360 Feedback Surveys
About
Since I became a manager I have been reading about feedback gathering. All in an attempt to improve and try to have my team’s best interests in mind.
One of the tools I quickly found out about and implemented is: 360 feedback surveys. Also 1-1s, but that’s another topic for another time.
360 feedback surveys are short forms that should be shared with everybody you regularly interact with in the workplace and should ask questions so that you (the person running them) can get some actionable feedback on your activity and performance. Optionally anonymous in order to encourage honest (if not blunt at times), feedback.
This can come in handy if the team needs the psychological safety of typing some answers (instead of giving them live, in person) and maybe the safety of anonymity.
Target audience
My target audience is colleagues I regularly interact with. Regardless of level. I also tend to include skip level managers that I know might have an opinion on my work and performance. This is the source of the name 360 feedback, you look in all directions.
If you include people that do not really work with or for you, you might not get a response, or get a shallow one and lose both of your and their time.
Frequency
Speaking about time: After my transition from IC to manager, I have set out to run these surveys every 6 months. So I have done this 3 times now. I haven’t thought twice about the frequency, after reading about others' experience from running surveys I decided I didn’t want to overdo this since the period of time should be long enough that:
- people have time to form opinions
- you have time to act on their feedback (from the previous survey) and maybe see some results
On the other hand people can also get survey fatigue if you’re running them too often. If the feedback is gathered too rarely, then you might continue some behavior that is not appropriate. If this is the case and you’re doing something really bad, then other company mechanisms should kick in, but this is reserved for bad scenarios like consistently not meeting deadlines and losing clients, not for “you’re too strict” or “you might want to be more consistent in setting 1-1s agendas”.
In short: you have to find the sweet spot that works for you.
Questions and their answer type
I aim for a short survey in order to maximize my chances of everybody responding, you don’t want people to get bored with the questions. The questions have to be easy to understand and answer. You don’t want to waste people’s time, reading the email inviting one to take the survey and realizing they will not answer, is lost time and a context switch causing lost productivity for somebody. I’d like to avoid this.
So this is the question list and type (replace Your Name with your actual name):
- Your Name consistently prioritizes the needs of his colleagues
- Answer type: rating on a scale of 1-5 (5 being consistently and 1 being rarely)
- Your Name can be described as a role model in the company
- Answer type: rating on a scale of 1-5
- Your Name completes their work to a high standard with great diligence
- Answer type: rating on a scale of 1-5
- Your Name is transparent in their approach and communicates decisions
- Answer type: rating on a scale of 1-5
- Your Name is often focused on the task at hand and completing projects
- Answer type: rating on a scale of 1-5
- Your Name is clear in how they communicate with other team members
- Answer type: rating on a scale of 1-5
- Your Name brings a good attitude into their work and works with others
- Answer type: rating on a scale of 1-5
- What is one thing Your Name should start doing/improving in their role?
- Answer type: text
- What should Your Name continue doing in their role that works well?
- Answer type: text
- What should Your Name stop doing that isn’t working for him?
- Answer type: text
- How does Your Name handle taking feedback and putting it into practice?
- Answer type: text
- What did you learn from Your Name?
- Answer type: text
- What is a piece of information that Your Name is missing and he needs to know?
- Answer type: text
- How could you see Your Name taking the next step in their development?
- Answer type: text
- What is a question you wished was included in this survey? (Please also provide an answer for it)
- Answer type: text
- Your Name (optional!)
- Answer type: text
So, 15 questions, with, at most, 1 minute per question, this will not take more than 15 minutes of your respondents' time. I personally find that acceptable considering that I haven’t changed the questions that much in the three instances I ran this survey.
For the “rating” answers, you ideally have to see an improvement over time. I consistently use 1 as being the lower score, and 5 as being the higher score. This allows me to also compute averages and compare year-to-year or survey-to-survey.
For the “text” answers, I would like to see one or two sentences of actionable feedback.
Disclaimer: I haven’t come up with these myself, but I no longer know which online article I used to come up with this list of questions. For example I now find the fact that I speak in 3rd person about myself icky. I might change this in the future, but some of the questions were worded this way where I sourced them from and I kept all of them similar.
Question 15 is a meta-question and it helped me refine the survey itself. At first, the “rating” questions were “yes/no” questions. Through this 15th question I learned this might not work very well and people wanted to provide a “rating”, which is more granular and helps with seeing improvement over time.
My experience with the answers
This is the part that actually prompted me to write this piece.
Seeing the 360 feedback survey one of my peers asked:
“I would like to learn your verdict about this way of getting team feedback”
Well, it depends. In my limited experience, keep in mind I’ve only done it three times, there’s two types of people:
- those who write their name and have some soft feedback, which is usually easily put into practice since it’s reduced to “do more of the same”.
- those who’d like to remain anonymous (this is actually the target audience due to the psychological aspect mentioned earlier) and have “harsher” feedback to offer. Because of the anonymity they actually offer it since otherwise they don’t do it in 1-1 meetings.
The “harsher” feedback ranges from (paraphrasing a bit):
- “the wheel is turning, now you’re on top, you might hit bottom next” - I can’t do anything about this… not actionable, somewhat aggressive. My manager actually warned me that, under the anonymity protection, accountability might go out the window 😊
- to: “hey you’re too strict, please let us work in our own rhythm”, and “please rely more on your instincts, not on process” - which I can act upon and I appreciate.
Conclusion
Take what’s written in these with a pinch of salt (since anonymity can make people crueler), but I really see the value here for these actionable items and it helps me really see what they are seeing.
Still, I would really like that the actionable feedback be delivered to me when I ask at the end of 1-1s “what I can change, what can I do different?" in person - so I can discuss and learn more 🙂 but… psychological safety is not yet at that level unfortunately. So … on to increasing it together with the HR department by running stay-in interviews (something that I didn’t know existed until now).
One interesting point from my peer that asked me about these, with which I agree, is that usually the negative feedback of one person, delivered in a retrospective meeting (oh, hey, SCRUM) can actually negatively influence the other team members which, initially, didn’t share this opinion. Hence, this form of feedback gathering is a nice addition to these retro meetings - which anyway, according to SCRUM are focused on the process itself and this is more high level, department & me oriented, not per project itself or one project specific team.
Thumbnail photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash