The top-down hierarchy still has its place in Canadian business, but increasingly, it’s all about the team. Teams are created for special projects; to work in tandem with other departments towards a particular goal; or to form more permanent structures, such as departments, units, sales forces, and so on. It used to be that the performance of each individual team member was assessed directly by their manager. But increasingly, companies are starting to realize that there really is no ‘I’ in team.

Lately, the employee evaluation paradigm is shifting to a more holistic approach whereby the employee is evaluated from multiple angles: their own self-assessment is considered, and so are evaluations by peers, customers, vendors, support staff, other departments, and the team. This 360-degree feedback can be a more accurate measure of an employee’s performance; after all, a manager might only witness a tiny percentage of their employee’s daily contribution to the team compared to the people working on the same project.

In today’s highly competitive business environment, organizations are continuously looking to improve performance…but in order for employees to adapt, they have to know exactly what needs improvement. This can be a difficult proposition for traditional employee evaluation forms; after all, the manager hasn’t necessarily witnessed the behaviours that should change. Benefits of team feedback include:

Obviously, it’s key for you as an HR manager to find out whether work teams – teams you may have no direct supervision over – are working smoothly. It might be naïve to expect all team members to be perfectly in sync since conflict is a part of life. But you do want to know that overall, the team can come together as a cohesive group to get the job done. On a team-based employee evaluation form, you might want to ask if the individual:

With this kind of employee assessment, it’s important to make sure the team is large enough that one rater’s viewpoint can’t have too significant an impact on the overall results. If the team is smaller than three to five people, it might be necessary to combine departments or groups to maintain the confidentiality of the employee evaluation forms. But if done properly, this form of 360-degree feedback can play a major role in helping the team understand, and improve upon, its current dynamics.