Most companies can only guess at what the real problems are within their organization.  As a result, restructuring, redirection and training are mostly “hit and miss” propositions.  Many times the deeply rooted reasons for performance problems are overlooked and never solved.

     Multi-rater feedback assessments (MRA), available and used by large corporations for the last 15 years, were expensive, cumbersome and difficult to modify.  Today’s new generation of MRA’s is different.  They are more affordable, flexible, paperless and more widely used by medium and smaller companies.

     MRAs, also known as 360 or 20/20 because they measure and obtain feedback all around and have “perfect vision to internal company issues,” are the latest in the management arsenal of weapons, and a very powerful one.

      They give you a cross section of perceptions within the firm, which result in a clearer picture of the real problem.  They are independent and uncoached reactions to behaviors which affect performance and relationships between co-workers, departments, superiors, subordinates, divisions and customers.  These working relationships are critical because they can make or break all types of performance within a company.

     ITT, BASF, Dell, G.E., Capital, Hilton Hotels, Kraft General Foods, MCI, US Naval Warfare Center, Time Life Inc., TRW, Xerox Corporation and Tandem are just some of the companies now using 20/20 MRAs to determine what needs to be changed or retrained.  The specific program they use is called 20/20 Insight by Performance Support Systems.  Here is a typical scenario of the assessment flow:

1. First they position it with their employees as a diagnostic tool that helps determine the strengths and weaknesses of their organizations in many different areas.
2. Once the diagnosis is performed and results analyzed, the company becomes much better prepared to improve the way that people and systems work together.  This in turn improves performance, work relationships, team building, customer satisfaction and ultimately profitability….it all begins with the people!
3. The report that is generated from the assessments is used to decide what the best approach is to capitalize on strengths, or to correct weaknesses in the organization.  This might be done by a number of methods, examples include:
4. Revising organizational structure to put people in roles that will allow them to really do what they are best suited to do:

• Target training programs to areas that are critical to improve.
• Perform one on one coaching with managers to develop areas of weaknesses.
• Help individuals to design a self-study program that would develop weak areas.
• Design team, department or whole organization events, brain storming sessions etc. that would allow designated groups to improve relationships and work methods.
• Simply improving the processes that are identified as a hindrance to performance and customer satisfaction.
• After remedial steps are taken the instrument is run again to measure the effectiveness of whatever was done, whether it be training, coaching, process revision, etc.

Steps in implementing a 20/20 MRA:

1. You decide what department, job function, process or skill you would like to evaluate within the organization.

2. Next you decide which individual’s; department’s etc. assessments will be done.

3. Questions that come standard with the system are reviewed to determine appropriateness and changed/added/eliminated as desired.

• You select the report formats that would be most beneficial.

• Next decide who will do assessments.  It is best to use a cross section of  peers, managers, customers, suppliers….depending on the situation.  The more variety and quantity of “raters” you use, the more reliable the information. (10 is a good number, but never less than 6)

• Raters complete the questions on DOS diskettes and give the information back to a designated administrator of consultant. NO ONE-EXCEPT THE RATER can look at the information on the disk as the rater has established his own password.  IT MUST BE CONFIDENTIAL.

• Administrator uploads all rater diskettes into program and prints reports.

• The reports are interpreted as to their meaning and what action is best to develop the individual or group as needed.  A consultant should to the interpretation to obtain an unbiased result.

• A good multi-rater tool should be so flexible that it can be used for many purposes.  It should be customizable to your needs, and it can be used to support many different areas, including:

Competency Development

Create skill areas and behaviors to be assessed for a specific position.

Skill Assessment

Assess skills for interpersonal or technical areas.

Needs Assessment

Print reports at any time for any individual, group or the entire organization.

Leadership Development

Diagnose individual interpersonal skill strengths and areas for development.

Team Development

Diagnose individual interpersonal skill strengths and areas for development.

Level 3 Evaluation of Training

Compare data before and after training to determine the impact of training on performance.

Customer Satisfaction Research

Survey opinions of external and internal customers.

     The popularity of Multi-Rater Assessments in the world is soaring daily due to the PC and the new flexibility not found before.  The latest generation programs are PC based, do not require programming changes to modify question sets, do not require paper input, do not require that the program company compile all data at a costly rate.  It’s probably a good time to look into MRAs, such as 20/20 for your company.

Copyright PowerBusiness Associates Inc. Article written by Zigmund Sepanski and published in Amcham Journal