Performance Review Imput by Peers Catches On at More Firms
One-on-one job performance reviews can be unnerving enough, so the possibility of being rated by peers and subordinates can jolt anxiety levels even higher. Nevertheless, many companies and their employees are deciding that evaluations from several sources provide a more complete and balanced picture of individual performance.
The process, often known as 360-degree feedback, is at least 17 years old, but is just now gaining favor, said human resources consultant Tom Pawlak of Towers Perrin in New York.
It stands apart from traditional, top-down reviews by seeking the evaluations of not just an employee’s superior, but his or her peers, subordinates and sometimes clients as well. Often the system is used merely as a tool for personal development, but many companies are starting to use multisource evaluations to make salary and promotion decisions.
“For most people, it is more feedback than they have ever had in their lives about how others perceive them,” said Alaine Weiss, manager of training and organization development at Beckman Instruments. The Fullerton-based company, which specializes in laboratory automation, has been testing pilot multisource evaluations since 1995, and Weiss is sold on the concept. Employees who go through it like it, she said.
“We always do post-assessment and responses have been very favorable. Ninety percent of the participants think they get better feedback from multiple sources.”
A recent national survey of 750 blue-chip companies by Towers Perrin showed that almost 70% will use some form of multisource evaluation within the next three years, compared with 10% now and less than 1% a decade ago.
Companies have tended to step softly in this area because the idea of 360-degree evaluations makes a lot of people uneasy when they first hear about it. Managers may see such evaluations as a challenge to their authority. Lower level employees may also be unnerved. After all, in a traditional evaluation, a worker needs to please only one supervisor. Inject the opinions of co-workers, even customers, and the anxiety can begin to build. What if your critics don’t really know what they’re talking about? What if your enemies collude against you?
Collusion can be detected, proponents say, but another primal fear of the process is realistic: the prospect of hearing something about yourself that you don’t really want to know. Not that that couldn’t happen in a standard top-down review, but you could dismiss the criticism of one supervisor as misguided. When your co-workers and clients have the same opinion, it’s a lot harder to duck.
Multisource evaluations are also regarded as a more comprehensive measure of an employee’s leadership, communication and team-building abilities, skills that companies are putting a premium on these days.
Critics complain that such emphasis on measuring intangibles is merely a fad that doesn’t connect to the bottom line. Cartoonist Scott Adams of “Dilbert” fame regularly belittles the trend and calls 360-degree performance reviews “a chance to threaten your boss with mutually assured destruction.”
Scientists and engineers at Beckman Instruments had other objections. Many refused to participate in Weiss’s voluntary multisource evaluation pilot program, arguing that their value to the company is based on their technical expertise, not on their team skills or communication abilities.
“They were also concerned about how this data might be used down the road,” said Weiss, landing on perhaps the thorniest aspect of implementing multisource performance evaluations: deciding whether to use them for salary and promotion decisions.
Beckman Instruments uses 360-evaluations solely as a learning tool. A consultant compiles results and shares general assessments about group performance with management. Specific individual results are revealed only to the subjects.
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Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space has just begun using multisource evaluations at its Sunnyvale headquarters, said leadership program manager Dee Imazeki. So far the information is only for personal development, but the company intends to use the method for evaluations eventually. One reason it will do so is because the young employees Lockheed hopes to attract prefer it.
Many older Lockheed employees also see it as a move in the right direction. “People feel that a competency-based system is fair,” Imazeki said.
