Have you been frustrated by the Performance review process? Well, I have, and in many ways, I have come to believe that an annual review process is an “old school” idea that needs to go. For years I have been preaching that performance must be evaluated and appraised essentially every day. What is a “360″ Review? The plain fact is, if you wait for an entire year to give feedback, you have just wasted an entire year.

Yes, by waiting to give feedback, you will lose the opportunity to give positive feedback on the exceptional performance; and importantly, you will lose the opportunity to give constructive feedback on a shortfall in performance. In fact, if you are honest with yourself, you will probably find that you probably will forget all but the most egregious failures, and may forget almost all of the real successes. That is a tragedy for your employee, because now you have lost all that time to help them work through their weaknesses; and most importantly; to be rewarded for their victories.

You must give feedback at every turn: good or bad. That is the only way your associate will ever really understand how and why you have drawn your conclusions about their performance. Give feedback on small victories; and carefully managed feedback on the small little shortfalls. Neither should be done to extreme, but letting your associate know that you are watching, is essential.

Another thought: Make certain you find things that each day allow you to “catch your employees” doing something right. The value of a simple “at-a-girl / at-a-boy” is huge. Use it to reinforce behavior, and you will be suprised with the result.

With that said, there is one type of annual exercise that can be extremely valuable. If you don’t do something like this; you should. This is a process in which an employee or manager receives feedback about his or her competencies from peers, supervisors, direct reports, and internal and external customers. It’s a complete picture of the impact one has on those with whom he or she interacts on a frequent basis. Many companies use a “180″ feedback process instead, which allows for feedback from peers, the supervisor, and direct reports (if applicable).

Advantages of a 360 Review:

 A major advantage to the 360 process is that it provides an opportunity for all those people with whom a person comes into frequent contact to offer feedback.
 When feedback comes from many sources, it’s more difficult for a person to brush aside constructive criticism and chalk it up to a “personality conflict”
 Another advantage of the 360 process is that it is designed with a customer focus in mind. This gives employees the opportunity to see how the work they do impacts other areas of the
organization, as well as customers (internal or external)
 360 reviews are particularly strong when coupled with competency-based job descriptions and an action plan developed by the person receiving feedback.

The downside of a 360 Review:

 People might be tempted to ask their friends in the company to be the ones who receive feedback instruments, if given the freedom to do so.
 Without advance notice and training on how to participate in a 360 review, the process will not be successful.

Ensuring the process runs smoothly:

 Reviewers should be people that truly have observed an employee or manager on a frequent basis.
 The process must be carefully designed to minimize the possibility that this handpicking doesn’t occur.
 When an organization decides to implement a 360 review process, at least two sets of employees and managers should be trained on how to effectively use the process: those receiving feedback and those offering feedback.

Give this idea a try, and you may be very surprised in what you learn.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.