360° Assessments
A 360° Assessment is a performance evaluation of an employee in which input is collected from the employee's manager, peers or customers, and subordinates. It can serve two purposes:
- To provide job performance feedback to individuals (to complement the Performance Management system)
- To provide information on the company's training needs.
Recommended Steps in the Process
- Identify and define the key competencies for organizational success based on the organization's vision, values, and goals.
- Translate those competencies into a series of concise
statements (you may want to consult with external experts for
help developing the statements), such as:
- Has a record of excellent performance
- Treats people with fairness, trust, and respect
- Promotes teamwork and empowers people to improve business performance
- Generate a scale (5 point recommended), such as:
Excellent Demonstrates leadership and teaches others
Good Usually successful
Adequate Satisfactory
Poor Rarely successful
Very Poor Negative impact on others - requires immediate improvement
- Select which employees will participate in the evaluation.
This should include a large sample of managers and key
individual contributors, or all managers and key individual
contributors, or even all employees.
- Instruct each participant to select their evaluators, with
their manager's approval. These typically include two to four
peers, customers, and subordinates (if applicable), and the
manager are selected.
- Provide questionnaires and instructions to the participants
for them to distribute to their evaluators. Have the completed
results sent to the individual responsible for compiling the
results.
- Compile the results and keep it confidential.
- Consolidate and analyze the results to determine what training
would be most beneficial to the company.
- Provide feedback to each participant on their individual
evaluation results. The results must be summarized to preserve
the confidentiality of each evaluator.
- Instruct each participant to work with their manager to create
an action plan to improve the his/her performance.
Process Tips:
One important factor for the success of a 360° performance assessment is to ensure that the right people are selected to provide the feedback. Both critics and supporters of the individual should be selected. Another key to success is avoiding punishment for bad results. Rather, assessment participants must be positively encouraged to improve. Therefore, it's recommended that 360° performance assessment results not be used to determine performance based salary increases (see Salary Review process).
