360 Appraisals for 
Human Resource Professionals

Restore Your Faith in Employee Feedback Using 360 Degree Appraisals

Have you given up on employee reviews? Do you dread the work that goes into conducting them and reporting them? We don’t blame you. It’s time to try something different.


Performing a 360 degree appraisal allows you to collect information from multiple sources, including those who spend the most time with the staff member that you’re analyzing. This saves you the wasted time and money associated with traditional reviews.


Grapevine helps you:

 

  • Avoid the headaches of creating your own employee review system
  • Save time and money with a simple plug and play tool
  • Get a measurable ROI through happier and more productive employees

 

360 appraisals are a simple, customizable and effective method of gathering information about personnel. But instead of only one person providing the necessary information, HR professionals learn from everybody who interacts with the employee.


This allows you to discover in-depth details that would otherwise remain unheard. The reviews are completely anonymous, so they eliminate problems like office politics or people answering diplomatically instead of honestly.

Traditional employee feedback is based on the opinions of a single supervisor, manager or superior. Your perspective is limited to a singular point-of-view. But with 360 appraisal, you gain a new perspective from an employee’s:


  • Coworkers
  • Superiors
  • Subordinates
  • and even customers

Grapevine understands the needs of the HR Professional. Our tool assists you in creating, distributing, managing, and evaluating all stages of the appraisal process, easily and efficiently.


And, you can track participation and follow up as needed.

We are proud to partner with businesses of all sizes and sectors, including large international companies such as Thomson Reuters and tech companies such as Pandora Radio.


Want to learn more? Simply take a tour here or request a demo here. Or you can call us toll-free at 1-866-385-1425.

How Technology Changes The Everyday Lives of HR Managers

When it comes to reporting and measuring employee performance, many HR professionals consider using a variety of software tools obtainable in the market. Although, in some of the cases, these tools would not provide the type of evaluation features that your team are looking for. That is why so many employers are moving to perform 360 degree performance appraisals to substitute those traditional software tools in the market.


Today many organizations and companies are taking interest in 360 degree evaluation to judge their employees’ morale, values, decision making, quality and organizational communication. This method is considered as a human resource device to analyze a company's potential.

The Main Idea

With this type of evaluation, managers, direct supervisors,  or co-workers and subordinates on the same level get a chance to give honest feedback about the employee’s performance.


The essence of this evaluation is to offer a balanced outlook on an employee.

The Process

They then grade other members of the staff on particular competencies with the help of a rating scale. They are also given the opportunity to mark up their survey with real examples. Finally, the rated employee has a chance to measure their own performance. 


After completing 360 degree evaluations, many employers have found that they and their staff are able to achieve an apparent understanding of the employee’s weaknesses and strength.


Evaluations help staff and their leaders recognize the results and create an action plan to work on those areas that require improvement. 


If completed on a regular basis, your team will be able to maintain higher quality of work.

Why Anonymous Feedback Is So Important

Sometimes rivalry amongst colleagues makes evaluations ineffective and not at all objective. Anonymous assessments are one of the many good things about 360 degree evaluations.


This appraisal system is important for managers and firms and helps an organization know how efficient their employees are and what they think about their colleagues.

Reduce Time Spent on Reviews

Employee evaluation software is becoming popular among all types of big and small organizations. This is because of its superb features that reduce burden on HR and management. Evaluations can now be done in just a click of a button. 


In addition to this, 360 degree evaluation software is not time consuming leaving HR professionals and leadership staff more time to spend on important tasks. This has further encouraged managers to perform employee evaluations more frequently, giving employees better, more attainable goals.

Best Practices To Get Useful Feedback From 360 Appraisals

The best practices of employee evaluations are comprised of four essential stages. 

Step 1

First, the manager or evaluator meets each of the employees to make a plan that describes how the employees should be performing their job and what goals they need to accomplish. This way, the employees will come to know the list of expectations their employer wants them to fulfill.

Step 2

In the next step, the managers help the employees to implement the plan they have created. The manager and the employees have to work as a team to make sure they reach their goals and take the responsibility of accomplishing the tasks successfully. The HR manager provides training and feedback and takes initiative to ask questions while providing additional coaching if needed. 

Step 3

HR managers get ready for annual evaluation by first analyzing the plan they had created at the beginning of the year and the data that shows how well each of the employees have performed to attain their goals.

Step 4

In the final stage of the appraisal process, managers and employees scrutinize the plan that has been created at the beginning of the year, or the employees’ appraisal form and other vital data that was accumulated by the manager over the last year. They also discuss goals reached, goals still outstanding, and what the employees will do to make improvements. Managers will also schedule a meeting to make plans for the coming year.


Employee evaluations can help the workforce to understand how well their individual performance fits into the organization’s structure and how they can drive the company’s success as well as build their own career.

Giving A Fair Appraisal

When you have set unrealistic or unattainable goals and standards, it will bring resentment and disappointment for your employees. You should set goals by taking into consideration the working environment and other factors that are beyond effortless reach.


Give emphasis on the job, rather than on your workers’ personality. Just focus on the workplace mannerism if it is the problem. Moreover, be honest while conducting employee performance evaluations. If you are not telling your employees about their performance problems, they will not know whether they need to make improvements. Even though it may not be comfortable for anyone to accept the truth, they still deserve to identify where they stand and how they can move forward.


Manage and backup the appraisal data so that when your employees review it, they are able to comprehend clearly their past performance and how they can improve. The assessment will help them to gauge their true performance levels.


What Can Be Discussed During An Employee Review Meeting?

An Employees Role in the Company- Discuss new and outstanding tasks

Performance- Confer in detail on how well they are performing and all aspects they are required to progress on.



Salary- This is an open opportunity for employees to discuss why they would like an increase in salary. Salary increase and compensation based on performance leads to a content workforce.

What Types Of Employees Are Easily Identifiable With 360 Appraisal?

The Good

Everyone on your team loves this employee — even if they don’t always say it. This is because they do all of the dirty work (without complaint) and are thus considered an invaluable teammate by everyone. A 360 performance appraisal, which forces employees honestly look at how someone affects the team’s performance, easily uncovers these hidden workhorses.

Employees who fall into this category produce results similar to your unsung heroes but receive even less attention for their efforts. This is mostly because they, as the name suggests, are quiet. Their introverted nature causes your team to unwittingly downplay their actions. 360 performance appraisals, which do not factor in personalities, are excellent tools to help you look past a quiet employee’s introversion and only focus on their performance.

The Bad

Some employees can seem like company rockstars, even when they aren’t. This is often due to strong self-hype, wherein they ensure that every positive action they take is known by the entire company.


360 performance appraisals are designed to see past what someone says about their performance and assess only their actions.


They also help an unwitting braggart get a clear picture of their performance for the first time because their self-evaluations will be overblown relative to how everyone else rates them.

Every company has a seemingly talented employee who just doesn’t seem to fit. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are lazy, incompetent or less talented than you initially thought. It could be that they are simply a round peg in a square hole, meaning that while they are a great fit for your company, their role needs to be changed to get the most out of them.


You can identify this need for change by seeing how an employee is rated in different skill areas on their evaluation. This is where you can really get the most out of your 360 evaluations, because as San Diego State University’s Terri Linman said in a recent scholarly journal, it is designed to “Support feedback with back-up services or customized coaching” so that you can have a clear path for performance improvement (which could include switching roles).

Avoiding Common Mistakes


The Recency Effect

Never let one recent screw-up taint an employee appraisal for the entire year.


Employee appraisals can sometimes be spoiled by what’s called the “Recency effect.” Basically, this happens when an employee has a great year, with the exception of a recent mistake. This mistake is still fresh in people’s minds at the time of review and might be all people can associate with that employee.


Our 360 employee feedback avoids this by giving you reactions and reviews from every level of an employee position. So, you’re not just getting feedback from people who were affected by a recent mistake—like their direct superior. You can also customize your questions to make sure you’re assessing the entire 12-month period.

Simple Ways To Make Feedback Less Stressful

360 performance appraisals can be stressful—just like any performance review.


The experience can be fraught with stress on both sides. Nobody likes to feel judged, nor does anyone enjoy giving someone bad news. Unfortunately, these are the two feelings associated with employee performance reviews.


Here are a few little things you can do to improve the experience.

Provide feedback all year

If your employees are only receiving feedback once a year, they’re going to dread it more. So be there all year round to give praise and tips on how to improve. A little conversation, once a week, will really make things easier come review time. 


Rely on facts and figures

Your employees are giving feedback about how someone fits on their team, so it’s natural to feel like their personality is being critiqued. Stress that this is not the case, and make sure they receive lots of objective and number-based feedback on their performance, to bookend the more subjective feedback. 

Maintain a two-way conversation

Just sitting and listening isn’t going to help anyone from feeling uncomfortable. So give them lots of opportunities to contribute to the process— to ask questions or address any concerns.