Tips for Gathering Performance Feedback – Part Two
Posted by Laura on January 13, 2009
The second installment of what I’ve learned conducting 360 reviews.
2. Determine the best format for the desired outcomes.
If you’re seeking feedback, you can gather it through an online survey (Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo are easy to use and either free or cheap), by interviewing people yourself, or by asking a third party to conduct interviews.
The questions you ask, and the way you ask them, determine the answers you will get. Do a test run of your survey or interview questions to understand how respondents interpret and answer them. Here are some different purposes for reviews I’ve conducted, and how we designed it accordingly:
a) Baseline comparison. One person wanted a baseline gauge of her abilities in ten different areas. She planned to compare these baseline results with the results a year later. In this case, the design was fairly straightforward: survey questions were designed to evaluate the ten areas in both qualititative and quantitative ways. The exact same survey can be used a year from now to show if there has been any improvement in her performance in these areas. The entire survey was conducted online.
b) Recognition and direction. Another individual wanted to know if he was meeting goals he had set for himself, and wanted input into what goals to work on next. We used rating scale questions to see how well he was achieving goals, and open-ended questions to explore areas of strength and weakness. Respondents answered online, and we had follow-up telephone discussions with a subset of respondents to explore their answers further.
c) Exploratory and relationship-focused. A third individual wanted to understand what his team knew about him that he didn’t know. Rather than an online survey, this performance review consisted of open-ended questions in telephone conversations, and was more participant-directed than client-directed. The outcome was a series of themes and learning opportunities that we might not have discovered if we had set out with our own pre-formed questions to explore.
Next post: part three – trust and relationship-building while conducting reviews.
