No employee is perfect, but implementing a 360 degree system can help improve nearly anyone’s on-the-job performance.

Although a 360 degree system can work wonders for your company morale, unity and overall productivity, you can also counteract its benefits by using it the wrong way.

So that you don’t make this mistake, we are going to explain the wrong way to use your 360 degree system.

If you are trying to use your 360 degree system to build employee personality profiles, then you are using it wrong. The purpose of a 360 degree evaluation is to identify specific behaviors that affect an employee’s performance so that they can improve. Make sure that instead of asking rhetorical psychological evaluation questions, you ask questions about what an employee does.

Anonymity is a critical element of the 360 degree system that cannot be ignored. If people are worried that the responses that they give will not remain confidential, then the honesty and overall quality of your evaluations will be compromised.

Make sure that your 360 degree system is 100 percent confidential. Also be sure that, as Eric Jackson suggested in a recent article for Forbes, when explaining the system to your employees that you “assure them up-front that it is a confidential process and won’t come back to haunt them.”

A 360 degree evaluation should not be a punishment for employees who aren’t producing results. It should be a company resource integrated to improve the performance of every member of your company’s team. If, however, you only evaluate “problem” employees, this is exactly what it will start to look like.

As the OI Global Partners career development group said in a recent article, using your 360 degree system like this “creates a perception that multi-rater feedback is only for poor performers.” Creating this type of sentiment will be counterproductive, to say the least.

In addition to identifying and mitigated weaknesses, your 360 degree system should also support your employees’ strengths. When you do this, you can cause an employee to lessen their use of their strengths. It also casts a dark cloud over the entire 360 degree process, as people don’t like hearing all bad news.

What is the point in an employee performance evaluation if nothing is done to correct the behaviors identified in the evaluation? There is none. In addition to identifying what is affecting a team member’s performance, your 360 degree system should map out a pathway for improvement.

By avoiding taking the actions discussed in this article, you can make sure that your 360 degree system is a resounding success.

Grapevine Evaluations provides easily customizable online 360 degree software that can provide crucial feedback about employees from everyone they work with, including themselves. To learn more about how our 360 degree feedback can help your company, or to set up a one-on-one demo, contact Grapevine Evaluations today.