How to Do Great 360 Degree Feedback with Assess TEAM
As organizations become more matrix structured, and organizational and project success becomes more dependent on complex team collaborations, the traditional one-to-one performance appraisal format is becoming increasingly dated. An individual’s contribution to the business can no longer just be accurately assessed by one person, the line manager. For a meaningful assessment of an employees performance the line manager must incorporate feedback from the employee’s key co-workers, and internal/external customers to get a more holistic view of the employee’s performance.
This is called 360 degree feedback, and is currently used by about 85% of big business as part of their leadership development process, and is now increasingly being deployed in smaller and medium sized business too, thanks to the availability of inexpensive, 360-degree feedback-enabled, performance management software, such as AssessTEAM. Below, you’ll see our our how-to guide on doing 360 degree feedback in your organization
Eradicate blame and create a learning culture
Before you start implementing 360 degree feedback, get the culture right. If you have a blame culture in your business 360 degree feedback will exacerbate the situation, leading to blame flying in all directions and staff running for cover. 360 degree feedback should be viewed as part of a developmental process during which weaknesses are uncovered, not to vilify, but to calmly identify areas for personal development. The overall aim of 360 degree feedback is to help individuals to become more self aware of their strengths and weaknesses and to provide them with a personal development road-map they can use to reach their maximum potential. It’s about learning.
Choose the right tool.
360 degree feedback processes can be labour-intensive since you have to gather, collate and review so much feedback. That’s why it’s vital that you use a tool like AssessTeam, which is a cloud-based performance management tool that allows multiple raters/assessors and which is highly automated, taking all the pain and most of the labour out the 360 degree feedback process.
How you can do 360 degree feedback with AssessTEAM
Once you have signed up with AssessTEAM, get in and start assembling your team of evaluators and evaluees, quickly, by importing staff data in directly from a spreadsheet
You’ll need to do some upfront configuration of AssessTeam, (but that’s the same with any good tool), to enable the system to automate the feedback process for you. The three mains task you’ll need to do are:
1.Choose from a list of over 900 key performance indicators, (known as job result areas), ensuring you have enough to cover all the competency areas in your business.
2.If you want to do financial analysis of performance you’ll want to create projects and associated project teams. As long as you then set projected hours and link the system to time sheets, so you can establish actuals, you also be able to use AssessTeam to assess specific team performance against budget. This is a great bonus feature of AssessTeam as not many other performance appraisal tools allow this level of commercial performance analysis.
3.Set up your evaluations. AssessTeam allows you to set-up and administer multiple evaluations, quickly and easily and with little effort. For example, if you want to evaluate your software testers, you just select the ‘job-title’, ‘software tester’, then select the ‘evaluators’ (for 360 degree feedback), and you then can select the ‘result areas’ that you want the ‘evaluators’ to rate them on.
If you have configured AssessTeam correctly in the earlier steps not only will it automatically assign the evaluators for you, (saving lots of time and effort), it will automatically assign the KPIs that you want your staff evaluated against.
As soon as you input the ‘evaluation period’ in question, indicate the ‘frequency’ of evaluations, (which can be ‘weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly’), and indicated a ‘trigger date’, sit back and let the magic happen…
Automated 360 Degree Feedback Magic With AssessTeam
Having properly configured your 360 degree evaluation in AssessTeam, the system will send out notifications to all evaluators at the designated intervals, chasing them until they have completed their evaluations. Thanks to it labour-saving tools and automation functionality, AssessTeam turns an unwieldy 360 feedback process into an effortless management process, truly allowing organizations to deploy 360 degree organizations across their organization with minimal management overhead.
If you want effortless and effective 360 degree appraisals, try out AssessTeam today.
