7 Questions to Ask When Evaluating 360 Degree Feedback Software System Vendors

In our last post, we looked over the importance of developing an effective 360 degree feedback process within your organization. There are a number of steps that are absolutely necessary to getting this done including establishing a purpose, competencies,  participants, and a method of giving feedback to all participants in the review.

However, one critical factor that is often overlooked is selecting a 360 degree feedback software system that works for you. There are many things that you need to look for when selecting a 360 assessment tool for your organization. Let’s examine some of them.

7 questions to ask when evaluating 360 degree feedback software system vendors:

1. Is your software system web-based?

   A key question when evaluating a software system is whether it is truly a web-based system. Does it require plug-ins, Active-X controls  or upgrades of any kind when users want to access the application?

2. Can your system allocate the appropriate 360 feedback form to the appropriate rater?

   A lot of survey software systems that try to pass themselves off as 360 feedback systems generally lack the ability to centralize the allocation of appropriate raters with the corresponding reviews. Separate surveys must be issued for the different employee/rater combinations.

3. Does your system understand organizational hierarchy, including direct and indirect relationships?

   Similarly, a true 360 feedback software system should be able to allocate different rules for different people and include how people are related to each other.

4. Can your system apply different deadlines to different reviews?

   A true 360 feedback system needs to keep track of which reviewers have differing set deadlines for their reviews and not get deadlines confused.

5. Can the system track who did their reviews and who didn’t meet deadlines?

   Again, with respect to relationships and keeping track of assignments and designations, a true system needs to track who has completed their assessments and who has been negligent.

6. Can the system guarantee that only the appropriate raters review the appropriate employees? And only once?

   A system designed for 360 degree feedback reviews needs to be able to know  who should be rating who with respect to each 360 process.

7. Does the system have a powerful reporting engine?

   It’s extremely important to evaluate people on a number of criterion at different points in time. As an organization, it’s to your advantage to have a system that makes periodic follow-up reviews to ensure participants have shown the requisite improvement over time. Also, can your 360 feedback system do appropriate cross tabulation and analysis, the way Explorance’s Blue system can by breaking down results demographically by employee, department, age, gender, or more?  Is it capable of breaking down results by different rating groups?