Use 360 Performance Reviews for Honest Feedback

Your vision is to have open communication with your employees and have them feel comfortable telling you when there are issues. 360-degree performance reviews will help you. This article will go over what a 360 review is, why it's beneficial, the main components, and the few drawbacks to watch out for.

Defining a case for using 360 reviews

The dilemma is you are a manager, and you have heard rumblings of tension between departments. From your perspective, employees are completing their work, and they seem to be working together fine to do just that. When you have conversations with employees, they are always upbeat and positive and it seems that everything is functioning just fine. You know something is going on but you can’t quite put your finger on it. After all, you’re the manager. Wouldn’t your employees tell you if something were wrong? Wouldn’t they just come right out and tell you if they didn’t agree with recent decisions? Or would they? Most often, employees aren’t going to feel comfortable providing direct feedback like that, so what are you to do?

One solution is to start using 360 performance reviews.

Start getting more well-rounded and honest feedback by making this change in how your review your employees.

What is a 360 performance review, you ask?

It is a different approach to the traditional performance reviews of employees where a 360 review utilizes multiple aspects and areas of feedback collected rather than one manager. This method is used for both reviewing your employees and having employees review you as a manager. Have you ever considered having employees involved in your review? Read on to find out why this is beneficial. It’s a proven method whether the business size is small, medium, or large.

So how would a 360 review work?

There are a lot of 360 review software options out there to assist with this process, Lattice and Trakstar being just a couple; however, software isn’t required. A 360 review uses feedback from six to twelve individuals rather than the manager alone, and a scoring system of one to five across various areas is often used to report feedback. In addition to scoring 1 to 5, make sure you allow space so that details can follow the score. If an employee is rated poorly at a 1 for communication, you will need details. The STAR method could be used here where the person providing feedback gives an example and states the situation, the task, the action taken, and the result. I find this to be most useful, as concrete examples are going to assist the employee in growth rather than a feeling or hearsay. The feedback comes from direct reports, peers, and managers, providing an all-around view with multiple perspectives as to how the employee is performing. Most often the feedback is anonymous and the manager may choose to share all or some of it.

What would you need to do to use 360 reviews for the next round of performance reviews?

1. Think about the feedback you need to get and determine the key areas. This could include leadership ability, how willing they are to work with teams, how they communicate, the quality of the work produced, and how conflict is handled as a few examples.

2. Determine who you are going to ask for feedback. Managers, peers and direct reports were mentioned, however, don’t forget vendors and customers as options.

3. Determine if the survey will be anonymous or not and send accordingly. This is where software comes in handy if you want anonymity.

4. Ask that the employee completes the same survey to find where gaps may be.

5. Choose the information you are going to share and have an open conversation. This is a great time to set goals for employees so that they can work towards improvement by the next round of reviews.

Why would you use a 360-degree review?

There are several benefits to diverse inputs that a 360 performance review provides you.

1. Use this method to find the weak areas in your organization where you may need additional training.

2. Awareness of how the team views a team member will assist in that member knowing how their actions and work affect the team leading to accountability and team development.

3. Employees have different relationships with you than they do each other so this method will give you a better overall picture since you as the manager are not going to see all interactions.

4. 360 reviews reduce discrimination and bias in reviews as there are likely strengths that may not be seen when taking the feedback of a single manager.

5. Use 360 reviews to improve yourself as a manager by providing a psychologically safe place for your employees to give you feedback on decisions.

6. If you choose the anonymous route, you are more likely to get honest feedback, as it can be a struggle for some to be upfront in face-to-face conversations. This can be beneficial whether you are reviewing employees or employees are reviewing you.

7. You may find that you have employees that aren’t showing motivation like they once did, and it’s because of an organizational issue that you can correct when the whole time you thought it was them as individuals that had the problem.

8. You may have someone looking for a promotion and you want to get honest input from all areas of the business to assist in goal setting for that person to reach the goal of promotion.

Those are significant benefits, so are there any negatives to using 360 performance reviews?

Just a few things to be mindful of below.

1. Be cautious in choosing the individuals asked for feedback so as to not bias the results towards those who only show frustration with this individual.

2. Be aware that some people may get upset if their feedback doesn’t get acted on.

3. Make the feedback most useful by getting STAR-type feedback to build on making improvements and settings goals. It can be easy to get too general of feedback.

4. Think about the entire year, or period of time in review, don't get stuck on the last two weeks of issues.

Try a 360 review survey for your next round of reviews and comment as to how it went!

Written by Nicole Hullihen, July 31st, 2021

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Recommended references if you are looking to learn more about 360-degree reviews.

https://www.indeed.com/hire/c/info/360-review

https://lattice.com/library/the-pros-and-cons-of-360-reviews

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-relations/pages/360degreeperformance.aspx