Customised HR Software: Tick Off All the Boxes

Your logo can appear on the web-pages that people use when completing the questionnaire

We refer to ’raters’, ’focuses’ and ’360s’, but you might refer to ’respondents’, ’participants’ and ’270s’ - that’s just fine.

You can have as many or as few relationships as you want (e.g. ’self’, ’report’, ’peer’, ’director’, etc.), with whatever names you want (e.g. ’report’ /’subordinate’)

These are the rules you may want to enforce regarding the raters that get set up (e.g. must have manager; if have peers then must have at least 3 to protect anonymity)

These are the emails sent out to raters and focuses when they are first invited to take part - they can be worded however you want

These are the emails sent out to remind people that they have a questionnaire to complete and the deadline is approaching.

This is the email used to send the final report to the person receiving the feedback

This is the page of explanation that raters see before they start the questionnaire. It’s a good opportunity to explain what will happen with the data and how confidentiality is handled.

The page people see after clicking ’finish’ on the questionnaire.

Our software can be set to require items of personal information such as age, job title, department, etc. These can be open text or a choice from a drop-down menu.

This is our standard leadership model. See here for more details

Each individual 360 session can be configured with a different selection of competencies, depending on whether they are relevant to that person’s role or not.

We can set up an instrument with your own choice of items to reflect the behaviours that are important in your organisation. We are also happy to help you develop these items or to give advice on their psychometric robustness.

As well as the specific behaviours, you will no doubt want to structure your questionnaire into competencies. You can have as many as you want, as well as grouping them into ’domains’ to make the structure clearer.

Our ’pick & click’ technology allows each 360 session to be set up with a different selection of competencies. One popular use of this is to define role-specific competencies to complement a set of ’core’ competencies that everyone completes.

Questions can be Likert (e.g. 5-point scale from Poor to Excellent, 6-point scale from Never to Always, etc.) or Ipsative, and can be based around current performance, importance, or anything else you want to ask about.

You can give ’NA’ as an option on certain sets of questions - useful if some reviewers aren’t able to assess every behaviour

Each rated item can also have a comment box, to allow specific text feedback from reviewers on specific behaviours. This complements ’open text’ type questions and brings greater richness to the feedback.

You can have as many open text questions as you want

You can set some questions to be answered only by ’self’ or by ’non-self’ raters. This is useful for open-text questions like "What are you currently working on to improve?"

You can set some questions to be answered only by particular relationships - this is an elaboration of the ’self-only’/’non-self-only’ option. This can be useful where observable behaviours are specific to the nature of relationship one might have - for example in client or supplier relationships the rater sometimes cannot comment on questions of management ability or style.

Items that act in the opposite direction to the others in a competency can be included - the scales are automatically reversed to make aggregate statistics meaningful.

You can ask people to choose n top/bottom items from a list. This can be very useful to tease out relative strengths and weaknesses where raters are not differentiating much. (E.g. Choose the x best and x worst competencies, or the x most and x least important)

This is where specific items are worded differently depending on the role profile of the focus, but still within one instrument.

This is a powerful tool for increasing engagement and commitment from the focus (the person receiving feedback) - they get to choose some questions that are only asked of that person’s raters, which are randomly mixed in with all the other items. This obviously allows the focus to make their 360 ’their own’

In order to ensure that focus’s personal questions dovetail with the standard set of items, they can be offered a ’menu’ of personal questions that they might want to use. This still gives deeper engagement but ensures the psychometric quality of the questionnaire.

Although your items will be based on your company competency model, you may also want to add another interpretation of those same items. E.g. you could identify how the items link with your organisation’s ’values’, and also display this in your report.

This is our standard leadership model. See here for more details

The report can be branded with your organisation’s logo

The front page can be completely redesigned however you want it

Completely flexibility in all copy in the report, including introduction pages, ’workings’ pages for taking notes and giving guidance, and explanations given to aid interpretation.

We offer many alternative ways of displaying the data, and can be displayed in any order

The colours used in the various charts can be set to be consistent with your organisation’s design policy, or at the very least to go nicely with your company logo!

Simple bar chart showing average score by competency

Overlaid comparison of self score vs. score for everyone else

If being run a second time for a particular focus, the scores can be compared with the previous 360 to see if and where there has been improvement

If sufficient data has been accumulated, you can directly compare the scores with the distribution of scores seen in your benchmark data (e.g. everyone who completed the same survey in your organisation in the previous year)

A simple list (of as many items as you want) showing the top- and/or bottom-rated items. This gives a great flavour of the person’s strengths and weaknesses, and can also compare self vs. everyone else

If your instrument asks for evaluations of importance of competencies, this can be contrasted with overall ratings in a scatter chart, allowing clear insight in where the development priorities lie.

Unique to TalentFocus, this shows how all of the raters gave their scores, both as their average rating and the distribution of scores. Useful to understand how much agreement there is between indivdiuals, and also to see the extent to which the raters gave differentiated scores.

This is a very powerful page that clearly shows every score in every competency for every relationship.

This is the real detail, showing the average score for each item from each relationship. This also shows comments given against those items, and has many sub-options such as whether to also visually convey the values of the numbers by shifting them left or right (see the final page of our sample report).

This table summarises where there are differences in opinion between certain groups of raters

A summary of the extent to which the different types of rater agreed on the individual’s relative strengths and weaknesses. This is based on correlation analysis.

A listing of all items and competencies that had scores that fell below a certain threshold. This is particularly useful to confront poor performers with the fact that there are lots of areas they need to develop.

This displays the answers given to open-text questions like "What are they good at?", etc. Self answers are always shown separately, but within everyone else there are various options: Everyone can be grouped together (ensuring best possible anonymity), the Manager can be split from everyone else, or comments can be identifed by relationship.

This is a special display of the results from the ’best/worst’ question type, which shows how many people chose each option in a powerful visual style.

The results of an ’overlaid’ item structure can be displayed in the style of interlocking circles, which clearly conveys relative strengths and weaknesses whilst staying deliberately vague about absolute scores.

We believe that the best visual display is the one that delivers insight into the data in the most natural way for the viewer. That means that we often need to develop new displays for new projects. We will happily do so for you too.