New Year, New You – Start Now!

Once the festive season is over and the new year approaches, people turn their thoughts to what they want to achieve in the coming year. If you are planning to set goals for 2024, either personal or professional, where do you start?

New Year’s Resolutions

You may have a clear idea of what you want to achieve in the coming year. Many people’s objectives are less well defined, and they may need a little guidance or help to find their direction and make an action plan. Perhaps you have set your sights on a leadership role; maybe you want to manage your staff better to achieve your company’s goals, or perhaps you feel the need to improve your resilience to face the challenges of 2024.

If you don’t know where to start, try talking it through with someone. Just the act of verbalising your thoughts can help to crystalise those goals in your mind. Having a conversation about your aims and ambitions with a trusted friend, advisor or coach and writing down what you want to achieve is a great start.

Once you have a broad direction, asking for feedback from those around you can provide valuable insights into the strengths you possess, and the skills you need to develop, to give you the best chance of achieving your goals. Even if you think you know what you need to do to make yourself a better leader or a more resilient person, it’s worth getting the input of those around you. They have a different viewpoint and can see things that may not be obvious to you.

360 feedback can collect valuable advice from those around you which you can use to create an action plan. No matter what the subject of the 360 (Leadership, Customer Service, Resilience etc), it will highlight your strengths and your areas for development. You can use these valuable insights to craft a development plan, either alone, with a manager or friend, or with a coach.

How does it work?

A 360 feedback exercise asks you to select a number of colleagues, customers, friends and/or family (who you pick depends on what you are asking for feedback on) and asking them about your skills in your chosen area. Doing it online makes collecting feedback a hassle free process. Your chosen respondents are all sent an e-mail with a link to your feedback questionnaire, asking them to complete it by a certain date. You will complete a self-assessment, answering the same questions as your respondents. Our 360 system sends helpful reminders during the feedback process.

At the end of the feedback period, we generate a clear report for you which shows your perception of your skills compared to that of your respondents. Your respondents were asked for comments on your strengths and areas for development in each area; these are displayed along with the scores to explain the scores and give you some examples and ideas.

You can do 360 feedback all by yourself, or you can enlist the help of a coach who will talk you through the process beforehand, feed your report back to you, helping you to focus on the areas that will help you achieve your goals, and guide you through the process of turning feedback into an action plan.

Get started

If you are planning to make New Year’s Resolutions, start now with 360 feedback to help you craft SMART objectives for the coming year. 360 feedback can be completed in around two weeks, meaning your report can be with you to read and think about over the Christmas holidays, allowing you to set objectives and get started on the road to achieving them on 1^st January, or even before.

i-comment360 have a range of standard 360 feedback questionnaires to cover six popular areas: Leadership, Management, Customer Service, Sales, Resilience and Emotional Intelligence. We can provide coaching sessions to help you get the most out of your 360 feedback and kick start your personal and professional development for 2024.

Multi-language 360 feedback

Increasing participation rates using multi-language 360 feedback

After many years of administering 360 feedback, we have learned a few things. Working with multi-national organisations, and organisations with customers in numerous countries, has shown that the best way to get feedback is to ask in their own language. Even if your sales team or customer speak very good English, they will be much more comfortable completing a questionnaire in their native language.

One of our training customers delivers a programme of sales training to an organisation with sales teams across the world. Their participants complete 360 feedback before the training so they, and their trainers, can identify where to focus the training. A second 360 feedback is completed around 9 months after the training to measure improvements.

We set up this questionnaire in five different languages; English, French, German, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese. The participant and their colleagues have the choice of language at the start of the questionnaire, so they can view questions and provide responses in whichever language they choose.

This was a great project. Our customer provided the translations, and we uploaded them into the system, matching them to the English questions and checking to make sure that the questionnaire reads correctly for all the different languages. My French is quite good (I studied it at university) and I can understand a bit of German, but Korean and Brazilian Portuguese were new to me. Google translate was very helpful! We would always suggest that a native speaker reviews the questionnaire in their language before launching, just to make sure that the wording is appropriate.

Allowing the participant and their colleagues to choose their language increases participation rates and provides more meaningful feedback for the participant. Feedback is included in the report in the language in which it is given.

Another multi-national customer asked for their Sales 360 to be in nine different languages. European languages have many similarities. The languages which use different characters, e.g. Korean, Japanese and Thai, are more difficult and we have to place trust in the translation provided.

It’s not just 360 feedback, we have also set up surveys in foreign languages. A customer asked for their regularly used team survey to be translated for a German team. Although the team spoke English, a more in depth understanding was possible in their native language.

To set up your next multi-national 360 project, give us a call.

How much does 360 feedback cost?

360 feedback is an extremely beneficial development tool. But how to offer it in your organisation? The cost can appear prohibitive for small businesses, however that doesn’t have to be the case. A little research has shown that it’s not easy to get an answer to the “how much does 360 feedback cost?” question.

Standard 360 feedback

We have created a range of six standard 360 feedback questionnaires and reports, covering six major areas where 360 feedback is often used. These are designed to make 360 feedback accessible to both small and larger businesses, and to be as easy as possible to set up and use. They available to purchase via our website at £40 per participant. The six areas are Leadership, Management, Customer Service, Sales, Emotional Intelligence and Resilience.

The participant can nominate any number of people to provide feedback, although we suggest nominating 8-12 colleagues. The respondents are categorised by role e.g. Line Manager, Peers, Direct Reports, Customers etc. Depending on the type of 360 feedback you are undertaking, your role and the size of your organisation, you may have five people providing feedback, and you may have twenty-five, but the cost is the same.

The process is simple – each participant receives an e-mail link to their set up page where they nominate colleagues. Those colleagues then receive a link to the feedback questionnaire which remains open for a period. The participant fills in a self-assessment and once the feedback closes, a clear, easy to understand report delivers the results to the participant. Read more about the 360 feedback process.

If you have a large number of participants to put through a 360 feedback exercise, we would be happy to offer you a volume discount.

Bespoke 360 feedback

If you are looking for a bespoke 360 feedback, with questions that are specific to your organisation, perhaps incorporating your corporate values and behaviours or to fit in with a new or existing training programme, that’s no problem at all! We will work with you to create a questionnaire that meets your needs.

Set up of a new questionnaire and report costs £150. This includes any number of questions; experience has shown that too many questions put people off, so keeping the number down tends to result in a better response rate. More than 50 questions can mean the questionnaire takes too long and people often don’t reach the end. The set-up fee includes give you access to our team’s wealth of experience designing effective questionnaires and our extensive question library.

The best 360 questionnaires contain both rating and free text questions. The rating questions give you a measurable score and the free text questions provide information on strengths and suggestions for development to help participants get the most out of their 360.

Multi-language feedback

Multi-language - Hello, Hola, Ni Hao, Bonjour

If your organisation is a multi-national with offices in several different countries with different language requirements, or if you have customers in a number of countries where English is not their first language, we can offer the option to have your questionnaire available in several languages. Participants and their colleagues can select the language in which they would like to view the questions. Answers to free text questions will appear as they are typed by the person providing feedback.

If you can provide the translations, the cost per language is £150. If you need us to arrange the translations, the cost of professional translation will be added to this.

Feeding back the feedback

Once you have your 360 report, what then? Read and inwardly digest the contents. Make a plan of action to play to your strengths and address any areas of development. That might seem straightforward, but that isn’t always the case. Having an impartial third party to review your 360 feedback with you can help you to objectively analyse the feedback and put a structured plan in place. We offer coaching sessions to debrief the 360 feedback and help you get the most out of the process.

Coaching sessions start from £45 per session, or combine your 360 feedback with three coaching sessions and a Persona profile in our Business Coaching package for £200.

Re-running feedback

Many of our customers offer a 360 feedback exercise before a training programme, then rerun the 360 feedback 9-12 months later to see how the learning from the training has benefited the participant, and to highlight which area to focus on next. The cost of re-running the 360 is the same as the initial 360, £40 per participant (discount for large numbers of participants), and we will add the previous score to the revisited 360 reports at no extra cost.

The ability to add previous scores can be useful when the feedback is being used as part of an annual (or more frequent) appraisal, comparing scores from previous appraisals.

Anything else?

We love to say “Yes!” to our customers. If you want something we don’t already offer, we are happy to price a system change to enable this to be possible.

In Summary

360 feedback does not need to cost the earth! Your 360 feedback project can start from as little as £40 for a single, standard 360. If you have hundreds of participants to put through a multi-language, bespoke questionnaire, it will cost more.

The advantage of using i-comment360 is our years of experience providing 360 feedback questionnaires and reports for a wide variety of organisations across the world. We will help you to get the best out of your 360 exercise and make the process as easy as possible for you and your staff.

Prices correct as at May 2023.