As HR managers, the success or failure of your 360° system is down to you. Decode the data right and you’re laughing, writes Dan O'Shea.

So you’ve bought into the idea of 360. You’ve rolled it out to all your staff and the results are in: you now have an absolutely priceless portrait of what your people really think of each other. You have a good balance of textual feedback and scores.   

What do you do now? You have 2 options

Option 1
Input the scores into a computer and get a 30-page summary of soulless stats: graphs, pie charts, tables.

Option 2
Let the text do the talking. Analyse the perceptions (both positive and negative) of your people. Tease out the key themes. Anonymize the feedback and make it constructive.  Then write a 1-page, easily digestible report. Let page two summarise the scores.

30 pages of tables or two pages of insightful and instructive feedback? I know which report I’d prefer to get back from HR. Yet you’d be surprised at how many businesses fall down at this final hurdle by letting bureaucracy triumph over common sense. Nothing could be more counter-productive: by bombarding staff with reams of paperwork, tables, charts and other statistics, one risks breeding resentment and causing people to lose faith in HRs ability to deliver. So why do so many businesses insist on relaying the results in this unhelpful way? What lies behind this reluctance to switch from quantity to quality?

“By using graphs and tables to illustrate the raw data, I’m getting much more value for money”

This is a common misconception with score-based feedback: providing your managers with a weighty 30-page tome to sift through won’t leave them any the wiser. The key reason here is that the messages delivered by these statistics are simply not clear enough: what does it mean, for instance, to average 5.3 out of 10 for people skills? What, specifically, is stopping your peers and subordinates awarding you a higher mark? Do you need to be more consultative or do you need to act with more conviction? Do you need to grant employees more autonomy or keep a closer eye on their workload and capacity? The scores won’t tell you: they’ll flag up underperformance without drilling down and getting to the heart of the problem. They won’t help you move forward and come up with development objectives. In short, this kind of superficial analysis is not a satisfactory return on your investment- you’re being short-changed.

Take this case-study: we recently carried out a 360° review for all the partners at a leading City law firm. A handful of them didn’t receive a sufficient level of qualitative feedback to enable a report to be produced so they were provided instead with a page of (below average) scores. Soon after, we were instructed by the client to repeat the exercise so that more qualitative data could be collected and a report then created. Why? Because scores can do more harm than good:  they are alarmist rather than constructive as they indicate poor performance but deny the recipient any further detail or explanation. 

But qualitative feedback does much more than just skate the surface; it puts the scores to one side and hones in on the textual feedback: it then synthesises these comments and converts them into a crystal clear page of analysis. This way, strengths and weaknesses are thrown into sharp relief and – crucially – they are substantiated. The report is consequently specific, evidential and constructive. Managers can then use this document to come up with development objectives so that when the 360 exercise is repeated, say, 6 months down the line, their improvement (or indeed lack of it) will be strikingly transparent. 

“The data I get from the computer is more reliable”

As we highlighted above, score-based data simply doesn’t add up; it only gives you part of the picture so it can’t be wholly relied or acted upon. But what about qualitative data? Clearly, the author charged with turning the raw data into a page of textual analysis has a huge responsibility on his hands. The 360 tool does after all generate highly sensitive and candid comments so it’s crucial to get this right. The process should work as follows:

1. Start by reading through the raw data and pinpoint the key themes and recurrent trends
2. Synthesise the various disparate comments, bringing them together to form a clean and coherent narrative
3. Ensure the analysis is both constructive and anonymous
4. Show utter loyalty to the raw data: don’t ever try and draw inferences or be subjective

If the above four rules are closely adhered to, then the report will be immensely reliable and valuable to the manager involved. It’s also important to state here that each individual has their own particular skill sets, strengths and areas for improvement: qualitative analysis will highlight and amplify these nuances and the report will consequently feel like a bespoke, personalised document. But quantitative data –with its emphasis on statistical analysis - is much more homogenised and impersonal. If you want managers to drive their own development and have renewed faith in HR, you need to engage them on a personal level. So it has to be qualitative over quantitative every time.      

“I don’t have time to write reports. Using the graphs and tables to represent the data is much quicker and more efficient”

It might only take you a minute to put the scores into a computer and print off the 30-page report but what happens when you hand it over to the manager? They’ll have to spend hours poring over the document to try and make sense of the stats and decipher what they’re actually being told. They won’t thank you for that: it’s both time-consuming and tedious. And worst of all, completely unnecessary. The qualitative process will take up a touch more of HR time but anything takes longer than mindless number crunching. And it really is time well-spent as it will be adding such a huge amount of value to the whole process. In any case, a qualitative culture really isn’t that time-consuming.

So put your faith in qualitative data and you’ll soon see the results: your people will be more self-aware and HR will be seen as a strategic asset rather than a cost centre. Put common sense before process and opt for quality over quantity.