How to do 360 degree feedback?
Management does not always understand what the team's opinion of an employee is. One of the most effective methods to solve this problem is the "360 degree feedback".
Many companies experiment with trying to visualize what their team is doing. The main idea of such an event is to get a sense of what you need to focus your efforts on to improve, identify problems, and help teams become more productive.
Because guessing exactly what needs to be improved in work processes is difficult (you need to know what needs to be improved, and once improved, do you understand whether it really improves?), a systematic approach with visualization can help reduce that guesswork.
The engineers at Spotify have developed a technique over several years that helps address this issue. We, in turn, have accommodated this model in our bot service, allowing us to do healthchecks with remote employees and less time.
Terminology
Before we get started with the survey, let's define the terminology:
Healthcheck is the Squad Health Check itself, developed by Spotify engineers.
An indicator is a question that each participant has to answer. There are 10 in our template, you can create your own options, preferably no more than 12.
Semaphore - in our case it is a choice of three answer choices. Green - all is well, yellow - no change, red - we have problems.
Now let's define the indicators themselves, there are 10 in our template:
We recommend that each team break down which indicators make the most sense for them and based on the template, remove, add or change indicators.
Before you take the survey, talk through or describe each indicator in detail.
Below is a description of indicator in our template:
Indicator |
Rating "Good" |
Rating "Bad" |
Technical quality (code) |
We take pride in what we do! The code is clean, easy to read!! |
Our code is total crap. |
Development processes |
Simple, fast and mostly all automated. |
Unpleasant, a lot of manual work which takes forever. |
Speed |
Everything is done very quickly, with no delays! |
We never seem to finish it. Constant stalls and freezes! |
Pawns or players |
We decide what to do and how to do it better! |
We are just cogs in the project, we don't decide anything. |
Teamwork |
We are a cool, cohesive team! |
I'm gonna have to write my resignation soon. |
Fan |
I love going to work and I love the time we have! |
Boooooring. |
Help from others |
The guys on my team are very responsive and will always come to the rescue. |
It's easier to do everything yourself than to ask someone else for help. |
The value of the product |
We make a great product and are proud of what we do! |
I'm ashamed of this product. |
Learning |
We are constantly learning new things! |
We never have time to learn anything! |
Team Mission |
We know exactly what we're here for and we're very excited about it! |
We have no idea why we are working here, our mission is unclear |
Healthcheck results should be sent to a common channel so the whole team can see the results.
Analyzing the data
Based on the results of the survey, we can identify 4 areas that need improvement: Problems in the team. Problems with technology. Problems with processes. Product problems.
For example, if the "teamwork" results show you are trending more into the red, then maybe the people on the team aren't getting along and something needs to change.
In your personal cabinet, analyze the responses, relative to previous Healthchecks. This way you can see the dynamics of change and whether you're moving in the right direction.
The summary
Try to make the team aware of the importance of healthcheck, do not be afraid to give red marks, this will show that the team realizes the problem.
Hold the healthcheck itself no more than once a month. After the survey, you can get the remote team together in a zoom and do a retrospective on the problem areas.
Management does not always understand what the team's opinion of an employee is. One of the most effective methods to solve this problem is the "360 degree feedback".