HR Feedback 360 Employee Survey
Demystifying the practicalities of conducting management 360 appraisals.
When I was first asked to conduct some 360 appraisals for a commercial client, I had little idea what 360 surveys actually were. So like many, I Googled a few phrases and then looked to solution providers. For what appeared essentially very straight-forward, there seemed to be a fair amount of mysticism (and not to mention cost!) of actually doing it.
So what is a 360 Assessment?
Essentially, all this is a picture of someone’s performance based on a view of themselves, and many of the key people they interact with. By combining these views, you receive a fuller ’360′ picture of that person’s performance. This picture is built up of their own view of their performance, people who manage that person, people who report to that person, and any peers who work alongside that person. This picture could also include other people like patients or even suppliers. For the purpose of simplicity of this article, we will just consider other members of staff who interact with a particular manager.
Why do it?
Good management performance is a key driver of effective organisations. Poor management performance is the most common reason for major problems within the workforce. This includes poor productivity, staff absenteism, poor profits and high staff turnover. Google ‘impact of poor management’ to discover a wealth of background information. So although people can see and feel the impact on a day to day basis, to reinforce areas of good performance or identify areas of improvement, some basic metrics are needed. This is where the 360 comes in: it gives you a clear picture of how management is performing.
What do you need to start?
There are only 3 requirements:
1. A set of questions that are a good indicator of performance.
2. A set of people who will give you some answers.
3. Some tools to gather and present the data.
1 Questions
This is often the most time consuming part: agreeing on what you need to ask in the first place. In my experience, most of the questions you need to ask have already been used in other 360s conducted. In Healthcare for example, a good starting point is the Royal College of Physicians “Colleague multi-source feedback questionnaire” (will open in a new window).
We will use this as a template to demonstrate the steps needed.
2 People
360s contain two types of people. People who are being assessed and people who are doing the assessing. For self completions, these are the same person.
For the sake of demonstration, I have created a simple imaginary ‘practice’ where two doctors Dr H Corbett and Dr T Smith are receiving a 360 appraisal. Please note it does not reflect any particular organisational structure, just to illustrate a point. Here’s how it might look. This is pretty much a common structure in any organisation, so feel free to replace with CEO, MD, departmental managers etc.
So you can see there are 6 people in the organisation. Only the 2 people receive a full 360. Sue manages the two doctors. The two doctors are peers of one another. Jo, Sam and Dave all report to the appropriate doctor. So when it comes to getting data from the people, here’s a full list of the completions required.
Who to complete
To complete on
Relation
DR H Corbett Dr H Corbett self
DR H Corbett Dr T Smith peer
Dr T Smith Dr T Smith self
Dr T Smith Dr H Corbett peer
Sue Towsend Dr H Corbett manage
Sue Towsend Dr T Smith manage
Jo Whiley Dr H Corbett reports
Sam Black Dr H Corbett reports
Dave Brown Dr T Smith reports
Total completions required=9
So you can see, in order to conduct a full 360, 9 surveys require completion.
3. Tools to Collect and Present the Data
If you Google ’360 appraisal software’ you will discover many excellent vendors. However, when I looked into many in order to use for a client piece of work, I discovered how bewildering and costly many of them were. Given that data collection, or surveying, is actually a simple process, I wrote our own rapid360.co.uk system to simplify it. As easy as it would be to plug our own system, I would highly recommend people to research all the products before making any decision who to use.
The key elements you require are:
A way of presenting the 360 survey to the right members of staff.
A way of collecting the responses into an appropriate database.
A way to track who has completed, including the generation of reminders.
A way of viewing the results that are appropriate to your needs.
What a survey may look like.
Using the Royal College of Physicians as a template, and the above staff configuration for the demonstration, I have plugged this data into rapid360 to create the following survey. One of the concerns people have is anonymity. Although people’s names are required by rapid360, this is only for tracking purposes and names are not used in the reports.
Reporting
Most 360 appraisal software comes with a suite of reporting tools and administrative functions. Essentially these are to support the appraisal process (e.g. track responses and generate reminders) and produce 360 reports. It is usually client requirements that determine how a particular report looks, but the contents fall into two types:
Displaying the values of the tickbox questions, broken down into average, self, manage, peer and reports.
Verbatim comments and any textual analysis.
So the tickboxes clearly display the results, and the verbatim comments explain why those results were given. One particularly useful function of these graphs is to highlight the descrepency between how staff see themselves compared to how other staff see them. Comments are particularly helpful as it highlights specific positive behaviours and specific areas for improvement. Where there is a difference in perception about a particular manager’s performance, the text often explains why.
Here are some dummy examples:
Here the manager feels they are weak in a particular area, a view shared by their peers. However, people who manage this manager and people who report to them, both score them highly. What is interesting here is it demonstrates that this particular manager may not have relished the idea of the 360, yet the results would be encouraging to highlight how they are performing better then they think!
If this question was on empathy and respect, it clearly displays a member who does so well with higher managers, yet people below them do not receive such grace. It may be characteristic of an ‘upwardly looking’ member of staff.
In either of these two examples, a quick look at the comments will yield a good explanation.
Some Questions
This article was designed to be a brief introduction to 360 surveying within healthcare. Usually when we are approached, the most common questions are, how long and how much?
The first one is quite easy if we use rapid360 as an example. A survey like the one included in this article takes a couple of hours to set up, which includes all the configuration and reporting. Generally, you will see results within a few hours of the surveys going live and the process is complete usually between 2 days and a week. This depends on the responsiveness of staff and the amount you want to remind them to complete the survey.
Cost is not quite so easy to establish as it depends on particular requirements and how much you need help. However, rapid360 is a fixed cost for a particular project once we have established the requirements the cost remains fixed. Each vendor may have a different pricing model, an alternative is setup cost + per response.
One more question frequently asked is response rates. Rapid360 usually delivers a 40% response rate within 48 hours, and 90%+ within two weeks. For the sake of most projects, an 8 week project window is usually sufficient. The largest delay is not in the system provision/operation, but usually in agreeing the questions to be asked.
Summary
360 surveying in healthcare will provide an excellent way of understanding management performance in the any organisations. Importantly, effective systems will also provide a rapid way of improving performance. The major stumbling block rarely is a system itself, but rather the culture which may not desire to find out the answers.