How often should we make 360 feedback available to employees?

Welcome to Ask an Adviser, EBN's weekly column in which benefit brokers and advisers answer (anonymous) queries sent in by our readers. Looking for some expert advice? Please submit questions to askanadviser@arizent.com. This week, we asked Dale S. Rose, founder and CEO of the 3D Group, to weigh in on the following: How often should we make 360 feedback available to employees?

Known for its level of deep inquiry, 360 feedback helps employers examine just how effective an employee is behaving in the workplace. This method involves gathering feedback from multiple sources on a given employee's performance, from peers and subordinates to supervisors, as well as self-evaluation. 

While 360 feedback varies greatly from one organization to the next, it can take anywhere from four to eight week to complete the process. Given all that's involved, it can't possibly be done on a weekly basis — nothing else would ever get done! 

Companies that have tried continuous feedback applications learn that employees don't actually need continuous feedback. Instead, they need more time to understand, accept and act on the feedback they get periodically. But how long should one go between such events? 

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The optimal frequency for a 360 feedback process is once per year as part of a formal process with a survey to collect multi-rater feedback.  Organizations may choose to offer this opportunity to leaders more than once during the year if they are participating in a leadership development program and also do an annual feedback cycle. What's particularly helpful is if managers and employees give each other more frequent or real-time feedback throughout the year.

Think of an annual 360 feedback cycle as a method for providing maintenance-level information to keep employees "tuned up" in terms of how they are doing with their coworkers. Annual cycles keep employees focused on helping each other to continue improving and allow co-workers a regular schedule to surface issues and celebrate success. Less frequent cycles allow issues to fester and may encourage performance problems to be ignored. 

Even in cases where employees continue to hear the same messages about how well they are doing and how well respected they are by coworkers, it's valuable to maintain a consistent process to remind these strong performers of those facts. 

Timing can depend on a company's purpose for collecting and using 360 data. If feedback is not being used for performance management, then the best approach is to receive feedback in the first month of a new year. This is often a time for planning and looking ahead, along with reflecting on past behavior. 

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If you are using 360 feedback as part of your performance review cycle, which is different from 360 feedback, then annual usage three months before reviews are due is reasonable. Otherwise, you may choose a different time frame. This timing recommendation also allows employees adequate time to provide thoughtful feedback to each other and for managers to reflect on and integrate results into the full performance evaluation.  

In addition to a "core" annual 360 feedback process, it's often worthwhile to add "episodic" 360 processes into the mix. For instance, many executive education programs leverage a curriculum-linked 360 feedback process to accelerate and target learning. Generally, the content for these isolated 360 feedback processes will be very different from the annual process since they are targeted at more narrow sets of behaviors. And so, in fact, employees could end up with more than one 360 report in a given year.