What is 360° feedback? |
| Also known as multi-source feedback, multi-rater assessment, upward feedback, or peer evaluation, 360° feedback is the general process in which you, your boss, your direct reports, your peers, and your customers evaluate you with a standard set of criteria. Often, the 360° assessment is followed by training, coaching, and personalized action plans to help the participant strengthen their weaknesses. Also, a follow-up 360° assessment can be given in 12-18 months to evaluate the participant's progress and revise action plans. [top] |
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What makes our product different from other 360° feedback instruments? |
| Most 360°feedback instruments offer a basic set of managerial questions with a black and white printout. Often the printout is 8-12 pages and gives the participants simple graphs summarizing their responses. In contrast, we offer a full-color survey of 96 management behaviors, 21 Leadership Dimensions, 10 Critical Practices (those your associates consider the most important behaviors of an ideal leader), written comments, a Data Summary page displaying your personal leadership strengths and weaknesses, and personalized "Coaching Tips" pages to help you on areas where you need the most improvement, and a Personal Development Plan. With detailed rich pages of easily interpreted graphs and suggestions for immediate on-the-job application, our 360° Personal Performance Assessment is the most comprehensive feedback instrument on the market. [top] |
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How long has 360° Personal Performance Assessment been used? |
| Stewart Systems, Inc. has been using the 360° Personal Performance Assessment with Fortune 500 companies and government agencies for over twenty years. [top] |
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What are the benefits of participating in the 360° Personal Performance Assessment? |
For the individual:
- Perception is reality and this process helps individuals understand how others perceive them
- Develop leadership and managerial needs that are discovered in the process
- Receiving feedback is essential for learning and knowing how to improve
- Individuals can better manage their own performance and careers
- All analysis relates directly to the individual's personal performance.
- Only your associates, those who you know and with whom you work, supply the input. This increases credibility and accuracy of the results.
- Specific and complete listings of personal strengths and weaknesses are provided in all significant leadership and managerial areas.
For the organization:
- Better career development for employees
- Promote from within
- Improves customer service by having customers contribute to evaluation
- Drives training
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How has 360° feedback changed over the years? |
| Beginning as a tool for higher levels of the organization, it now being used in all levels of the organization. 360° feedback used to involve thousands of paper surveys and months of analysis; now, the process is online and takes a few hours to analyze and process. The survey questions used to be vague and imprecise. Now, we can evaluate time tested and essential leadership and managerial behaviors with speed, accuracy, and precision. [top] |
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How do I know if my organization, team, or myself is ready to conduct a 360° feedback survey? |
There are several steps that need to be considered to decide if you, your team, or your organization is ready:
- Desire - your organization wants to improve
- Awareness - the people in your organization understand how 360°
feedback works
- Action - an environment where confidentiality, fairness, and openness exists
as the participants and their associates complete their surveys on one
another
- Support - those in the organization have mentors, friends, or professional
coaches available to help implement an action plan to strengthen
their weaknesses
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How is 360° feedback different from personality or style assessment? |
| Personality or style assessments measure traits or behavioral tendencies, while 360° feedback measures competence and explains how you actually behave, as perceived by your associates. [top] |
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Where is 360° feedback being utilized? |
| A recent Society for Human Resource Management study found that in organizations performing 360° feedback, the process is being utilized at the following levels:
Executives
35%
Upper-middle management
37%
Middle management
23%
First-level managers
18%
Individual contributors
11% [top] |
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How is 360° feedback utilized? |
| Lepsinger & Lucia found that Human Resource managers said that 360° feedback is being used for:
Management and organizational development
58%
Performance appraisal
25%
Support strategic implementation and culture change
20%
Team development
19% [top] |
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How many companies are using 360° feedback? |
| According to a recent survey by Towers Perrin, 8 percent of major companies now utilize 360° feedback and 69 percent plan to introduce it in the next three
years. [top] |
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How often should 360° Personal Performance Assessments be used? |
| Twelve to eighteen months intervals give enough time for the participant to make a measurable improvement in their behavior. Twelve to eighteen months allows a person to change and then receive feedback on their progress so that they can develop next-level goals and action
plans. [top] |
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What are the criteria for selecting evaluators (respondents)? |
- Length of time the respondent knows the participant (recommended minimum is 4-6 months)
- Amount of daily and weekly contact with subject
- A good understanding of the nature of what the participant does
- Those who work well with the subject and those who do not - a mix of both kinds of people is recommended
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In what media is 360° Personal Performance Assessment conducted? |
| The 360° Personal Performance Assessment is conducted online. [top] |
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Who gets a copy of the feedback report? |
| The participant is the only person who receives a copy of the report. The organization may receive group averages if they request it, but no individual data. We value and protect individual confidentiality! If personal data were given to bosses and others in the organization, people could fear the process, feedback comments might not be as constructive, scores could be inaccurate, and data could become a weapon, not a development tool. We value the integrity of the entire process. [top] |
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How long will it take me to complete the online survey? |
| There are three parts to the survey: Evaluating the participant in 96 leadership behaviors; selecting from the 96 behaviors the ten most important behaviors you consider are essential for the ideal leader; and responding briefly to three general, verbatim questions. The whole process should take you about 15-20 minutes. [top] |
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How many of my associates can evaluate me? |
| The average number of evaluators per person is 10-15 associates including the participant. We allow a maximum of 35 associates: 1 Self, 2 Bosses, 15 Direct Reports, 12 Peers, and 5 Customers. [top] |
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How long does this process take? |
| From the moment you order the assessments and receive your token (password), until you can print out your personalized data, it will take an average of 4-8 weeks. This includes 3 weeks for you and all of your associates to complete their online surveys. It takes about a week to process and print the online surveys. When your data is processed you will be notified. [top] |
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How do I select who evaluates me? |
| After you have ordered your assessment and have received your token (password), login through the "Create Client I.D." link. You will then be asked to identify how many bosses, direct reports, peers, and customers will evaluate you. You will then receive a list of different tokens for each evaluator. You will then distribute each evaluatorís token to the respective person. To ensure confidentiality, Stewart Systems will never know who is evaluating you; this is why you distribute the tokens so we do not have the email addresses of the evaluators. [top] |
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How is confidentiality ensured? |
| Confidentiality is important to both the participants and the evaluators. If the participant is not guaranteed that the results will remain confidential, the evaluators will not respond honestly. All direct report and peer data is completely anonymous throughout the entire process. Only the scores from your boss(es) and your customers are not held in confidence. We believe that these scores are more beneficial if they are presented openly. The scores from your direct reports and peers are withheld unless there is a minimum of three scores for each group. Through averaging the confidentiality is upheld - the greater the number of scores from each group, the greater the level of confidentiality. If only one or two scores are present for each group the individual scores are not printed, though the group average is still printed. This behooves the participants to encourage as many direct reports and peers to complete the online survey. [top] |
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Should 360° feedback be linked to performance appraisals? |
| 360° feedback and performance appraisals can complement each other, but should not be linked. If 360° is linked to compensation decisions, it loses its power and integrity as a development tool. [top] |
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How do you introduce 360° Personal Performance Assessment to a potentially resistant organization? |
- Start at the top
- Conduct a pilot
- Directly address, up front, the issues that are at the source of the resistance
- Focus on the benefits for the individual or group
- Utilize an external consultant to minimize fears of confidentiality and inappropriate data usage
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What is a token? |
| A token is a password that ensures security and confidentiality. Each participant is assigned a token by Stewart Systems. The participant uses this token to login at the "Create Client I.D." link. After the participant logs in and specifies how many evaluators he or she will have, the participant is given tokens for each evaluator. The participant is responsible for distributing these tokens to each evaluator. The evaluators use their individual token to login at the "Take A Survey" link. If the integrity of the token is ever questioned or if the token is not used, please notify your Group Lead and/or Stewart Systems immediately and the token will be reassigned or destroyed. [top] |
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