360 Reviews without the Trauma

How self-aware are you?

Have you ever considered this question? Have you ever considered the myriad factors that affect your self-awareness? Have you ever been thoughtful about your blind spots? Have you ever thought that the way that you see yourself may differ from the way that others see you?

If you have, you probably haven’t done it enough. Many of us haven’t really thought about the stuff at all. And those of us who have thought about it, have probably come to the conclusion that we have a lot of blind spots and that there are many obstacles in the way of us really understanding who we are. And yet, it is indisputable that we all stand to benefit tremendously from increased self-awareness.

The more information that we can gain about who we are and what we are about, the better we are. But the thing that a lot of folks don’t really understand is that self-awareness isn’t really a process that should be undertaken by yourself. What self-awareness really means is that you’re going to draw information from all kinds of sources, analyze it in different fashions, be thoughtful about its ramifications on your life, and then make changes through actions based off of your findings. The idea is to hold yourself accountable. Did you really make progress?

In the workplace, the best example of the power of this is with 360 reviews. 360 reviews are a mechanism in which individual employees are reviewed from every possible angle. In other words, you ask your boss, peers and employees/reports who you are, how you are doing, how you can be better, what you do great, and what their thoughts are on your overall workplace performance. This entire idea is not easy to do. And it’s definitely not easy to do well. By definition, subjecting yourself to that level of scrutiny comes with more than a little bit of potential for trauma, and so many people opt out before the discussion even starts. Some are simply not ready for that level of analysis about who they are doing about what they are doing, who they are, how they can be better, or any of those types of things.

The concept of 360 reviews is not widely used, and so it can, from time to time, have a very negative outcome. There are just a lot of obstacles. What should you ask? How can you plan on getting the best results? How do you process the information? How do you preserve anonymity? How do you conduct this process so that it’s productive and so that your employees and leaders can still work with one another when it’s over? These are really important questions that are not considered enough. When they are considered, they often result at the end of the process before it even begins.

At Holistic, we believe very strongly in the power of this type of analysis, so what we’ve done is we have endeavored to create a situation where companies derive all the value of 360 reporting without any of the potential trauma.

Here’s how we do it.

First, we conduct traditional 360 analyses. We prepare the service and implement them directly giving the appropriate people the chance to provide feedback on their peers and their bosses and employees. Because we are the ones who are maintaining the survey, the data is specifically designed to go in our system and is useful as well as anonymous.

We then conduct analysis for each individual recipient of the 360 review, as well as one for the entire company.

Third, we produce reports which are disseminated to the appropriate people. The company leadership gets an overarching report that shows how the company is doing across the spectrum, as well as macro level feedback about how each specific employee is doing. Your specific employee also receives a report about the overall findings, which contains accurate feedback from other reviews. The result is that nobody has their anonymity compromised and everybody has access to the crucial information that they need.

Finally, we work with the company to create goals, objectives, and action items coming out of the service. As always, every aspect of the report feeds strictly in your system and ties to the other pieces of data that we are collecting about the company. We can continue to do 360 reviews over time to measure progress for employees, measure changes in the overall culture of the company, and many other things.

This is simply not something that individual companies can do. Any preservation of anonymity goes completely out the window when a company does 360 reviews for themselves. Also, the data is not particularly useful in its rough, raw form. It needs to be analyzed, measured, and implemented appropriately. That's where Holistic comes in.

360 reviews are a crucial element of the Holistic system. If you’re interested in trying one with us, contact us here. Good luck!