Survey - I am Customising a 360 Survey

360° Surveys are on-line questionnaires which ask assessors to rate the ‘Target’ against a whole range of skills or abilities (often termed ‘Competences’) in terms of this person’s level of effectiveness. You may be using a pre-determined range of competences, within a Standard 360° product, or you may wish to customise your own survey - in line with particular organisational or sector needs and concerns.

All 360° products are based on the Psychologica Model, which provides a universal competency framework that research has shown to relate to human behaviour in all organisational sectors - and which ties in to established processes of individual, team and organisational development.

Reasons for Designing a Customised Survey

You want the survey to reflect a particular aspect of Organisational Development which is central to your OD Strategy
Your organisation uses specific language and terminology which you would like the survey to reflect
Your organisation has an existing competency framework and you want the survey to reflect this as closely as possible
You want to use some comparison criteria within the survey (such as customer expectations, from a Customer Survey, or expectations for a role, from a Job Analysis).

N.B. Remember, customisation can be time consuming and complex, so before embarking on this process ensure that there is not a pre-existing product which already matches your needs (see Psychologica Products & Services). If customisation is clearly the way to go, but you do not feel able to carry this out yourself, we are able to provide a customisation service on your behalf, and manage the whole 360° process if required (Contact for details).

Further Information on the Custom 360° Survey

The Custom 360° Survey is still based on the Psychologica Competency Framework, using the same hierarchical structure, but allows you to choose items from a large item bank and to emphasise, or omit, different areas of the model.

You can also modify existing wordings, to suit your organisational style, or write new items, in relation to specific organisational specialisms and requirements.

The Output Report will be tailored automatically to match your specifications, within the existing framework.

The Custom 360° Survey allows you to select/deselect whole Categories of items (such as ‘People Skills’, ‘Organisational Skills’, etc) and Dimensions and Skill Areas within each Category (such as ‘Team Focus’ and ‘Cooperating and Sharing’, etc).

You can then select survey items, from within each specified Skill Area, to include in the survey. We recommend that you use the minimum number of items in each area, to try and prevent the survey becoming too large, and choose the one which has the best wording for your particular organisational specialism. If none are appropriate then you may also write your own.

When to use Categories

First you will need to select Categories, from those available, which you want to include in your 360°. At this point in time you are not able to change the titles or subject matter of the Categories, or their sub-dimensions, as this will disrupt the integrity of the framework and subsequent reporting. However, if required, we are able to design a new 360° for you from scratch (Contact for details).

There are Step-by-Step Instructions

Step by step instructions are provided for selecting Categories, Dimensions and Skill Areas to include in, or omit from, your survey. You will be shown an array of potential competency items, to select for your survey.

Using Items and Targets

You can select from existing items with wordings which are ‘core’ to all organisational staff, or specify those most appropriate for the particular organisational levels of the ‘target’ individuals in your project (ie: leader, manager, supervisor, operative, etc).

You can include ‘targets’ from different organisational levels in the same overall programme, as the Project Management System will automatically send the appropriately worded items to each ‘target’ (and their nominated assessors), according to their specified level/role.

Before beginning Reminder

A real advantage of using the Psychologica Competency structure, as a basis for all surveys, is that similar criteria can be assessed across the whole organisation to build a complete picture of the overall ‘culture and capacity’, which can be related to established development interventions and approaches. For example: specific aspects of the customer experience, from within a Psychologica Customer Survey, can be related to associated elements of customer focus as relevant to different organisational functions (at the level of individual roles) and the overall service quality culture/climate (at the organisational level).

This can be related to: specific behaviours of customer facing staff; customer focus or leadership style of managers; service and staff development strategies amongst leaders; and so on. Output can feed into targeted interventions designed to increase customer awareness and focus at all levels of the organisation. In this way the 360° can be attuned to a focused programme of positive change which can be cascaded across the whole organisation, in relation to any given criteria - such as a specific area of customer experience, for example.

The Psychologica Competency Structure

Remember, before beginning to customise a 360° Survey you need to be very clear about the organisational outcomes you wish to achieve ultimately, and design your survey to ensure you will be able to achieve this. In other words, ensure you have a rationale, or existing OD Strategy, and are actually measuring competence in the areas which are central to your strategy. If your objective is to carry out a 360° Survey as a diagnostic, to aid the development of an OD Strategy, then it may not be wise to omit Categories or Dimensions within the model, but rather use a Standard 360° Product initially on a sample of key members of staff, and structure your customised version based on the findings.

Writing Competency Items

The value of survey output is always limited to the relevance and quality of the items used in the first place. Therefore it is important to ensure that any new items you add to the survey conform to the same basic ‘rules’ which govern the generic items already included below:

Ensure that the item is placed within the appropriate Skill Area and Dimension of the model. The score on this item will be included with others, in that area, to build into an overall score and relate to the report wording - so it has to be a valid ‘fit’ with the other items in that area, by referring to the same underlying competence. This can be difficult with some closely related skills, eg: is ‘Persuasion’ a Communication Skill or a People Skill? There is a clear rationale for the classification of competences within the Psychologica Model and you can check this using the Competency Referencing Tool
Items are best when related to a ‘simple’ competence, rather than a ‘compound’ of a number of component behaviours . For example, ‘good leadership’ is composed of a wide number of aspects, such as: social influence, organisational skills, strategic thinking, clarity of vision and direction, etc. So an item attempting to measure ‘good leadership’ directly may be meaningless, as each respondent may interpret this differently - some seeing this to be fundamentally interpersonal while others may relate to clarity of direction. The Psychologica Model sees leadership effectiveness as emerging from a number of possible styles and approaches and the significance of these would be examined when feeding back the report - which would address each of these component areas in turn. In short, try to word the item to address one thing only (eg: Persuasiveness) and place it in the relevant area of the survey (Influencing > People Skills)
Try to make sure items only relate to one skill at a time, eg: ‘Chairs meetings effectively’, rather than ‘Chairs meetings effectively and makes decisive action points’. An individual may do one and not the other and therefore respondents will be confused and cannot answer
Ensure the item refers to something which respondents can actually assess. This means some kind of behaviour which has measurable effectiveness in objective terms, rather than an inference about an internal process. For example, it is possible to form a judgement about the degree to which an individual may get on with others in the workplace, but not necessarily the motivation which drives this (which may be personal to the ‘target’). This may be inferred, but such an inference will be subjective and therefore not reliable
On the other hand, 360° responses are based on opinion and amalgamated to create an overall picture - based on a consensus view. Purely objective performance criteria (such as technical accuracy, for example) may be better assessed using a work sample test, which is free from any bias based on likeability of the ‘target’
Always use ‘positive indicators’, such that ‘more is better’. The item scale, against which the skill is measured, goes from ‘ineffective’ (1) through to highly effective (7). Therefore: ‘Makes a strong impact on others’ would work, whereas, ‘Often avoids social contact’ would not
Try to include approximately the same number of items in each Skill Area - this ensures that each area has the same weighting in the final analysis
Avoid asking the same question a number of different ways. Although this may ‘cover all the angles’ it will make for a lengthy questionnaire. Choose the best worded item and stick to it
Make each question a ‘stand alone’ item - which doesn’t refer to another question or depend on another item to make sense
Phrase questions to allow a ‘spread’ of scores to result, by making them sufficiently challenging. For example: ‘Is always punctual’, rather than ‘Usually turns up on time’. High scores on the former indicate exceptional performance while high scores on the latter may not
The customisation process allows you to create items specifically for different roles and levels in the organisation. These may relate to the same underlying competence (eg: Communication) but may require different wording (eg: ‘networking with partners and stakeholders’, at leadership level, or ‘putting customers at ease’, at operator level)
Ensure your questions actually make sense, by trying them on a group of different kinds of people (eg, who may not understand any jargon you use) before launching the survey

You may also wish to refer to Definitions of terms used in the 360° Process

Customising a 360° Survey

Writing Competency Items