Advantage: It gives you a fuller picture of an employee’s performance
The biggest upside to 360 Feedback is that it gives you a broader idea of an employee’s strengths and weaknesses. As opposed to managerial reviews, this brings in feedback from many different angles, including peers and direct reports, and a self-assessment by the person being appraised. So if someone is great at managing their team, but less so at interacting with senior execs, this is proven out by the feedback they get from those groups.
At a higher level, you can use advanced AI to process large amounts of feedback and spot trends in a department or team. For example, does lack of communication come up in a lot of team members’ reviews of their manager; is there a lack of understanding between 2 departments that often work together?
Disadvantage: It might not be very informed feedback
If you’re asked to comment on someone you don’t really know, most people’s inclination is to be positive, but usually not very specific. This can skew your data and give you a misleading picture of someone’s performance.
- How to avoid: Limit who a person can select to review them, or have the survey administrator select the reviewers – this’ll ensure reviewers are people the subject work with, or have regular contact with.
Advantage: It’s easier to spot development opportunities in teams or departments
If you only ask managers to review their team members, you’re left with enormous blind spots in terms of what that employee could improve upon. A manager gets one view of a team member – but they may be lagging behind when it comes to managing their team members, or interacting with peers. Using advanced AI technology, you can process a huge amount of company-wide feedback and get a detailed idea of strengths and weaknesses within certain teams.
Disadvantage: Too much managerial oversight can deter truthful feedback
If it’s known that managers know who said what, people can feel less confident in giving truthful feedback. And even if their name and role might be hidden, there might be other telltale signs as to who gave the feedback. Or, they’ll feel as though they’re harming a colleague by simply giving feedback at all.
- How to avoid: Think deeply about how you anonymise or attribute feedback and match it to your company culture. In Qualtrics, we make upward and peer feedback anonymous but all manager comments are attributable. There are even a few organisations where no comments are anonymous. However you could keep all feedback anonymous and inaccessible to managers. Alternatively, offer an aggregated view of the data, using AI text analysis, versus verbatim comments.
