Too Many Cooks?
Looking for better ways to gauge the character and abilities of their workers, business leaders are increasingly tinkering with the traditional top-down performance review by weighing comments from peers and subordinates, as well as supervisors, to craft broader assessments of employees.
But in bringing more people into the evaluation process, which so-called 360-degree feedback does, many managers have found that office politics can taint the results of the multi-source appraisal method, one of the fastest-growing trends in human resource offices across the country.
“If a person knows he’s going to have 360, he’ll go around to his employees and peers and say, ‘Give me high marks and I’ll reciprocate,’ and what you get is inflated scores,” said Larry Axline of San Antonio-based Holt Consulting Services Inc., which performs 360-degree evaluations. “That happens frequently.”
Conversely, a 360 assessment in the hands of an office rival is potential dynamite for the reputation of the employee under review, warned David Bruesehoff, director of human resources at Ernst & Young’s regional headquarters in Irvine.
“Any time you get people together, you get politics,” he said.
Recognizing human nature is certainly easier than overcoming it, but Bruesehoff and other observers of corporate culture advise that there are ways to “depoliticize” the 360-degree process.
No evaluation process is effective unless participants are honest in their opinions, and 360-degree is no different. The catch, however, is trying to keep entire offices of job appraisers honest rather than just a single boss or cadre of supervisors.
A key way to encourage honesty, Axline said, is to make sure all participants support the process. Before implementing 360 feedback, he said, businesses need to tell employees how it works, why it is being done and why it’s important for them to be forthright. And everyone, he said, including top executives, should be reviewed.
“The CEO should be the first in line,” Axline said. “If that doesn’t happen, it can be very threatening and divisive.” Ernst & Young’s Western region decided to start with company partners from Denver to Honolulu when it began using 360-degree feedback last year, Bruesehoff said.
To foster sincerity, the process was also made voluntary, Bruesehoff said, and participants were told the evaluations were for personal development only. The conclusions were to have no bearing on salaries, bonuses or promotions, and those being evaluated were free to discard the results if they wanted to.
All but three of the region’s 110 accounting and consulting partners agreed to the assessment, and more than 80% of those “were very much in favor of what they went through and got from the process,” Bruesehoff said.
Keeping responses anonymous is another way to ensure honesty, especially in “upward feedback” from subordinates. “I’m liable to be more candid about feedback if I know it’s not going to go to human resources with my name on it,” said Kevin Hummel of Towers Perrin, a management and human resources consulting firm that coordinates 360-feedback for companies.
While people being evaluated should know the makeup of their review group, Hummel said, the source of any particular piece of feedback should be kept confidential. Hiring an outside consulting firm to process responses, he suggests, can help allay employee misgivings about honest opinions coming back to burn them.
Bruesehoff also advises assembling feedback groups of at least 12 people to lessen the chances that evaluation subjects can trace anonymous comments to their sources.
Employees, from supervisors to support staff, will also be more willing to speak truthfully if they have some say in the design of the process and the questions asked.
“When we work with a client, we typically have a design team that is representative of the target population, so that we have input from the people who are going to be the end users,” Hummel said. “It gives them ownership, and ownership increases the likelihood that it is going to be used properly.”
Even if employees don’t have a hand in the design, Hummel said, the 360-degree questionnaire should at the very least be tailored specifically to individual companies and job descriptions. “You have to make sure the content and the questions are valid for the population or it won’t make a difference.”
That’s exactly what Mary Settle, director of human resources for former aircraft giant McDonnell Douglas Corp., found out.
In 1996, the company contracted with a consulting firm to administer 360-degree evaluations to the company’s 40,000 salaried employees, including 6,000 at the company’s C-17 airplane assembly facilities in Long Beach.
Questions were the same for all categories of employees, and, therefore, results were broad and nebulous. “It was so generic you couldn’t get specific feedback about what you could do to improve,” Settle said.
“It kind of detracted from the value of their feedback because it was so generic. You can’t give the same questionnaire to a clerical worker as you would a manager.”
Settle now oversees human relations for Seattle-based Boeing Co., which acquired McDonnell last year. She said Boeing plans to continue using 360-degree feedback but wants it modified for specific job descriptions. The company is also considering making it voluntary for all but managers.
Despite its shortcomings, Settle said, the McDonnell Douglas process had a positive side: The company was able to keep feedback groups balanced by stipulating that workers and their bosses agree on the composition of the groups.
“Otherwise people were going to try to stack the deck with people they know are going to give them favorable responses,” she said.
Dick Grote, a performance management consultant and author of “The Complete Guide to Performance Appraisals” (Amacom Books, 1996), recommends “Olympic scoring” as another tool to ensure balance. Throwing out the most glowing and most disparaging evaluations keeps excessive flattery and excessive criticism from tainting the results.
Grote also favors keeping the process strictly for personal development. Bottom-line considerations such as wages and job security can undermine the objectivity of even the most conscientious employee, he said.
In addition, Grote warned companies that making compensation and promotion decisions from 360-degree evaluations could leave them vulnerable to litigation from disgruntled employees.
“More people are running after a shrinking supply of jobs,” he said. “People are much more sensitive about why Susie got the job and I didn’t. If you use [360] for other reasons than development, you run the risk of having individuals say someone else got a promotion because of a discriminatory process.”
Hummel said that risk is even greater if companies use cookie-cutter methodology. “For it to be legally defensible, you need to do appropriate research to make sure the content is relevant to the work it is supposed to measure.”
Aside from cutting the risk of lawsuits, Settle adds, gearing 360-degree feedback exclusively to personal development is probably its most effective use.
Despite their generic outcomes, Settle said, the McDonnell Douglas evaluations did accomplish an important goal: “It got people talking, and that’s important.”
Settle scoffs at concerns that 360-degree feedback is overly susceptible to office politics.
“In the traditional kind of evaluation process, the boss evaluates the employer and that’s just one person’s perception of your performance,” she said. “Does office politics enter into that? Probably yes.”
