360° review

A '360° Review' is a personal audit in which a range of people with whom an individual works are asked to evaluate his or her effectiveness by answering a questionnaire. The name is used because people who work in all kinds of relationships with the individual are involved. For example, junior staff, a group of peers and their management may all complete the questionnaire. Results are summarised in a series of bar charts and numerical tables, along with all the comments provided. These reviews are judged to be amongst the most robust and reliable methods of evaluation because of the number and range of people involved. The participant usually is asked to choose the respondents in order to give maximum credibility to the results.

They

• Provide clear and accurate feedback on individual/team performance
• Complement to existing performance review procedures
• Identify the individual’s management of internal and external clients
• Highlight problem areas
• Identify development needs

When To Use A 360° Review

There are three main applications and employers, both large and small, commonly use all three. The highest levels of use have been achieved in larger organisations where well-established human resource practices and procedures exist.

As a performance review tool

Most organisations undertake annual or bi-annual performance reviews and it is common for a brief 360° Review to be adopted as one input to this process. The results summary can then be included among the topics covered during review discussions between individual and manager.

Diagnostic work with staff

It is common for the 360° Review to be used to identify or highlight problems associated with staff who are performing below expectation. It provides an honest and candid summary of colleagues' views. This can then be used to pinpoint development areas that will assist the person involved in improving their work performance.

Training and development

A 360° Review can be invaluable in identifying individual career development needs and likely succession opportunities.

It is also frequently used for team development purposes, allowing each team member’s profile to be compared and contrasted with others in the group.

Why To Use A 360° Review

Their use has grown in popularity over the years. There are several reasons for this:

• The participant usually determines who evaluates them and therefore trusts the process.
• The whole assessment is completely transparent and face validity is high.
• The entire results are shared so the balance of power between reviewer and reviewed is fairly equal.
• People understand what to do with the results and can often do it for themselves. It's highly motivating.

Areas Assessed

The Selby & Mills 360° Review gathers information on 3 areas of performance:-

• Delivery of Results
• Leadership and Communications
• Business Strategy

Each respondent is also asked to indicate the 3 major strengths and 3 major development needs of the person about whom they complete the questionnaire.

The person being reviewed, the ‘Participant’, also completes the 360° Review questionnaire with respect to themselves. 

Tailored Questionnaire

Whilst Selby & Mills have this standard 360° Review, it is easy to tailor this to client requirements by incorporating additional questions which tackle areas that are of particular concern to the client organisation.

Indeed our advanced web technology means that we can construct individual questionnaires for clients quickly and effectively.

Web Based

Our 360° Review questionnaire is fully web based which means that there is no onerous distribution and collection of documents and their subsequent electronic capture. As a result a report can be produced within a few hours of all of the respondents completing the questionnaire.

The system enables an organisation to easily and effectively manage the reviews of a number of participants simultaneously. Each participant is able to initiate emails to their respondents and monitor progress via the system and determine when the report process should commence.