Conversation unfolding on Twitter. But enough folks in the thread that all 140 characters have been consumed. Wanted to write down a couple of notes on our most recent variant of 360 reviews. These are just some super quick notes
- I'm on record as saying 360 reviews are the worst possible system, barring all the others. I believe that.
Obviously most issues should be dealt with early and often through frequent and engaged communication. A managers job is to help facilitate those conversations. That said there are many many potential issues for rupture in that communication, and you need a system of check and balances. And frankly in a long lived organization (or one you expect to live past your seed funding round) you need a system for getting feedback written down.
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The questions you ask during your reverb process dramatically shape the feedback you receive, you need to be extremely intentional about them. Designing the right questions is a longer topic for a different day, but if you feel like the feedback you're getting is useless I'd first examine your questions.
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Anonymous feedback is an extremely powerful tool. Even in a system where folks are assured that feedback will be anonymous due to manager roll ups it is very hard for people to trust the system, and self censorship is common. Making anonymous feedback weird or anomalous makes it even less likely. And it probably goes without saying that anyone violating the norms around anonymity severely handicaps the effectiveness of the system.
Two tweaks
a. The effectiveness of anonymous feedback relies entirely on the quality of the managers summarizing and delivering the feedback. If you aren't running manager trainings on how to give feedback, and how to handle hard conversations the odds that your 360 review process will deliver quality results relies entirely on the quality of your manager hiring process. (which is to say it's going to suck)
b. One common problem with the 360 degrees is they're easily gamed by people who don't wish to receive critical feedback (in conjunction with lazy or complicit managers). As Haskins rather succinctly described the problems as most of the reviews being "a few radians shorts of a circle". (curse you Twitter search and your incompleteness, no link to the original). The most recent revision of Etsy's 360 process explicitly created a system for unsolicited feedback to address this issue (where anecdotally the major use was highlighting potentially unknown positive interactions).
Reviews are still totally broken. An ongoing stream of continuous feedback would be better. Smart folks I talk to who are obsessed with this talk mourn Rypple.
But I just wanted to call out it is possible to improve 360s without throwing out the process, but it requires making your people better and more engaged.
Reverb is easily my least favorite thing about Etsy.