Multirater Feedback For Business Growth; Employee Development
Managing People and Human Resources Management Consultants
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 work 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. Not only that, a multirater feedback system can serve as a powerful catalyst and map for individual and organizational effectiveness.
However, this kind of system requires discipline and skill on the part of all involved. After the feedback is received, 90 percent of the process remains. Moravec and Associates Human Resources Management Consultants have learned that certain conditions must be present for such feedback to produce significantly better performance:
- The survey needs to be tailored to the employees and business strategy: the one-size-fits-all approach does not apply.
- The recipient has to have ears that want to hear. This requires a supportive management 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 acquire new technical or supervisory skills and apply the new competencies to their jobs.
One of Moravec and Associates' clients reported that of the 30 people who received multirater feedback, seven were promoted, within a year, to higher positions. Senior executives believe this is due to their having a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses and performance management.. Their promotions prevented management from having to go externally to fill those positions.
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 executing 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 human resources decisions.
- Use an outside consultant to deliver feedback during the launch phase. This creates trust in the process; since the information is confidential at this phase, participants do not fear that it will be used against them.
- 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.
- Use pre and post assessments to ensure that the strategy and individual reap the full benefits of 360-degree feedback.
- Provide adequate resources - including time away from and on the job - for training, skill application, coaching, and recognition.
- Provide for periodic analysis, by someone outside the organization, to ensure that the process delivers improvements in workforce performance and business growth.
The design, implementation and follow-up of the 360-degree assessment not only affect the assessment itself, but can also positively influence strategic transformation.
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