Are you a business owner or line manager who is looking to capitalise on the benefits of 360 feedback? Improving employee performance is crucial to success. Regardless of how great an organisation’s values, visions are objectives are, goals cannot be achieved without a well-performing team working around you.
360 feedback is the process by which members of a working team evaluate themselves against a set of behavioural statements, usually linked to a competency framework, before inviting a selected number of fellow team members to do the same. Effective 360 degree feedback processes will also include development planning and coaching sessions.
Implementing effective performance and appraisal processes is key to building a successful team who are motivated to perform to the best of their abilities. When done right, the discoveries you will make through using 360-degree feedback regarding the behaviours, abilities and opinions of your team, will prove invaluable. You will take big steps towards understanding how to analyse and measure feedback data effectively in order to transform your staff of today into the future leaders of tomorrow.
The benefit of clarity for individuals and organisations alike to identify and develop what is most imperative to them is invaluable. However, what if very few take part and why does this happen?
Have You Targeted the Right Information?
The overarching objective of 360 degree feedback is to help individuals within the organisation to understand how others perceive them. This will give them a firmer understanding of self and how to best reach their personal objectives, which will bring wide-reaching benefits for the firm as a whole.
Business experts have understood for decades that feedback is absolutely crucial for learning. Quantifiable data allows individuals to better manage their own performance and careers. However, by not targeting this information in the right way, your response rate will be jeopardised. If respondents don’t feel as though questions are fair and relevant, or fail to be spurred on by them to produce useful data, then the 360 degree feedback process will become redundant.
How do you target the right information? When writing your survey, it is crucial to remember that
you are targeting information regarding behaviours, not personality traits or styles. An easy and effective way to remember this is to concentrate on the how not the what.
Essentially, you are trying to discover the particular way in which that respondent goes about doing their job. click-360 frequently find that the company’s performance management system is supported by the questions that are drawn from the competency framework.
Have You Worded Questions in the Best Way?
Wording questions in the wrong way, even with the best intentions, is one of the most common causes of an unsuccessful 360 feedback process.
Questions need to be made specific enough to be relevant to a team member’s actual job and role within the company. If not, the participant will (at worst) lack the motivation to finish the questionnaire and (at best) fail to be motivated enough to understand what changes need to made to optimise their performance.
Vague, poorly worded or overly complex questions will not produce useful feedback. It is important that concise and plain English is used whenever and wherever possible. Unnecessary add-ons and qualifiers, for example “as necessary” and “when appropriate”, should be avoided at all costs. These add unnecessary fillers and confusion to your question, whilst simultaneously increasing reading/completion time.
Consistent language is also vital when looking at a particular competency. Each of these questions should be similar to each other in terms of linguistic style. A good rule to remember is that every question should be similar to other questions used to measure a particular competency and distinct from all other questions relating to different competencies. Muddled competencies will always equal muddled feedback.
It can be tempting when building your 360 feedback to cram multiple questions into one, as a way of trying to get as much useful information as possible. However, this can actually be counterproductive, as respondents may get confused by the wording of the question. Asking more than one thing - for example, ‘Makes decisions which are clear, timely and well-judged’ - will jeopardize both your response rate and production of useful 360 feedback reports.
Was it Easy to Use?
If a respondent finds the 360 feedback platform’s interface to be too difficult or irritating to navigate around, then this will put your response rate under great risk. Answering feedback surveys can be quite an unappealing prospect to some members of the company. This is only natural, as they will probably have a lot of ‘business as usual’ work they would rather be doing.
Therefore, it is absolutely vital to work with a 360 feedback application company that emphasises ease of use for its respondents. click-360 put care and detail into designing an intuitive interface that requires minimal input from respondents and those sending out the questionnaire. This modern and innovative interface design optimises rates of response and completion amongst all clients.
These healthy completion rates are guaranteed further by allowing surveys to be completed on a wide variety of electronic devices. Within this modern age, much of team communications and admin work is being conducted on the likes of mobile phones and tablets. Bringing 360 feedback platforms into this digital era, all of our surveys can be easily completed on mobile phones and other handheld devices. Furthermore, the outputs of these mobile questionnaires are integrated with a workbook to aid interpretation of the data and for capturing reflections from the report.
Our customers are busy already, which is why ease of use is so important to us here at click-360. Watch our questionnaire video to see how this straightforward 360 degree feedback software can bring you the results your organisation needs.
How click-360 Can Assist You
If not implemented effectively, then there are various reasons why a 360 process may not live up to a business’ expectations. Working with a trusted 360 feedback tool is one way in which you can guarantee optimum results for your company.
Get in contact today and we will get you on the way of unlocking your team’s potential through 360 feedback.