At a meeting for feedback recipients, guidelines are established for how many questionnaires any one person should be expected to complete. After presenting a selection criteria, participants can be asked to think who they would select as raters. In addition, participants can be coached on how to ask potential raters for their feedback. A live demonstration of how to access the website and navigate the survey pages can also be provided. This gives the process immediate momentum and enables participants to become familiar with the content of the questionnaire.

When 360 feedback is new to an organization, we also suggest that meetings be held with the people who could potentially be selected as raters. They also have questions and concerns, and dealing with these at an early stage can have a positive impact on the quality of the feedback provided. At these sessions, information should be provided on the purpose of the initiative, how the data will be used, who will have access to it, and how confidentiality and anonymity will be protected. In addition, it is also helpful to train people in how to observe and rate behavior. This ensures raters are able to distinguish “behavior” from “traits” or “attitude” and that everyone has a shared picture of what “good looks like.” Providing rater training tends to improve the quality of the feedback, increasing the recipient’s confidence in its accuracy.

When FGIC first introduced a 360 process, Sean Woodroffe, the senior vice president of human resources, understood that an orientation would be an efficient and effective way to answer people’s questions and respond to their concerns. It would also ensure that everyone received a consistent message about why it was being put in place and how it would work. Groups of ten to twenty feedback recipients and potential raters were invited to their own two-hour sessions that were scheduled over the course of a week. At each session the purpose of the initiative and their role in making it a success were reviewed. The competencies on which people would be evaluated were reviewed, and background was given on how they were developed with the participation of the senior management team. To ensure that everyone understood what “good looks like” the groups reviewed a version of the competencies with behavioral examples that illustrated above standard, standard, and below standard performance. Using case studies, the groups discussed how they would rate the manager in the case on each of the relevant competencies. “These sessions and practice ratings were definitely worth the time,” observed Sean. “It was the first time we did a 360 and people had lots of questions and concerns. It was also important that recipients felt that they got high-quality, useful feedback; otherwise I doubt I would have been able to get support for the process going forward.”

These sessions play a critical role in the participants’ subsequent commitment to the 360-degree feedback process. In applications of a smaller scale, organizations can take advantage of regularly scheduled staff meetings to achieve similar objectives. A suggested outline of the group orientation meeting follows.

To do this most effectively, we recommended that one-on-one meetings be held. Beforehand, a letter should be sent to each person providing a brief overview of the process and mentioning that an outside consultant would be contacting him or her to schedule a face-to-face meeting. In the case we are describing, after scheduling a convenient time, we met with each executive individually. We began each meeting by reviewing the purpose of the effort and how it tied in with the organization’s business goals. To emphasize both the importance of the program and senior management’s commitment to it, we explained that the executive committee members had already gone through the feedback process themselves. We then explained how the feedback was going to be gathered using questionnaires and interviews and who it would be gathered from, stressing that the process would be conducted confidentially and that all responses would remain anonymous.

We also asked each executive to identify, based on the goals and development needs discussed, five raters he or she wanted us to interview. Because we were keeping a master list of who was being interviewed, managers were told that if someone they had selected had already been chosen by two other participants he or she would have the option to not participate. In some cases, we asked the manager to identify another source. In other cases, we left it up to the raters themselves to decide whether they would be willing to provide feedback on all the people who had asked them for it. We closed each meeting by explaining that, after collecting and analyzing their feedback, we would meet with them again to help plan for their professional development.

In addition to providing a highly effective, personalized method for introducing and explaining the feedback process, these meetings also gave participants an opportunity to clarify their goals and expectations in a one-on-one setting. As a result, we were able to obtain a further level of commitment.

A detailed outline of the one-on-one orientation is provided below.