Staff Evaluates Manager
njjel
1,235 Posts
Have any of you ever done this type of evaluation? If so were the end results positive or negative?
Comments
You are right though, I wonder if the person(s) who dreamt it up ever exposed themselves to it.
Geno
We've done something like this at my company for 12 years. It's called Feedback to Supervisor, and everyone who wants to can provide it.
When we first unveiled it we had a series of trainings for all staff about how to provide constructive feedback as opposed to dumping, complaining, etc. The trainings were informative, and good, but implementing this sort of thing is very tricky.
We've observed a couple of things, although improving the process to fix the problems is hard.
1. Getting feedback that is really useful is difficult. Some staff don't feel comfortable critiquing the boss, even if the boss welcomes it. Feedback that is all glowing is useless, the best feedback has a little of both.
2. As someone above said, this process works best when there is a mechanism to do something about what isn't working. Our feedback goes to the person's supervisor, whose job it is to figure out what to do with it. Of course they need to weigh it against other issues, so it may get dealt with in any one of a number of fashions.
3. We found that staff who put in the time wanted to know what had been done about it, which puts the supervisor's supervisor in the position of having to explain things they should be able to keep between themselves and the employee being reviewed. Not hearing back wht specifically had been said left the supervisees feeling unsatisfied if they didn't see immediate changes.
4. Our supervisors weren't wild about anonymous feedback. We allow both types, anonymous and not-anonymous, but the anonymous option has dwindled away to nothing. Either the manager actively discourages ("I welcome face-to-face feedback") or departments are so small it's obvious who submitted it (the feedback is narrative rather than numerical responses to questions.)
5. We give staff the option of delivering the feedback in person, and as a group to the supervisor rather than one-on-one. In the first few years some supervisors insisted upon this, with the obvious result that they requested some of the feedback be re-worded before being submitted.
6. Some of the more contentious situations wound up in my office, and this took time to sort out and was demoralizing for the team.
7. Like with reviews, some folks who'd had the same supervisor for a few years find it difficult to keep coming up with new things to say.
I could go on, but it sounds like you're already in the middle of the process so maybe this isn't so useful to you now. Let me know if you want to know more.
C
Kathy Carlson