Recently we hosted a discussion on the use of attributed or anonymous feedback in organizations’ 360° reviews. Here’s the recap:

Anonymous seems to be the baseline; the jumping-off point for multirater feedback. More useful in low-trust environments, anonymous feedback encourages honesty and reduces (hopefully eliminates) the possibility of retaliation for negative feedback.

Sharon Searle “I have used 360 degree in a lot of different environments including international (highly multicultural) over the past 30 years and have found that anonymous is a great place to start as you build towards trust.”

Most participants agreed there should be some level of access (by managers or HR) to attributed 360° information, even if the reviewee never sees it. It’s useful to aggregate feedback by type (what peers are saying vs customer feedback), and it’s possible to dig deeper if there’s something wacky going on.

Christina Mazzella-King “My personal belief is the manager or human resource person should have knowledge of who is submitting the information. This will allow for more clarification if needed. There are times when individuals give bad feedback because of personal reasons rather than work related issues.”

There is a move towards greater transparency and openness in performance feedback that supports the case for attributed feedback. After all, if you trust that the people you work with have your best interests at heart you’ll be only too happy to listen to their feedback (even if it’s not glowing, it’s still likely to be useful…)

Timothy Wallace “One of our core values is speaking the unvarnished truth. Thus, we don’t use anonymous feedback. Historically, I find anonymous feedback is usually tainted with emotion and focuses on the negative versus the positive.”

But companies embracing open and transparent communication probably aren’t relying on a once-yearly formal 360° review for performance feedback and may find the whole debate a little pointless…

Jenny Kempa “I am a great believer in ad hoc positive acknowledgement and placing the responsibility for a good job done squarely on the shoulders of the relevant staff. In this way, the reviews become a simple procedure and are a consolidation of what the manager and staff member already knows.”

To sum up: we have anonymous, attributed and mixed feedback, formal and informal review processes and low and high-trust organization cultures. Seems to be a nice solid win for ‘it depends’.

Agree or disagree with anything our participants brought up? Join the discussion or drop a comment…

You might remember a wee while ago we got a bunch of the team together to make a very quick movie version of the Sonar6 story… all four and a bit years of our history crammed into 3 action-packed minutes.

This week we held the grand unveiling of A brief history of Sonar6. It’s actually pretty low key, but if you want to know where we’ve come from and where we’re going, it’s definitely worth a look.

And something that we learned during the process: making a movie about your history is a surprisingly good team building event. It gets people out of their comfort zone, it’s a ton of fun, and it’s probably cheaper than doing a ropes course…

Take a look and let us know what you think!

Watch A brief history of Sonar6…

Just had another fantastic review where you ended up discussing things that went wrong 8 months ago?

Our latest color paper looks at ways performance reviews should be redesigned to help managers do a better job of managing year-round (not just a better job of reviewing once every 12 months).

Read the ‘Do I need to thank my manager’ color paper online or download from http://www.sonar6.com/colorpapers/better-managers

Review season is coming up, and Sonar6 will be using Sonar6!

Of course, we’ve used Sonar6 before – once upon a time we used v2, and last year we used v3 Quick Start. This year we’ve decided to go one better; channeling our inner customer and going through the entire configuration process.

Part One: What does Sonar6 want from Sonar6…?

In which we discover it’s usually a good idea to know what you want from a system before you start using it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember a while back we showed you how Vitaco was motivating teams to complete their reviews?

Well, the race is over, and the prizes were pretty sweet (literally!)

Great job guys! Om nom nom…

Using an HR system? Have an opinion about it? The very nice people at CedarCrestone would like you to complete their HR Systems Survey. It’s a pretty big deal…

Read the rest of this entry »

Enjoy playing games and often found yourself wondering if there was a way to make tedious work tasks more like something you actually enjoy?

Our latest color paper looks at the concepts behind the incredibly popular social gaming phenomenon, and how they can be applied to (not incredibly popular) performance reviews.

Read the ‘Lessons from FarmVille’ color paper online or download from

http://www.sonar6.com/colorpapers/lessons-from-farmville

HR lacking oomph? Wondering if a more proactive salesy approach will pay off for you? Then you should definitely check out the  ‘Coffee is for Closers’ webinar June 3 (Thursday) 10-11 am PDT.

This one’s being brought to you by Jobvite – an extremely cool ATS – and co-presented by Kris Dunn, who’s one of our favourite HR people.

Register for the Coffee is for Closers webinar.

Looks like it’ll be a killer session; we thought you’d appreciate the heads-up!