Getting more from your 360° Surveys – much more!

Getting more from your 360° Surveys – much more!

We have on-line 360° survey services available to our clients. This enables us to develop tailored solutions and to help them to exploit the benefits of 360° more effectively.
 
We believe that 360° can be used more creatively and powerfully as a performance measurement tool than is perhaps realised.  Our top three ideas for doing this are.....

As a measure for “Culture Change”
Organisational culture is defined by a series of often unspoken (and sometimes unconscious) rules which everyone just accepts.  If you are seeking to change that set of rules or to take the positive ones to a conscious level,  360° can be a great tool for driving and measuring the changes you are seeking.  By pin pointing the behaviours used in your 360 to match the culture you are seeking to create, the feedback reports can be used to highlight the discrepancy between where you are and where you want to be.  At an individual level this is a great way of opening an individual’s eyes to the impact that the current organisational culture is having on their effectiveness and the contribution they can make to the desired cultural shift.  We then collate the feedback given to a specific peer group, and reveal where you need to be prioritising your behavioural change agenda.
 
As a measure of talent
Research into the relative accuracy of  360° feedback from different respondent groups indicates that the most accurate responses usually come from direct reports or junior colleagues.  In contrast the least accurate come from the line manager or boss.  Despite this most talent management processes are more influenced by senior managers or the person’s boss than any other group.  360° surveys, with careful planning and positioning, can therefore provide very valuable data to enrich talent identification and development.  This is because respondents give their ratings based on frequent contact through observing their colleagues in a real rather than artificial assessment environment.  This makes the information provided during 360° feedback amongst the most accurate and well observed within the workplace, and so a great source of data to feed into Talent Management.
 
As a measure of success

Whether you’re a psychologist, OD specialist or change manager a common problem we all face is how to tangibly measure success or outcomes.  360° feedback when used with a group can be remarkably effective at achieving this particularly if it is used as a before and after measure.  However, this will only work if the behaviours measured are those which you have identified are intrinsically linked to the change you were looking to deliver.  If you are able to achieve this and are confident that the behaviours measured correlate to success then your 360 becomes an effective measure of business and OD success.

So we see 360 as a “forensic” performance measurement tool with the added bonus that it encourages the individual to take ownership for their own development – quickly and with immediate effect on the results they deliver in the workplace.