Judging Workers From All Sides

In May 1996, the Department of Education made a major change in the way it critiques its 4,600 employees. The department’s old method of managers rating their subordinates was dismissed and replaced by what are called “360-degree evaluations.”

“The impetus behind it was that the old system was broken,” said Joe Colantuoni, director of management systems improvement at the department. “The key is we’re trying to manage performance; the old system didn’t do that.”

The 360-degree evaluations, so dubbed because they include feedback from every direction, cull observations from everyone an employee interacts with to illustrate the worker’s strengths and weaknesses. That means managers, co-workers, subordinates and, in many cases, clients or customers. Even the employee being evaluated gets a say. It’s a big departure from the old system, based solely on the manager’s judgments.

“It comes from the realization that everyone has customers,” Colantuoni said. “The idea is to work as a team.” At the Education Department, managers, co-workers, customers and subordinates evaluate one another via a computer program that is relatively quick and easy to use, Colantuoni said.

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Government and private employers increasingly are switching to 360-degree evaluations as a way to develop and nurture employees, rather than simply to grade them. The new approach generally is not used to determine raises or promotions but rather to spur discussion and stimulate improvement. The new tack also aims to increase equality by shielding employees from worker-manager personality conflicts that may unfairly shade evaluations, according to Tom Morris, president of Morris Associates, a career management services firm in the District of Columbia.

“It’s becoming a more frequently used process for both evaluation and development,” Morris said. “It’s much more of a management tool. The old way was quite often perceived as a report card.”

Yet, while some employers have found that 360-degree evaluations can help solve old problems, the new evaluation style can create some new difficulties as employees struggle to adapt to it and companies wrestle with how to administer it.

That’s because 360-degree evaluations are emblematic of wider changes in workplace cultures. No longer can employees operate independently; they are forced to think as a team, and they must be aware that all of their actions are open to criticism, Morris said. For an employee who is productive but has trouble communicating with co-workers, that can be tough to take.

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This openness also can cause problems if employees see it as a chance to take a free shot at someone or pass blame to a co-worker.

“People will always shade it a little bit,” Morris said, “but you’re likely to get reliable ballpark information, and that’s what you’re looking for.” To eliminate ill will, the employee being evaluated rarely knows who wrote which reviews, Morris added.

Management experts say that to ensure that 360-degree evaluations fulfill their purpose, companies must provide a strong foundation and continued support of the approach.

At the Education Department, for instance, this meant a year of planning before the new evaluations were introduced. Even with the proper foundation, the department must invest another three to five years in finding out whether the evaluations are having the desired results, Colantuoni said.

“If it ends up improving morale and cutting back complaints,” he said, “and at the same time improving communication and performance, then the benefits far outweigh the cost. But the jury is still out.”