360 Feedback Preparation Guidelines

Follow these eight simple guidelines to help ensure your company's management gets the most from a 360 feedback survey.

In this article, we will review the necessary steps to ensure a successful 360 Survey campaign. Keep in mind the goal of the survey is to end with data that will help your managers be more successful in their roles. Follow these eight steps and you can be assured your survey campaign will be a huge success.

1. Identify company’s Core Competencies
Many business leaders get in a big hurry and look for survey content that is already written based upon someone else's theory of what your people need to do to be successful. Resist this shortcut! Build your own survey based upon the leadership competencies of your company, or engage us to help. If you have not identified your leadership competencies, do so before beginning the survey process. Ask the other leaders in the company what are the 4-5 things your managers must do in order for your company to be successful. After you have spent time interviewing your managers, you will notice that several competencies are being repeated. These are your core leadership competencies.

2. Develop Behavioral Items for each Competency
After you have identified your core competencies, you will need to find a way to measure them. Each competency should have 5-10 observable behaviors that objectively describe each competency. For example: If Communication is a competency, you may have an item “This manager listens to me without interrupting”. If you are not able to generate behavioral items for a competency, then it is probably not a good competency. Remember, you are going to ask raters to state how frequently they observe specific behaviors. The total number of items should not exceed 50. People do not like to fill out long surveys and a well constructed survey can accomplish its mission in 50 items or less.

3. Have a senior member of management communicate to the entire company that a 360 campaign will begin shortly and why it is being conducted
Once you have determined the feedback you wish to generate, tell the organization what you are doing and why the 360 is being conducted. It should be presented as part of leadership development and not a performance review. 360 Surveys should not be part of an employee’s official file and should not be used in determining employment (the performance review is the document to use in these situations). Raters need to be informed that their responses are anonymous and that their scores will be aggregated and presented to the target as one score (the exception being Supervisors scores). Participation in the survey is required and everyone who is invited to participate is expected to do so. It is also beneficial to disclose who will have access to the reports and how the data will be acted upon.

4. Include all people who have people management responsibility to participate in survey
We recommend that everyone who has people management responsibility to be included in the 360 campaign. Managers want to know how others’ perceive their behavior and usually welcome the opportunity to receive candid feedback. Do not limit the survey to your best or worst managers, all managers deserve this feedback despite their performance. If you have a large company, you may chose to survey specific levels of managers at one time and spread the process out over the course of the year. Furthermore, if your competencies are different at management levels, the survey items should reflect this change.

5. Develop a Rating Scale
One common error most 360 Survey companies make is the rating scale that determines how feedback is provided. This often overlooked component is critical to your survey’s success. The normal 10 point rating scale is not your best bet. People have been exposed to this so often that they frequently come with strong biased that they don’t even know they have. Furthermore, raters will not use a 10 point scale; it is difficult to get them to use 4 ratings. Our preference is a 6 point scale, we like it better that the 5 point scale because it makes the rater take a stand. There is no neutral score when the choices are an even number, odd number scales allow for a neutral score which is not very helpful to the target.

Additionally, do not ask the rater to state if they “agree” or “disagree” with an item. The more objective approach is to ask the rater if they observe the behavior (never-always). Targets understand that their behavior changes based upon their audience, this rating scale is better received and more objective.

6. Company’s Administrator sends reports to Targets and others designated to receive the information
Once the survey is complete, it is important to distribute the reports to the targets as quickly as possible. Every person who has access to the report should receive a copy and review the results. We have found the distributing the survey via email as a PDF attachment works best. Historically, reports have been printed and handed out as written reports. It is our experience that electronic reports are preferable because they are easier to distribute and save.

7. Target’s boss reviews the results with them and future developmental plan is agreed upon
After reports have been distributed, someone should review the report with each target. This person is generally the target’s supervisor or a coach who works with the manager. It is imperative that the target study the report and understand the data that is being shared. Once the report has been reviewed, agree upon 2-3 developmental goals for the coming year. The target should make a commitment to develop and state specifically what they will do over the course of the year to improve. The supervisor or coach should follow up with the candidate to ensure the actions were taken.

8. Conduct survey again to ensure behavioral changes
There are situations when it is beneficial to conduct surveys more frequently than once a year (we recommend conducting 360 surveys on an annual basis). Targets who have significant deficiencies in behavior can benefit from more regular feedback. Behavioral changes usually takes place after the person is conscious of the problem and motivated to make changes. Regular feedback of a deficiency can be the motivator that a manager needs to improve his/her behavior. Once a manager understands that they will not be able to ignore the problem any longer, they will either make improvements or deselect themselves from the position.