Benefits of 360° feedback

Most of your managers will have experienced appraisal schemes, and will have been through different development programmes. When you are introducing them to 360° feedback you will need to communicate clearly what the process is about and how it works.

The following points may help managers and your organisation understand the real benefits that 360° feedback will bring to them:

-	360° feedback can be a powerful experience for the individual manager. The information reveals how effective he/she is in a wide variety of work based settings. It provides invaluable information about his/her style, and its impact, as seen by all interested parties.
-	The manager has an unrivalled opportunity to consider his/her personal style, strengths and development needs objectively, focusing on the factors and situations relevant to the specific role. Personal perceptions are compared with the observations of line manager, colleagues and direct reports. The implications of these comparisons can then be explored and an appropriate personal development plan created which addresses the most critical areas.
-	Because the feedback is based on real workplace situations, rather than on theory the data is completely relevant and enables the manager to focus on what must be done to improve effectiveness in a variety of settings. Research into the impact of 360° feedback shows that because managers recognise the feedback is fair, balanced and based on the actual work place the data has high face validity and is accepted more easily.
-	Research and experience indicate that effective use of 360° feedback is proving to be a strong motivating force with managers, enabling them to focus their development and promote lasting behaviour change.
-	The organisation can merge projects, store information and interrogate the data to focus current training and development accurately and plan an effective management development strategy for the future.
-	Improved individual performance will result in an improved overall performance of your organisation by meeting and exceeding those key indicators that make the difference between average and outstanding managers.

Benefits of Compass360 online

-	Secure and confidential system
-	All questionnaires completed online (paper based option also available).
-	Use your own competency or key performance indicator model and rating scale, or use our generic Compass Model.
-	Open-ended questions or narrative in the questionnaire will appear in reports.
-	Option to gather specific development activity suggestions from rater's lowest scored behaviours in the questionnaire.
-	Customise email messages sent out by the system to subjects and raters.
-	Flexible definition of types of relationship between subject and rater.
-	Reuse libraries of different competency models and feedback report styles across your organisation.
-	Customisable feedback reports generated as a single pdf file for printing.
-	Feedback reports can be generated at any time, provided there is enough data about a subject.
-	Subjects are able to monitor their own feedback survey.
-	Feedback reports can be generated by subjects or sent to a designated email address on an agreed date.
-	Secure and confidential system
-	Produce aggregate reports across all the subjects in a project or across a number of projects.
-	The raw data is available as CSV, an open format suitable for use in other applications e.g. Excel.

Online feedback: the process options

Bureau Service

One of our Compass360 administrators will set up and manage your 360 feedback projects.
In discussion with you they will:

-	Input your key performance indicators and behaviours
-	Agree and input the questionnaire rating scale, colleague relationships, free text comments structure, average scores data, benchmarks etc. as required.
-	Agree content/text and send out project information e-mails to subjects and colleagues
-	E-mail and agree set-up information text for web pages
-	Monitor questionnaire completion by subjects and colleagues
-	Chase up late questionnaire completers
-	Regularly update the company project co-ordinator on project progress
-	Agree format/content and generate feedback reports as required
-	Ensure your 360° projects meet the agreed deadlines

Self-Managed website

One of your company 360° project co-ordinators/administrators will have access to the site via an administration interface and be able to carry out all the tasks listed above as an internal bureau service.

Alternatively, the site can be set up so that subjects can visit when required and manage their own 360° feedback process. Overall progress can be monitored by the company co-ordinator as with a bureau project.

-	Subjects (candidates) receive e-mails from the system with an introduction to the 360° process and an internet address to complete their self questionnaire
-	Subjects enter the email addresses of colleagues and the system sends out messages asking for their assistance as raters in the completion of feedback questionnaires
-	In addition subjects also receive an address for a monitor page where they can check on the progress of their own 360° survey, i.e. how many colleagues have completed their questionnaires so far
-	Subjects can generate their own feedback reports when a predetermined number of colleagues have completed their questionnaires
-	Alternatively reports can be generated and sent to subjects on an agreed date and/or to a separate agreed e-mail address, e.g. to someone in the HR department