360 degree performance reviews

[quasar]

I've never been asked to perform a review of my bosses, although there were several I'd have dearly loved the chance to comment on anonymously. It appears many employees are starting to get that chance. I read an interesting article about it at Boston.com. Have any of you had the chance to go through this process from any side? What did you think?

Janice

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

Our agency talked about doing it when one of the cabinet members told about her husband's workplace's experience with it. It died a quick and painless death -- I have the feeling that there are those who really do not want to know what their peers and underlings have to say.

Meanwhile, I enacted it on my own on a small scale. About a month before my annual review for the past two years, I adapted a questionnaire I found in Social Work Supervision by Kadushin - since I supervise clerical staff instead of social work staff, it needed adaptations. I gave the questionnaires out to my staff and had them return the completed questionnaires to a third party, who tallied the results and copied over the comments (so I couldn't tell who said what on the basis of handwriting, or figure out that Person X said Very Good to question 3 and Very Poor to Question 4 as a way of determining who rated me how). It is VERY important that those filling out the questionnaires feel confident that the boss won't be putting two and two together and then taking it out on the underling!

I then analyzed the results, made a plan on improving my ratings next year, and submitted that with a self-study based on my job description, my strategic plan, and what I saw as my main work priorities. I'd like to incorporate peers into the next review, and hopefully will be able to get some of my peers to agree to rate me.

It takes a certain amount of ego strength to put yourself out there for rating by all and sundry like that, but I found the responses to be very worthwhile.

[pageclot[$]]

I've had a few 360 degree questionnaire evaluations done on me, and did not like the results at all.

The whole management group completed the questionnaires, and rated each other, and it seemed at the time that it was a full time job filling out these incredibly detailed forms. By the time someone with 9 direct reports and 4 peers to review was finished, I'm sure burnout ensued.

And then came the massive management meeting where we all received our results in handsome folders. There were many questions about the results, what they meant, how it was all accomplished, the possible skewing of results by one disgruntled individual, how to interpret them, etc etc. And then, after some of us were thoroughly depressed by how they were viewed by their peers and/or their boss, they stressed that if these surveys were done regularly, that they could show trends in performance that were more important than a one-time snapshot. (Of course, we never completed such a review again, so it was pretty much a wasted exercise).

Then they let us loose in the bar. It wasn't pretty.

I had that review tacked up to my corkboard in my office for quite a while, for reasons I've forgotten; probably to make sure I remained humble. One of my co-workers, after getting trashed in his review, but still retaining his self-esteem, on his drive back home from the conference, at about 140 km/h, held the review out the driver's side window and let it get torn from his hand, cackling maniacally.

We spent far more time bitching about the methodology than we did trying to derive insights into our own character.

I am probably more confident about my performance now than I was 8 years ago, but if I was to do it again, I'd do it like mj does. I find that a lot of perceived weaknesses of one's performance have more to do with communicating what you do than any real lack of performance.

P

[Joubert[$]]

We just did an interesting variant of this - not a 360, but a peer review. The simplicity was simply to pick one of five team dysfunctions that you thought each person exhibited. Or in some cases, exhibited most often.

We then had a facilitated discussion. This only works when the group agrees to trust each other and say the hard words face to face. If you can build to that level - something we've recently done - the entire exercise becomes very promising.

7 of 8 peers selected the same attribute for me. That was common. Most of us found that the majority of our peers focused on one attribute. We actually have grown tighter and more cohesive as a result.

[murasaki]

The Army does peer review in various training/school situations. I have never had a good experience with peer reviews in these situations, largely because leading one's peers is not easy for anyone (it's much easier to lead one's subordinates because there's no blurry area about who's in charge).

I have had a couple of commanders that do exit counseling sessions, mostly for me to get my evaluation from them, but give me a chance to criticize anything about them, their style, or give them a heads up about anything in the unit. I have taken advantage of this to a great extent, mostly just to let them know about potential problems (for instance, I let one commander know that I suspected one of the other commanders who lived downstairs from me, of being depressed, since her performance was faltering and her husband was stationed elsewhere--after my comments, I heard from others that he started to view the other commander more sympathetically and she felt less pressured and her performance started to improve).

However, I'm probably not as daring as I should be about telling some of my supervisor's off, though few of them conducted the kind of exit sessions described above.

--naomi

[magenta321]

I've always had to do these on my professors. It's always done pretty much the way MJ described, but on scantron forms (so no need to change handwriting, unless you are filling in the optional write-in part).

I've never had to do one on a real boss before. I'd love the opportunity, however.

I think that probably the reason that these things don't work well is that it's hard to be told you are doing something wrong, and even harder to go and face those people who just said something you percieved as being negative. But, maybe that's not true of everyone.

I've never had a performance review where I was told I was doing anything wrong, so I'm not sure how I'd take that. I think it would be compounded, however, if my peers or people below me were doing the critiquing.

My last boss was pretty good, I thought. In our performance reviews, it was mandated that every supervisor create three things that their employee had to work on during the next term. My boss could never even come up with one, let alone three, since we were all good employees and did our job 110% every day. So she would have us come up with things to put for that. It was interesting what we came up with, and very difficult to criticize oneself.

Instead of finding faults, however, some people acknowledged they were doing their absolute best, and decided to take on additional projects in any spare minute they had (this is also a department where people didn't get lunch very often, let alone coffee breaks, so a spare minute was rare). It did help to make the department better organized.

[Magick1]

My company always seems to be in flux. They keep trying new and improved performance reviews, and such, but never stick through with any of them that they have tried.

Recently, we have been going through some major restructuring, and they have kind of started this 360 review thing.

My manager was to pick 1 co-worker of mine that would review me and then my manager would also review me. But, this isn't for the annual reviews, this is to "fit" me into their newly appointed job classifications that they are creating, but haven't shared with anyone. Not only are they finally creating a job description, but they are finally figuring out what it takes for an associate to move up. This way, they can tell you exactly what steps you need to get to the next level, or where you can go from here and give you some purpose.

(They tried this 2 years ago, and nothing came to fruition!) It makes it very frustrating as an associate that wants a goal to improve myself, and give me something to shoot for. I don't want to be the same ole same ole that I was when I started 3 years ago, until the day I retire.

We'll see what they make of this. I am sitting back looking at this with a lot of skepticism, only because of past experience. I hope it is better this time, but only time will tell.