Multirater Feedback for Business Growth and Employee Development
Moravec and Associates Performance Improvement Practice
Over 50% of employees express dissatisfaction with traditional supervisory feedback. They feel it is punitive or at least judgmental. For their part, managers wonder how they can help employees get beyond denial and resistance to acknowledgement and accountability for new behaviors.
Yet feedback is necessary for performance management and human asset development. Human Resource professionals want it to enhance employee involvement and supervisors' coaching roles. The top three reasons executives give for feedback are to provide information to employees, to clarify organization expectations, and to identify development needs and measurements. Multirater or full-circle assessments from peers, direct reports, subordinates, supervisors, contractors, suppliers, etc. (sometimes known as 360-degree feedback) address these concerns better than supervisory performance appraisals.
However, multirater feedback requires discipline and skill on the part of all involved. After the feedback is received, 90 percent of the process remains. Moravec and Associates consultants have learned that certain conditions must be present for such feedback to produce changes in behavior:
- The survey needs to be tailored to the employees: the one-size-fits-all approach does not apply.
- The recipient has to have ears that want to hear. This requires a supportive organizational climate in which everyone accepts that they are a work-in-progress.
- The employee must be able to control the process-that is, he or she must choose or help to choose timing, survey selection, participants, action planning, and measures of success.
- Feedback recipients need thorough follow-up to change behavior and to develop and apply new capacities.
Recommendations for launching and sustaining Multirater Feedback
- Have sponsors use the process personally as raters and ratees, so that they can more clearly define expectations for it.
- Ensure that sponsors comprehend the implications of process design decisions for vision, values, and business strategy.
- Use pilot groups.
- Train raters (those who fill out reports) and ratees (those who are rated) together in groups.
- Train the managers who will use the data for decisions.
- Communicate progress frequently and thoroughly.
- Hold raters accountable for their input.
- Hold ratees accountable for quality of feedback and action planning.
- Implement follow-up processes to ensure quality of compliance.
- Provide adequate resources for coaching, counseling, and skill development.
- Provide for periodic reviews, by someone outside the department or organization, to ensure that the process is used objectively and appropriately.
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