BY DOMINICK J. SWINHART
There are few things more stressful for employees than performance reviews. Sitting down in a closed door meeting with your boss to find out whether you’re going to get criticized or commended can make just about anyone sweat. How would you feel if, along with your own performance evaluation, you were allowed to give your boss a performance evaluation? A recent business management trend may soon give you that opportunity in your organization.
Employee performance evaluations have been part of the business world for decades. Performance evaluations have been used in the fire service for a long time as well, where they’ve been reserved primarily for probationary firefighters or employees on probationary status (i.e., those newly promoted). Fire departments are beginning to view performance evaluations outside of probationary periods as a valuable tool to facilitate organizational growth and employees’ growth as individuals.
Fire service performance evaluations proceed primarily in a top-down fashion. Battalion chiefs evaluate their captains, captains evaluate their lieutenants, and lieutenants evaluate their firefighters. This tried-and-true method of evaluating employee performance has significant limitations.
In the business world, who evaluates the department manager? In most companies, it is some other higher-level manager or perhaps even the CEO. The same holds true for the fire service. Who completes the performance evaluation of a captain, a battalion chief, or even the department chief? For the department chief, perhaps a mayor or the board of commissioners can complete an evaluation.
This practice poses the same dilemma as in the business world: Is a CEO necessarily more qualified to provide a realistic, useful performance evaluation of a lower-level department manager with whom he may have limited contact? What about those with whom the manager interacts professionally every daysuperiors, subordinates, and peers? Is the mayor necessarily more qualified to provide an adequate performance evaluation of a chief than the department’s battalion chiefs, captains, and firefighters?
Fortunately, there are cutting-edge employee performance evaluations used in the Fortune 500 world that can be useful in the fire service. The question is, What’s holding your department back?
A NEW APPROACH
The basic theory of 360-degree performance evaluations is that every employee, regardless of the person’s position in a given organization, receives thoughtful evaluations and suggestions for improvement from everyone with whom they come in contact: superiors, colleagues, and subordinates. The same employee might be asked to evaluate his coworker as well as his department manager. In the fire service, a captain would receive a performance evaluation not only from his battalion chief but also from his firefighters. It’s a radical idea, but it’s one that’s gaining traction throughout the business world with such companies as Boeing and Levi Strauss & Co. There’s no reason such a system can’t work in your fire department as well.
To better understand the place of the 360-degree performance evaluation in the fire service, let’s take a look at the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the most widely used performance evaluation method, the top-to-bottom evaluation. The top-to-bottom employee evaluation, preferred by many companies, is the one most widely used in fire departments. This preference owes as much to simplicity as it does to protecting the comfortable hierarchy present in most organizations.
In the top-to-bottom performance evaluation, employees receive annual or quarterly reviews from their immediate supervisors. In the business world, such evaluations serve a dual purpose. They are used not only to recognize an employee who is doing a good job but also to help employees discover areas in which they can improve. In most businesses, performance evaluations are an integral tool for determining whether an employee will get a raise or a promotion.
In fire departments, such evaluations not only are used to evaluate whether a probationary employee is a good fit for his position, but they can also be reviewed when a firefighter is up for a department promotion.
The inherent weakness of the top-to-bottom employee performance evaluation is that sometimes supervisors are not in the best position to witness subordinate activities, attitudes, and overall performance. Can a chief’s evaluation of one of the battalion chiefs ever be completely accurate when that chief may never see how that battalion chief functions at the company level? Can a firefighter ever truly know the areas he can improve on if the only evaluation he gets is from a single officer?
Further, some employees may complain that the top-to-bottom evaluation is unfair if they are subjected to an evaluation by a single person who they feel may have a personal bias. The 360-degree evaluation, if properly used, can neutralize biases and give employees a wider range of opinions about their performance.
FIRE SERVICE APPLICATION
The 360-degree performance evaluation would function in the fire service just as it does in the business world. During the evaluation period, all employees would complete evaluations of everyone with whom they come in contact every day, regardless of rank. For simplicity’s sake, some organizations restrict this to a maximum of seven people. Although evaluations can be customized to meet the unique needs of individual departments, in a typical 360-degree evaluation, a battalion chief’s performance, for example, would be evaluated not only by the chief (his superior) but also by the battalion chief’s captains (his subordinates). Likewise, a captain or other line officer would receive performance evaluations not only from his battalion chief but also from his fellow shift officers as well as the firefighters that officer supervises on his shift. Finally, rank-and-file firefighters would receive evaluations from their immediate officers as well as the other firefighters on their shift. The 360-degree evaluation can be tailored for each department based on size and need. A small department may create an evaluation process in which the entire department evaluates chiefs and officers, whereas larger departments may restrict evaluations to specific shifts, stations, or battalions. Figure 1 shows how a 360-degree evaluation might work in a small department for one shift.
 Figure 1. The 360-Degree Evaluation Employees would be evaluated not only by their direct superiors but also by their peers and subordinates. |
Anonymity is the key to 360-degree evaluations.1,2,3,4 This means that no employee gets to know who wrote his evaluation. Employees will never be completely honest in evaluating their supervisors or coworkers if they have to worry about being identified and perhaps singled out for retribution. Anonymity can easily be ensured by using computer entry or a simple checkbox evaluation or a scoring sheet that highlights specific categories of performance (Table 1). The checkbox system also avoids the problem of employees who might write down unhelpful criticisms that could derail the whole process.
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Right now there are probably more than a few readers asking, “A firefighter evaluating his captain? Are you kidding me?” If you’re one of those people, it might be worth doing some personal reflection to ask yourself why you would have a problem receiving honest feedback from a subordinate.
EVALUATION PURPOSE
The primary purpose of any employee evaluation process should be personal as well as organizational improvement. It can also be invaluable in identifying future leaders in your department and in giving your current leaders the feedback that can help them to improve personally and professionally. The purpose of the 360-degree evaluation is no different. It has the added benefit of obtaining evaluations from all around the employee, not just from his immediate supervisors. This, in effect, should provide a more objective evaluation of how an employee is performing his job, even employees working in management. Likewise, employees find the process fairer than traditional evaluations, and they feel that their opinions matter.
The 360-degree evaluation is not perfect and may not be right for your department. Organizations that have an atmosphere of distrust or that don’t respect open lines of communication are poor choices for the 360-degree performance evaluation. Critics often ask these important questions: What will such evaluations be used for? Will they be used to decide who passes probation? Will they be used to decide who gets a promotion and who doesn’t? Will they simply be used to help employees improve themselves? You must answer these questions before attempting to implement such an evaluation system. Some experts caution that the 360-degree evaluation is much more useful for personal development as opposed to promotional or financial purposes. (3)
Likewise, organizations must be vigilant for employees who attempt to influence the outcome of the process. One of the biggest concerns is that groups of employees may conspire to give each other glowing evaluations or poor evaluations to superiors. Another consideration is that employees must have a firm grasp of the job responsibilities of the person they are evaluating. A firefighter with fewer than two years on the job may have difficulty writing a useful and accurate performance evaluation of his chief or captain. Like any employee evaluation procedure, the results are not meant to stand on their own and should be considered together with other observations.
Finally, organizations should make sure that their evaluations are detailed enough so that employees know what changes they need to make. Nothing will frustrate employees more than to have three evaluations on which they score “strongly agree” on good people skills and two others that say “strongly disagree” and then have no avenue to ask for clarification since all evaluations are anonymous. Some organizations address this by including a small section under each category for written explanation. This format is better suited for computer entry so that the employees writing the evaluation can’t be identified by their handwriting.
If your department is progressive and open-minded, the 360-degree evaluation can be an invaluable tool to help all employees, regardless of rank, improve themselves, their relationship with their colleagues, and their departments as a whole.
Endnotes
1. HR-Survey, LLC Web site, “360-degree Feedback,” www.hr-survey.com/360Feedback.htm.
2. MissouriBusiness.net Web site, “360° Performance Evaluation,” www.missouribusiness.net/cq/2002/360_performance_eval.asp.
3. DeBare, Ilana. “360 Degrees of Evaluation: More companies turning to full-circle job reviews,” The San Francisco Chrionicle, May 5, 1997, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1997/05/05/BU65200.DTL4
4. Businessballs.com Web site, “Performance Appraisals,” www.businessballs.com/performanceappraisals.htm#360%20degree%20feedback%20360%20degree%20feedback.
DOMINICK J. SWINHART is a paramedic/firefighter for the Aberdeen (WA) Fire Department and also works as a fire service and EMS consultant. Involved in the fire service since 1989, he is a graduate of George Washington University’s EMS Management program.
