360 Feedback Blog

In this interesting blog, the author asks some fundamental questions about the soundness of 360 Degree Feedback, whether people are honest when giving 360 Feedback, and how to deal with potential manipulation of the results by mutual back-scratching.

Here’s my response:

These are great questions, and ones our clients often ask us. 

As a starting point, your questions assume that 360 Degree Feedback:
- is given face to face
- consists of unstructured comments
made by colleages
- shows who has made what comments
- and that there is no guidance or control over the process.

However, key attributes of successful and properly run 360 Degree Feedback are:

- It is completed in confidence,securely and online by the person giving the feedback. The individual also self assesses and gets to compare this with feedback received
- The person receiving the feedback is scored on a set of consistent criteria - the scores are collated to give a picture of their areas of strength and weaknesses, not to show scores from individual colleagues
- Comments can also be included, but these are anonymous (although they
can be identified if they relate to a specific situtation)
- Is carefully communicated and managed, not left up to people to use (or misuse) in an unstructured way.

So in answer to your questions, and assuming that your 360 is set up and managed
correctly, as I’ve outlined:

1. Yes, the scores should be an honest reflection because they cannot be traced back to the feedback-giver.

2. The subordinate will not be the only person giving their boss feedback, and the
feedback will be grouped with that of other people, so their generosity (or lack of it)will not be identified!

3. By obtaining feedback from all levels (not just friends, but also senior colleagues, team workers and the people who report to you - hence 360 Degrees), the manipulation of the system in the way you have described cannot work. 
And if it does get past  the monitoring system, a feedbackreport that only includes friends’ feedback would be instantly recognisable as invalid and could not be used for any purpose. (In any event 360 should never be used as the sole contributor to the annual salary review).

4. As an HR manager you should be in the forefront of using feedback to improve your performance and get better at your job.  Again, if you only receive low scores from one client, and the rest are high, there may be a relatoinship issue with that client (rather
than a performance issue) which you need to address. Thus the 360 can pick up other issues that need to be dealt with.

5. Other methods include: face to face feedback on a day to day basis
(’how am I doing?’ ‘what can I do better?’), clear, goals and targets, scorecards,
team meetings…

For documents on giving great feedback, things to avoid when giving feedback, and helpingpeople through difficult feedback, go to
www.tracksurveys.co.uk and download.