Through the looking glass: the benefits of 360 Feedback for your organisation
There’s a saying that goes: the more reflective you are, the more effective you are. So, 360 Feedback is the mirror your team needs to help them do their best work. It’s a feedback process that celebrates strengths, builds self-awareness and encourages more intentional development by giving your people a clearer picture of their impact on others and perception of their own abilities.
As the name suggests, 360 Degree Feedback (also known as multi-rater feedback or multi-source feedback) offers an all-round view of an individual’s performance, strengths and areas for improvement across your company’s competency framework.
Unlike traditional (top down) performance appraisals that solely rely on supervisors’ perspectives, 360 Feedback provides a more holistic assessment of someone’s contribution. Because it gathers perceptions of someone at work from the different people we work with (like our customers, teammates and direct reports), it gives a well-rounded, less biased, understanding of what they think they’re doing versus what they’re actually doing from a variety of perspectives.
While 360 Feedback is most often considered beneficial for those in leadership roles, it can be used for individuals and teams at all levels of an organisation. In fact, it’s a great way for teams to get group insights that help them understand collective strengths as well as put plans in place to plug any gaps.
Create a culture of constructive dialogue:
The feedback provided is aggregated and responses remain confidential. This means it’s an opportunity to provide honest, candid feedback, without any awkwardness at the watercooler later. With both qualitative and quantitative inputs, this feedback kick-starts constructive conversations about what’s working well, and where there are opportunities for growth. It supports a culture where people are empowered to self-evaluate, own their own growth, ask for help and be open to giving and receiving supportive feedback. Because it’s about how often different groups see different behaviours, its tangible and practical so you can understand what to show more of, and how to focus in on different groups.
Enable more targeted growth initiatives:
Self-aware individuals ultimately create better performing, collaborative teams. 360 Feedback fosters self-reflection, helping an individual learn new things about themselves, but also how the way they act or communicate impacts on others. As leaders discover their own strengths, they also understand how they can encourage and get the best out of others.
Embrace constructive critique:
Some people may feel vulnerable or exposed by the feedback process, but it’s important to frame feedback as a gift. While feedback can sometimes seem confronting, it can equally be validating. Often we can’t see just how powerful our attributes or actions are until someone points out their impact to us!
360 Feedback is best used to supplement, not replace, regular performance appraisals, adding additional insights for a more holistic evaluation that considers soft skills, general performance, hard skills, leadership skills and values. It also shouldn’t replace other positive feedback channels; regular shout-outs and praise still have their place!
It should be used with good development intentions in mind - not for a restructure opportunity, punishment or to circumnavigate conflicts. Anonymity is helpful for getting that no-filter feedback, but on the other hand, it’s important to keep in mind that reviewers are contributing their perception (which could come with a serving of hyperbole).
Start with an objective of what a review programme means to your organisation, and ensure this is communicated to stakeholders. To get the most beneficial feedback, you need buy-in from contributors; you may need to walk your people through some guidelines for giving good feedback, as well as support them in being receptive to their own reviews. The questions within your feedback survey should be tailored to what ‘good’ looks like for your company (if you don’t already have a competency framework, we can help you create one). For example, your measures of success may consider things like leadership care, leadership impact or cultural competence.
Of course, data is only as good as your ability to put it to use. This process is designed to help you find the right support for your people, so it may mean committing to professional development initiatives in line with feedback, and establishing a process to follow up on progress. A benefit of having external support (like us) help you manage this process is that it adds a layer of confidentiality and objectivity. It enables your people to talk to someone independent about their goals, and for us to provide specialised insight around a development plan that would support them.
If you’re an organisation kicking off a new performance year, now is a great time to establish intentional goals and plans for your team. The right guidance can help you get the best out of a feedback process; we can create intentional surveys, help you gather and manage feedback data, and then support you in implementing the right people systems for your business. Get in touch to chat more.
A note about our process:
Contact us to discuss what you'd like to achieve from a 360 process, we'll then create a custom built 360-survey to measure the areas important to your business.
We work with you to draft a communications plan for all involved in the process.
Participants work with their manager to select individuals who they'd like to evaluate them.
Surveys are distributed, they typically take around 15 minutes to completely (depending on length), including questions for raters to evaluate how often they see certain behaviours being demonstrated, then an option to add some free text typically along the lines what should they stop, start and continue doing.
Participants also complete a self-evaluation so that they can see their self-perception compared to the experiences of different evaluator groups.
Reporting and results are debriefed by one of our consulting team. This is a future focused session where participants are encouraged to select a couple of strength areas that they could further leverage and a couple of development areas that are likely to have the most impact to focus on. Managers are welcomed to join the second part of this session.
Results are incorporated into broader development planning.
Group insights are provided for groups of 10 or more participants to understand wider trends.