360 Feedback Blog

In this poll, reported in the US, 68%  of managers believe that looks have an impact on the way managers rate job perforamance.

If this survey is to be believed, Attractiveness comes only below Experience and Confidence in recruitment situations, and trumps Education and a sense of Humour - apparently known as the ‘Hottie’ effect!  The author advises those of us who are non-Hotties not to despair but to make the best of whatever assets we have…..

On a more serious note though, how can we overcome these biases which appear to be inbuilt in most of us and can make a big difference in how employees’ performance is judged?

The first answer is Awareness: once we’re aware of our biases, our assumptions and things like the Halo and Horns Effect, we can start to adjust our opinions of that person and inject some objectivity into our appraisal of their performance  (for more on Halo/Horns, go to 360 Degree Feedback and download our paper entitled What Not To Do When Giving Great Feedback ).

Second is judging people on what they have actually done, so setting SMART objectives is critical (Specific, Measurable, Action-based, Relevant and Timely).

Third is making sure that your own judgement is not the only one that counts….tools like 360 Degree Feedback are very important in ensuring that a number of different people have input into the appraisal, and that there is consistency in assessing performance, especially in hard to measure areas like management, leadership and team working.

We love this concise business case for measuring and managing performance: in this clip from Radio 4’s The Bottom Line, Jacqueline de Rojas,  UK and Ireland vice-president of software company, McAfee, talks about the importance of ‘Inspecting what you expect’ - setting performance goals and regularly measuring against them.  

360 Degree Feedback, Appraisal and Performance Review are just as important for teams as they are for individual employees.

In this video interview in today’s Guardian, the author of The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb has some very interesting things to say about power, knowledge, beliefs and behaviours. 

From a workplace point of view, we see that people behave differently on their own, within their team, within the organisation, and then collectively, as an organisation, interacting with the outside world.   Collective beliefs and behaviours have a big influence on the individual, so when we’re looking to make individual or organisational change happen, we need to analyse and understand what those collective beliefs and behaviours are, and how they are skewing the behaviours of individuals. 

Maybe if we’d done that with the banking sector a few years ago, we could have avoided some of the consequences of the actions and groupthink that have led to the current economic problems.

360 Degree Feedback

In this article John Herlihey of Google explains the company’s view of the importance of performance reviews and 360 Degree Feedback:

“We measure people every 90 days. We get 360-degree feedback on people every 180 days and that feedback is published to the whole company. People want reality. Ninety per cent of the rewards end up going to 10pc of the people”.

3 monthly reviews and 6 monthly 360 Feedback is certainly tough and takes a lot of effort and commitment from the company the staff. 

Critically, What it does do is keep people really focused on what the key things they need to do, on what they learn and how to put that learning into practice.

Google’s focus on constant review, feedback and action is probably one of the reasons for its success.

This article in today’s Guardian appears to show evidence that people work better in teams.

However, in an article in Harvard Business Review called ‘Why Teams Don’t Work, the authors debunk the myth that teams are the answer to every performance issue, and that teams always perform better than individuals working on their own.  They question the whole idea of ‘team dynamic’ as an absolute, consistently positive force.

Common misconceptions about teams include:

Teams that work harmoniously together are better and more productive than teams that don’t: there is more evidence that teams who are more productive, and are recognised as a team for it,  get on better together because of their good performance, not the other way around.

Teams work better because the work is shared out, and the bigger the team, the more effective: unfortunately this is cancelled out by the difficulty of keeping the right people informed as the team gets bigger, so big teams are not necessarily a good idea.

Teams should be renewed constantly to encourage creativity: again, this is not proven by evidence. In fact the more productive teams were those who had been together for a number of years and understood each other deeply.  Many teams are never given enough time to settle in and learn to work together.

In a research paper called ‘The Romance of Teams’, (Allen and Hecht, 2004), the authors conclude that the reasons people like working in teams are mainly because of the social interaction, because

1. team members feel good being part of a successful team
2. people also feel somewhat ’sheltered’ in a team, and
3. they can blame someone else on the team if something goes wrong!

To ask a question or share ideas about team performance and how you can measure it, go to
http://tracksurveys.co.uk/AskTrack.aspx

 For more information, articles and resources on teams and team performance measurement, contact me on jo.ayoubi@tracksurveys.co.uk
or go to:
www.tracksurveys.co.uk , scroll down and click on Team Performance Dynamics in the right hand panel.