After the furore regarding the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand Radio 2 incident, we wondered if there was ever a place for censorship within 360 Degree Feedback?

Should comments be relayed verbatim in the report to the recipient?

Or should HR (or some other mediator) be allowed to edit or censor the comments before they are published?

We would love to get a discussion going, so please do feel free to comment (without censorship of course!).

It has been very noticeable as we have entered a recession that there has been a change of language from 'developing' and 'investing' toward 'cost reduction' and 'saving'. 

It affects Bowland Solutions in how we present ourselves on our website, in our marketing materials and in a lot of our presentations.  Often we have to capture interest in a split second and so we have to capture the current mood but I do believe that the phrases are not mutually exclusive and we need to take care.

One of the great benefits of putting 360 degree appraisal or performance review on-line is that it reduces an administrative burden.  The assumption being of course that you were going to enter the exercise anyway.  The annual performance review is pretty much set in stone for most organisations, and so the cost-saving angle is obvious.  360 feedback is less set in stone.  My argument is that through a sensible investment in a cost-effective solution a good return on investment is achievable.

Let's look at 360 feedback.  Costs are going to range from £10 per respondent to £125 per respondent depending on scale.  Even allowing for some set-up costs it is hard to believe that a manager with heightened self-awareness and understanding of the impact of their behaviours will not improve their output by this scale of investment.  There is a strong business case for developing managers through these tools.

During tight financial times it is essential that we use cost-effective measures and tools to support people in their development.  Not getting feedback when times are tough is not something most managers would welcome and we need to ensure we make a strong business case for their development.


Brendan

We recently conducted a number of face-to-face 360 feedback debriefs and was mindful of the growing interest in 'Applied Positive Psychology' and how it promotes a different way of thinking about ourselves and others in the workplace.

In essence, it is concerned with the strengths a person displays and how they can be best deployed within their role, and potentially capitalised on beyond their current position.

The feedback people receive is always full of strengths and these can often be forgotten as the 'development areas' are sought out, with an overwhelming desire to 'fix things'.

It is important to dwell on the strengths, understand them, explore them, celebrate them and consider how they can best put to use.

We will often add these strengths into any personal development plan and encourage the recipient to consider actions which will bring these to the fore as well as address any developmental needs.

For whatever reason we have a number of our clients all coming to the end of a 360 degree appraisal process at the same time.  We are therefore looking at completion rates, deciding on what makes a quorum, deciding how hard to chase respondents all at the same time.  I happened yesterday to be reviewing our website copy with John and one of the phrases we were looking at was "improved completion rates".

What is a good completion rate?  The answer is simple but not always helpful!  You need enough feedback to give the recipient a rounded set of responses.  I believe the minimum you need is 7 responses.  1 manager, 1 self, and 5 from others.  So - if you have asked for 8 people to respond then you need to get near the 90% mark.  As I mentioned in a previous post, we are seeing increasing numbers of respondents and so 75% may be fine.  These numbers answer "what is enough" - they do not answer "what is great".

Our clients regularly hit 95% completion rates.  I believe this has great benefits to the process.  It indicates value, it suggests the correct people have been selected and those respondents value the feedback they are giving.  It demonstrates commitment and sets the standard for another year.  Last year, a client achieved 97% completion for 1,200 360 degree appraisal recipients.  That's over 10,000 appraisal forms completed.  It is the second year they've hit those sort of numbers.

As well as Bowland Solutions ensuring that we provide a very easy-to-use system, I believe the high completion rate is because the 360 feedback is used as part of an overall HR process which is valued by all concerned.  And, in particular, it leads to a set of training outcomes that are rigorously followed up on.

Brendan

360 degree feedback can be very personal - often our clients are very concerned with anonymity and security of access.  That can make sense - feedback feels something that should be confidential.

What also makes sense is that we need to share the 360 feedback with someone if we want to learn from it, debate it, and get context for it.

Often the feedback is shared with the manager - organisations often enforce this.  We regularly see clients that are looking for an external person (either from outside of the organisation or outside of the line) to debrief the feedback.

Strong managers will share their feedback with their team.  An open approach to reviewing the report encourages the team to see the manager as capable of taking feedback and discussing it positively and constructively.

Paper reports are excellent for this (as a person with a foot in the IT camp I am forever amazed by what paper can do!).  The standard IT way of handling portability is to use a PDF format and we recently enhanced our 360 degree appraisal software to allow the reports to be produced and saved in PDF formats.  Our recipients can now email their feedback to others and be confident in how the report will be presented to them.  As ever, we didn't do this because we could, we did it because sharing 360 feedback is a positive, useful exercise and our software should support it.

Brendan

There are many articles around at the moment referring to the fact that it is traditionally this time of year when many organisations conduct their annual performance reviews - a process which can leave many managers and employees feeling that it is all a 'tick box' exercise that must be endured.

This recent article in the Wall Street Journal cites a company conducting reviews once a week; now whilst this might be too much for many companies, it does highlight a very different approach to annual appraisals, and one that we are being increasingly asked to accomodate with our online performance appraisal systems.

Aside to having the annual review forms and Personal Development Plans (PDPs) within the system, there is a growing desire to have open performance journals or logs which can capture ongoing activity and performance issues.

This can be used for interim reviews, continual assessment or simply to help act as an 'aide memoir' for an individual when they come to complete their self-evaluation.

Whatever the purpose, it no doubt put performance at the forefront of an employee's mind but also serves to improve the dialogue between line managers and their team members, having meaningful conversations more often then just with the once-a-year ritual so often followed.

An Indiana based client of ours has asked us to put in place a survey following the 360 degree appraisal process with them that gains feedback from participants in how things have gone.

Bowland Solutions always recommend that this task is completed but it has taken a client of ours to actually get us to make it a part of the appraisal software. 

The inclusion of a simple questionnaire at the end of the process offers you the opportunity to review procedure, questions, and the value people found in both giving and receiving the feedback.

Not for the first time, we will be improving our software based on a client's idea!


Brendan

I wrote a post yesterday on 360 degree feedback for very large teams.  I was discussing a law firm client today with a colleague and it struck me that law firms are a perfect example of this phenomenon.  Often working in virtual teams and in very flat structures there are real opportunities for garnering feedback from a variety of sources on a more regular basis.

Sounds like this will be a topic at the next Bowland Solutions get together!


Brendan

I attended an ICT conference this morning.  The first two speakers were from CISCO and IBM respectively.  Sometimes it amazes me that IBM still exists but that is another story.  Anyway, the talks given were fairly unspectacular.  But, during both of the talks reference was made to how these organisations were having to build internal work infrastructures to support collaboration.

Cisco in particular emphasised how they had moved from 'hierarchical management' to 'command and control' and finally to collobarative team working over the last 10 years.  This chimed with some of the changes we have been seeing in 360 degree feedback over the years.  When we first started, you would find people wanted their direct reports to give feedback and "a couple of peers".  Over time the peer group has become larger but generally 4-5 is normal.  In the last year though we have had a number of clients looking for over 20 peers to give their responses.  This matches a move to collaborative working.

Indeed one of our most recent clients - a very large healthcare provider in the US - is looking to categorise people very differently in the 360 degree appraisals that they are conducting.  Rather than categorising by relationship they are categorising by department.  From Bowland Solutions' perspective we are having to review our reports to ensure that they give good analysis from such a wide source of people.

One thought - and used by one of our clients - is that we should source our feedback on a regular basis from the teams we have become part of rather than on an annual basis.


Brendan

Often when working with our clients, particularly with senior management, we help them with the one-to-one debriefs; the session where you share the feedback with the recipient for the first time.

During this session, as well as getting a balanced view of the 360 feedback, the hope is that they will begin the process of creating a 'Personal Development Plan' or PDP.

This will highlight any strengths that could be better deployed, and naturally any development areas they wish to work on.

Whilst this is an invaluable exercise for the individual leader, there is an opportunity beyond this to work with the whole leadership team in unison and create a 'Team Development Plan' as well.

By aggregating the results of all the senior managers in the leadership team, we can see the wider picture of development needs; ideally this report, should be shared just as one would share an individual's report i.e. Face-to-face with the group.

In this way, you conduct a 'group debrief' and together they can see their collective strengths and development areas, before collectively agreeing how to tackle their development areas.

This is an important step, because whilst individually they could simply attend to their own development, it wouldn't necessarily address issues that exist between people.

The use of aggregated reporting with 360 degree feeback helps raise levels of awareness beyond the individual and highlight issues that run company wide.

John

In a previous career I ran an outsourcing facility for HSBC.  We handled the administration of motor and household insurance policies for a variety of organisations including BMW, First Direct, and Fiat.  The argument for outsourcing has always been that you should concentrate on your core strengths and outsource the non-core work.  If I recall my MBA correctly the starting point for this was a Harvard Business Review article by Hamel and Pralahad.

Anyway, when Bowland was first created I was careful to avoid a suggestion that we were an outsourcer.  By then outsourcers had a poor reputation and I would have fought to the death any suggestion that a company should outsource HR.  If managing and developing your own people isn't a core strength then you have problems!

Recently though a number of companies have approached us to manage the 360 degree appraisal process for them.  They are not looking to hand over the appraisal exercise  - they just want to hand off the administration.  In continuing my theme on how Bowland Solutions' handle the 360 process I want to draw out the possibility of handing over the administration to a 3rd party.

The benefits of using a managed service are

• the provider should be skilled at driving completion rates
• you should be free to support the initiative rather than administer it
• for some organisational cultures a 3rd party provides comfort around anonymity and confidentiality
• you should save costs compared with doing it yourself

360 degree feedback can be a highly bureaucratic process.  The introduction of a system is a good start in reducing that burden.  But a further step to a managed service can provide a highly efficient method of ensuring an annual process is seen as worthwhile and not a chore.

Brendan

A recent series of articles in Personnel Today focussed on the new generation of graduates and school leavers entering work, often termed 'Generation Y' employees.

Despite making me feel very old, although falling somewhere just within the 'Gen X' bracket, the article did make some interesting points that highlight how a convergence of familiarity with technology coupled with a desire to have regular feedback, means that 'Gen-Y'ers' will expect a very different kind of management in the future.

It will become less and less acceptable to sit down at the end of the year and conduct a single  'Annual Appraisal'; already we are seeing our clients implementing 'Interim Reviews', 'Project Reviews' and alike, which happen throughout the year.

The transition to online performance review systems will make this process infinitely more easy than a paper-based process, and employees will expect this to become the norm, especially when technology is so prevalent in other areas of their life.

Taking this further, the ability to have web-based applications accessible from anywhere, is leading our performance appraisal solutions to now offer a 'Performance Journal' or 'Activity Log' which acts as a simple open document which both an individual and their line manager can complete throughout the year.

They add activities, acheivements, thoughts, apsirations, so that when they come to complete the necessary annual appraisal form, it is no longer a chore but simply an opportunity to reflect and easily consolidate into a better representation of their work during the year.

Gen-Y'ers will help line managers re-evaluate how they should properly performance manage for organisational success.

John

I have taken the title of this post from a post by Susan Heathfield on About.com.  You can read the post here.  I agree with the whole of this post and it is a great summary of what can go well with 360 degree feedback and what can go wrong.

By avoiding the "bad and ugly" of the third page of Susan's post you would go a long way to a successful 360 feedback implementation.

I also like the reference to managing people through pointing out what they are good at, rather than focusing on weaknesses.  Those of us who have "taught" a child to ride a bike will know that it is a fruitless exercise to repeatedly tell the child what they are doing wrong.  The challenge they face is they have no experience or knowledge of what the correct way of riding the bike is.  So, encouraging them when they remember to put their feet down after they have stopped rather than telling them the problem with putting feet down early works a lot better. And "go faster" and "stop wobbling" doesn't help them at all!

The output from 360 or from performance appraisal can too often be viewed as highlighting weaknesses.  Most of us are as much in need of being told what we are doing right - so we can repeat it and enhance it - than of being told where we are going wrong.

Brendan

Over the past few weeks, I have been working my way along Bowland Solutions' approach to implementing 360 degree feedback.  I have now come to the online system element of that approach.  I'm not going to cover how to select an online 360 degree appraisal system.  I'll cover that another time as I don't want to corrupt this exercise with a sales pitch!

So, instead - I'll cover how to get the system to work for you.  We see the system's role as a supportive one - it only exists to help the process, it must not become the end itself.  So, you are looking to

• make it simple
• ensure the only time spent by people is on completing or reviewing feedback rather than clicking all over the place
• make error checking easy
• remove administration tasks / make them easier
• improve reporting and make it more timely

Most everything else is fluff.  So, when we are implementing the system phase, we work off a simple checklist of what needs to be done and we strip the system functionality down to this level.  The less noise the better.

If you have this level of simplicity then there should be no training requirement.  I repeat, there should be no training requirement on the system.  Those days are gone - no-one tells us how to use Google or the BBC/CNN websites.

For a service like ours there is no real IT project to implement.  The only area to take care on is ensuring that emails will get through firewalls/spam filters.

We do suggest that you pilot the 360 implementation if you can.  There are unlikely to be technical issues, but this does offer the opportunity to change wording of questions, instructional text, and review process.

Otherwise it should be a matter of getting the emails sent out and off we go.

If you are working with a system that requires installation then we would recommend a full project initiative.  Your supplier should assist you with that.

Next up in the series : training.

Brendan

Law firms are of particular interest to Bowland Solutions - as well as being an important client sector for us, they also have provided some of our most interesting and thought-provoking discussions on best practice.  I was recently invited to write an article for the Staffordshire law society - we have now published this on our website, and you may wish to refer to it.

The article is "360 degree appraisal in a law firm" and can be found on our 360 degree feedback and performance reviews articles page.  The article covers the three greatest concerns of law firms when implementing 360 and gives our view on why 360 feedback is particularly well suited to a law firm.

Brendan

“I’ve only got 45 minutes, so can we get straight to the point?” said Charles, the head of corporate law as he strode into the room. The “point” to which he was referring was our meeting to go through his 360 feedback. The “point” that he actually wanted to make was that he didn’t really want to hear the views of others.

Coaching this high achieving City law firm partner had proved challenging for the last 4 months. Asked by the firm’s Managing partner if I “could help to sort him out”, I had struggled to engage in a change process. Charles was admired by the firm for his talent in winning millions of pounds of fees with new clients. But there had been staff losses and dissension in Charles’s department. Charles had apparently to change his style.

It was clear from the outset of our coaching sessions that Charles had no real intention of changing. My observations were brushed aside. He told me that his colleagues would have to “take him as they found him”. Charles demonstrated all the traits of the ultra alpha male with a few of the more extreme lawyer’s attributes thrown in – highly analytic, intimidating, quick witted, highly (superficially) confident, impatient, opinionated and focusing on flaws in other people and their views.

What’s more, Charles typically didn’t like exploring emotions - “I don’t do emotion –emotions can’t be controlled!”. Yet it was clear that Charles was actually highly emotional in frequently talking about his anger, frustration and - in his very occasional weaker moments – his insecurity.

Charles was eventually persuaded to agree to a 360 feedback session. In typical fashion, he was immediately dismissive of any negative comments. He also spent the first five minutes trying to work out who had been less than glowing in their opinions of him. Here, however was feedback that Charles could not ignore. Here was written data with examples of his behaviour being repeated across his department. There were well argued remarks backed up with facts.- a benefit of 360 work with lawyers is that their written comments are clear and supported by strong evidence.

Gradually, Charles’ curiosity in the feedback was engaged. He began to understand that the strengths that he thought were so important were damaging to his colleagues (and to himself). A common comment was that Charles was a very poor listener – to the extent that many in his department had stopped talking to him - “Charles only listens to respond”, ”I’ve stopped talking to Charles – I am not important enough fro him “ “Charles is only interested in his own clients”.

For the first time in 5 meetings, Charles’ defences were lowered. I turned the screw (a bit). This was an opportunity that might not come again! I suggested a FIRO assessment ( more data/evidence) to help Charles understand his needs for control (high) and openness (low).

Charles thought that he should acknowledge the feedback at his next departmental meeting. “Do you think that is enough?” I asked Charles. “On reflection – no. I will make more time for people. I will tell people that I appreciate them “.

We’ll both see what happens. Will Charles revert to type?  The first signs are promising but one 360 appraisal does not lead to a complete personality change. One thing is clear - without a structured approach, Charles would probably never have started to “listen” to his co-workers. Appealing to his curiosity about data was crucial to any breakthrough. Charles may even admit to having emotions soon!

This is a guest post for Bowland Solutions by Nigel McEwen.  Formally a managing partner of a top 100 law firm, Nigel is now an executive coach who works with clients in the accountancy, legal, manufacturing and financial services sectors.  To contact Nigel, please add a comment to this post.

 

 Here are some rules of thumb to help out if you take on the task of creating a competency framework for a 360 degree performance appraisal.

• Less than 12 competencies per role
• Cluster the framework for ease-of use
• Contain both definitions and examples to aid understanding
• Tailor off-the-shelf frameworks where you can.  Re-inventing the wheel is highly unnecessary for a lot or roles
• Create a forward-looking framework.  What behaviours does the organisation want/need rather than what do they currently have
• Seek out best practice in each area

There are some great technical resources around how to write the statements which are too detailed for here.  Let me know if you want further advice in this area.


Brendan

I have been working my way through the stages that Bowland Solutions' recommend our clients go through when setting up a 360 degree appraisal.  Here are my notes on creating a competency framework.  They apply to both 360 and standard performance appraisal.

There is some great material around on how to write competency frameworks, so please accept this bullet point list as the summary it is intended to be.  It will have been sourced from other parties over time and supplemented with our own experience : CIPD is the best place to start.  Writing a framework is a skilled, time-consuming job.  So, here goes :

• Start with your values and stated strategy - look to existing materials and language
• Get directors, or senior management to express their desired behaviours
• Seek to identify best practice in each area
• Involve managers and staff, outside of HR, in design and implementation
• Keep it simple : use straight-forward language
• Communicate, communicate, communicate
• Train people in how to use, understand, and assess against the competencies

Of course, at the end of this process you only have a framework.  We believe the process of generating the framework is of great value, but the proof is in the eating.  How it is used in performance appraisal, 360, training, recruitment, etc, wil determine how others value the framework.

Brendan

I recently wrote on the rating scales in 360 degree feedback .  One recent, interesting development we have had with a client is the number of ratings affecting the distribution of scores.

The client uses a 7 point rating scale.  One effect of a 7 point rather than 5 point scale is to bunch the scoring together.  So, the difference between rating points is much smaller.  This is not necessarily an issue but it is something to consider up front (we are changing our standard process as we speak).

One solution to this is to score from -3 to +3 - a suggestion from the client concerned.  I'm not necessarily advocating this approach and we have a general concern at Bowland Solutions around using averages/scores anyway.  But, this does solve this problem if you need it solving!

Brendan

A passing thought given the current situation where performance amongst traders, investment bankers and all, has been to date deemed successful when the short-term profit target has been met...yielding great results for the individual and organisation alike.

However, as has now transpired, this was success built on a house of cards; the long-term result has been catastrophic.

With 360 degree feedback, the very process of putting in place competencies or standards of acceptable/desired behaviour, can help ensure organisations move towards sustained success, not just short-term results.

It shifts the focus on 'results above all costs', and moves to an emphasis where it is just as important to measure 'what' an individual does and 'how' they do it.