale of agreement:

• It is always true
• It is often true
• It is true in a half of the cases
• It is rarely true
• It is never true
• I don’t know

Every reviewer should select how far a statement is applicable to a person being reviewed.

It’s useful to mix questions where “it is always true” is the most positive result with questions where “it is never true” is the most positive result. It helps to keep reviewer alerted and not to provide positive feedback mechanically. Having questions with similar meaning but differently phrased can help to validate the results – if more than 2-3 questions with the same meaning have very different results then questionnaire from this reviewer is likely to be invalid.

Starfish diagram

Starfish diagram looks like:

Starfish-based questionnaire has the following sections:

• Strengths – list of main strengths
• Weaknesses – list of the most critical weaknesses
• Start doing – what person should start doing
• Stop doing – what person should stop doing
• Keep doing – what person should continue doing
• More – areas/actions/habits that person should pay more attention/time to
• Less – areas/actions/habits that person should pay less attention/time to

How to perform 360 degree review

This review can be conducted by a company (e.g. HR manager) or by an employee himself. The latter ensures more openness because people know that results of this review definitely will not impact someone’s career.

A review can be performed using print outs of questionnaire and people have to write down their feedback on the paper. This method is quite easy, but it has serious drawback - it’s hard to ensure anonymity.

Review can be done using some special computer software. But people have to be sure that their anonymity and safety are secured.

And it is possible to perform such review using any text editor and LAN. Create questionnaire in text editor. Create network share on your computer, give permission to browse folder but not file content and permission to create files. Then send questionnaire to all potential reviewers and ask them to upload questionnaire with results to this folder with random name. It ensures security and doesn’t create additional difficulties for reviewers. The same approach can be used with text editor and FTP (but it’s more difficult for reviewers).

List of reviewers should include subordinates, colleagues with the same status and manager(s). It’s nice to be able to group all questionnaires in the same groups – it will help to understand how a person is perceived by each group. But if there are too little subordinates it is better to merge all questionnaires into one to ensure better anonymity and security.

Consequences

360 degree review, if it is used properly, can help people to develop themselves, thus helping a company to make the culture more open and more adaptive. Of course, using such reviews alone will not create open atmosphere, but it will complement other methods of creating adaptive corporate culture, because adaptation without adequate feedback is almost impossible.