Nobody likes having 360 feedback reporting done to them – or do they? They are time consuming, scary for employees and their effectiveness can be questionable. Fortunately, your employee reviews don’t have to stress you out. You can make them easier and more effective by transforming them into professional feedback tools that serve to enhance your workplace productivity, rather than being arbitrary punishments or rewards (depending on the results). Here is how:

Most types of work are difficult to objectively assess. As Jeffrey Pfeffer of Bloomberg Business said in a recent article, such performance reviews “mostly reflect how well employees can ingratiate themselves with the boss.” This dilutes your results, and can make the reviews counterproductive.

Instead of conducting single primary manager reviews, make each employee review a team effort, wherein a collaboration of manager and peer opinions comprises the assessment. This will cut out any biased perceptions, while broadening the perspective of the employee review.

Annual reviews aren’t very helpful. They require reviewers to accurately compile 365 days of data about one of the many individuals they interact with. Unfortunately, most people don’t have photographic memories, so much of the review will be based on the most recent happenings in the office.

Also, annual reviews are more daunting than a final exam — no matter how well most employees do, they will still be nervous about it; this will negatively impact performance during that time. Managers, most of whom don’t know any better, aren’t helpful here either. As human resources expert Susan M. Heathfield said in a recent About Money article, “Once a manager tells an employee about problems with their work or a failure in their performance, employees tend to ‘not hear’ anything else the manager has to say that is positive about their performance.” The reviews then become arbitrary punishments, even for employees with impeccable performance records.

Even workers who enjoy annual reviews won’t benefit from them. As Samuel Culbert said in an interview with the NPR, “They’re going to talk about all their successes — it becomes total baloney.”

Integrating reviews into the regular workflow provides the following benefits:

All of these factors will make your reviews much more useful.

Publicly ranked reviews don’t encourage better team performance. Instead, it fosters an overly competitive environment wherein people refuse to work with — or even sabotage — each other. To avoid this, keep all of your employee reviews confidential.

Approaching your employee reviews in a stagnant, stressful and minimally effective way just doesn’t make sense. A 360 degree review that accurately assesses an employee’s performance without heavily interfering with your daily workflow is the better option. What else can you do to get more out of your employees?

To answer this question, Grapevine Evaluations has the solution: a web-based 360 degree feedback tool that includes comprehensive reporting, so you and your employees can get an accurate understanding of what matters: how they are perceived from management and co-workers, and where they can improve. Contact us today to learn more about our product.