MHRM 6600—Week 6

Knowing a person does not work overnight, it is not something you get over a simple pajama party; it is something that anyone works on a long-term basis. To fully now someone, just like places, you have to immerse yourself; you have to understand and feel the way they feel. That is the target of 360 degrees feedback - to identify all the areas concerned in a particular individual to know their strengths and weakness fully because these areas are hardly seen by someone who sees only one side of a person. In the past learnings about employee development plan, we have all proven the importance of knowing the employees' strengths and weaknesses, aside from the feedforward interview, 360 degrees feedback can also give powerful results when we are searching for capabilities.

People typically involved in 360 degrees feedback are the direct supervisors, customers, co-workers, co-departments and close peers; but we cannot expect that colleagues, co-departments, and close peers will give professional feedbacks like what can direct supervisors and customers do. That is one of the limitations of 360 degrees feedback, emotions of the evaluators get in the way which results to inaccuracy. Unlike when we use the traditional appraisal which only comes to the direct supervisor, the feedbacks may be straight, but it does not go deeper regarding identifying the full capabilities of the person. Another limitation would be the uncertainty that the number evaluators is enough to get the full view of a certain individual. Yes, you may have performed the feedback, but is it enough? How does one ensure that the data he gets are accurate enough?

In times of assessing employees performance, HR Professionals should know how to manage and correlate the tools created for us. Sticking with one instrument does not guarantee the accuracy, but supporting it with another one is likely to be ideal and justifiable. Being an HR Professional, one must have the competency of being knowledgeable of all the performance appraisal tools so he or she can fully utilize all these things to assess a person to get accurate results that management can rely on strategic decisions.