Introducing 360 Reviews

Organizations struggle to truly understand employee performance and to identify employees’ strengths and weaknesses. Many obstacles can stand in the way.

As an integrated part of the Performance and Goals bundle, 360 Reviews help organizations capture a more balanced and complete view of employee performance by soliciting feedback from various sources. Managers can more effectively identify gaps in performance and chart employees’ development courses.

360 Reviews help to identify employee blind spots and hidden strengths to guide development. They can also be used as a multi-rater assessment that can factor into an employee’s formal performance review.

360 Reviews can coincide with the performance review cycle or off-cycle as a completely separate process.

Watch this video for an overview of the 360 Form and its basic components.

A 360 Reviews route map consists of stages similar to a Performance Review route map. An additional stage called Evaluation is inherent to a 360 process. It is in this stage where the actual assessment of the subject takes place.

The following table describes the stages of a 360 Reviews route map.

At each stage, you can add or reorder steps in the workflow.

During the evaluation step, the employee cannot do anything to the form other than update the raters (if they have the appropriate permissions).

For internal raters, the evaluation process is like any other performance review. When the form is available, a link to that form appears in a Complete Your 360 Evaluation Engagement Card, available in the For You Today section of the Home Page. Alternatively, they can access from the To-Do Panel (Task Center), where a Review Performance action will display all forms on the employee's Inbox, or by accessing the Performance Inbox directly.

External raters have a slightly different process. When they have been invited to give feedback about an employee of an organization, they receive an email as shown in the figure, External Rater Notification.

The external rater can decide to Accept or Decline the invitation to evaluate. If declined, this information is fed back to the original form. If the rater accepts the invitation to evaluate, they must complete a verification process before accessing the form as shown in the figure, External Authorization. Once the verification is completed, they will be able to access the 360 Review form to evaluate.

The steps in the 360 Review process are as follows:

1. Launch the forms.

2. Select raters.

3. Evaluate the review.

This process may vary slightly due to route map configurations and customer requirements.

After reviews have been submitted, the Detailed 360 Review Report is available from the employee’s 360 Review form. Typically, it is the employee’s manager who has access to this report. Managers can access the report from the En Route folder once they provide their own evaluation. Once all participants have submitted their evaluations (or declined to participate), the form is available in the manager’s Completed folder.

After a 360 Review has been fully completed, there are four different views available in the Detailed 360 Report:

• Graphical Summary (default opening view)

• Gap Analysis

• Hidden Strength and Blind Spot

• Rank

You can turn on or off each of these views depending on the needs of the user and the policies of the customer. You can access the Detailed 360 Report from the Completed Forms section in the Performance Inbox.

If the role has permission to view the reports, a Detailed 360 Report link is available in the completed form in the Evaluation Summary section.

Upon opening the Detailed 360 Review Report, the Graphical Summary View displays by default. This view provides an overview rating broken down by the individual rater roles. It also provides a graphical rating and a comment for each individual competency or goal that was rated.

Using form permissions, you can configure the template so that the names of the raters do not show up to specific roles during certain route map steps, including the completed step. This gives both the manager and employees access to the reports, but hides the names of the raters from the employee.

There are several areas in this report, including the following:

• Settings: Including a variety of display options that you can turn on/off for the Overall Rating and Competency Feedback views: Descriptions of Competencies, Comments, Rating Sources, Rating Scores and Bars to Display (to include Expected Ratings, display ratings from specific categories only, and so on).
• Overview: Displays the average overall rating by rater type as well as ratings categorized, and a radar chart for each Competency section. There are also minimum and maximum ratings.
• Analysis by section (example : Competency Feedback): Displays all of the raters’ ratings and comments by competency, in a card view.

The ratings and comments in this report can be configured to roll up if a minimum number of ratings are not met. This helps keep the individual ratings private. If rollup categories are defined, the responses are grouped together. For example, if the minimum number of individual responses has not been met, we can have the direct reports and manager responses roll up together as one category.

The Gap Analysis View identifies differences between the employee’s rating of their own performance and the participants’ performance ratings for the employee. The customer chooses the categories or groups to be compared, like Manager vs Self. Based on their selection, ratings can be compared within the report per each competency or goal section and identify any differences.

If raters rate the employee’s performance higher than the employee does, the employee is notified of strengths that they may be overlooking. If raters rate the employee’s performance lower than the employee does, this could be an area for the employee to develop.

In this report, there is a Settings section at the top where we can turn on/off descriptions and Select and Compare between rater categories and identify rating differences to analyze, followed by an Overview (gap analysis from the Overall Rating) and a section to compare individually ratings per each competency or goal section.

The Hidden Strength and Blind Spot View allows the viewer to see where there is a significant difference between how employees rate themselves compared to how others rate them:

Hidden Strength View

If an employee rates themselves low on a certain competency, but everyone else rates them high, this competency is considered a hidden strength.

Blind Spot View

If the employee rates themselves high on a specific competency, but everybody else rates them low, this competency is a blind spot.

To help with the identification of the employee’s strengths and development opportunities, the Rank View displays the employee’s competency rankings from highest to lowest and lowest to highest.