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It’s great to spread your message throughout the organization when you interact with people in person and at town-hall meetings, but you need to monitor in order to make sure employees are actually following through with that message.
At InfoCision, most employees anonymously complete peer reviews about management, supervisors, administrative assistants and other employees whom they work with.
Peers do not review communicators in the call center, but their supervisor, manager and human resource coordinator do. There are three sections to the review — performance, personality and open-ended questions.
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It’s really a 360-peer review,” he says. “Everybody you come in contact with regularly is going to be reviewing you.”
To start a peer review at your company, you need to first ask yourself some questions to know what to ask on the reviews.
“Get everybody together and say, … ‘What’s important to your company? What do you want to accomplish? What do you want an account executive to be; what kind of person do you want them to be?’
“Same thing with managers, IT, accounting, basic questions, and just send it out with the people they work with or for or who work for them. You’re going to get very, very, very enlightened feedback.”
Before the reviews went companywide in January 2002, employees thought everyone loved them and everyone got along. That, however, was not the case.
When the reviews first started, 4 out of 5 was considered a good score, while 4.5 was amazing. Now, because the reviews have helped shape the culture, 4.7 is the average score.
“If I stop sending out peer reviews in the next five years, I don’t think we’d ever go back to a 4 being the average, but I guarantee that number would erode, because there is accountability toward it,” he says.
The company started with 75 questions, but now has it down to just 10 personality questions and 10 performance questions. For example, a performance question would be: This person pays attention to the different levels of detail that overall helps the company be successful.
The personality section would feature questions such as: This person shows a great work ethic by working hard, working smart and being accountable.
For those two sections, employees rank their peers on a scale of 1 to 5, as well as answer open-ended questions such as: What is your overall view of this employee’s performance?
To gather complete and accurate scores, you need to make sure employees get reviewed by everyone they work with. Albright approves the peer review lists for management on up. Management approves all other peer review lists.
“They send a list to us, and we look at this and say, ‘He’s leaving off a couple of people he doesn’t get along with,” he says. “Or, ‘She’s getting people that are just her friends.’ “So, they send it to their boss and their boss’s boss and we decide, ultimately, who we are going to send the peer review out to.”
The feedback allows employees to see where they are strong but also where they need improvement. Some employees may not agree with the assessment their peers gave, which could prompt a negatively reviewed employee to confront the people they thought gave them bad reviews.
You have to be clear with that employee when you talk to him or her that the review is not meant to list everything he or she is doing wrong. It’s meant to help the employee improve in areas where his or her peers feel he or she is struggling.
As a leader, advise employees to ask the reviewers how they can do better and not to focus on receiving a bad peer review.
“It’s not to play internal affairs or gotcha or police,” he says. “We want to create a more positive culture for everyone.”
While the number of people an employee works around determines how many people will review them, about 30 people will review the typical employee.
With those numbers, an employee can’t say that it’s only a few people who dislike him or her. There’s strength in numbers, and if 30 people say someone struggles with a certain aspect of the job or the culture, there are facts to back it up. It’s those facts that will help you mold a culture that drives your company to success.
“Business is a lot about accountability,” he says. “I still would deal with people that were a problem, but now it’s an exact science, too. I can sit there and say, ‘This is a problem.’ (They say) ‘I don’t understand. All my people love me.’ Well, now I’ve got actual numbers to go through it.”
How to reach: InfoCision Management Corp., (330) 668-1400 or www.infocision.com
