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Performance is the buzzword nowadays in the corporate world. Every business unit needs performance, whether it’s a manufacturing industry or service industry. The productivity of an organisation is basically determined by the contribution of its people. The progress of any business unit depends on the performance of its human resources along with other factors.

Today’s organisations place more emphasis on improving the performance of their people, thereby improving the stability and performance of their organisation as a whole. An important tool used by organisations is the 3600 performance appraisal. It’s an approach to evaluate job responsibilities and goals of employees in comparison with those of the organisation.

Most employees are familiar with the typical annual or biannual reviews. These reviews involve the employees receiving feedback from a single perspective from their managers. 3600 performance appraisal removes the importance of a single rater. It enables managers and team members to collaborate on a developmental plan and actively manage it.

3600 performance appraisal is a professional feedback tool designed to evaluate employees from top level managers to supervisory levels. It’s about the employees themselves doing their evaluation. One can get the combined perspective of managers and several peers about the team work, communication, leadership potential and management skills of employees.

The goal is to provide feedback that will actually help the employees to improve and focus on their long-term career development. This combined perspective helps to create balance among different perspectives as feedback is collected from all those who are professionally connected with the employees instead of getting point of view from only one manager.

Some of the benefits of this system to the organisations are involving people with different perspectives in different roles at different levels, supporting performance culture, providing employees with better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, forming sound basis for development and performance improvement, and creating fair and transparent processes.

The employees reap benefits such as occasion to compare the opinions of many people with their own, possibility for better acceptance since coming from many sources, encouragement for increased self-awareness, focus on personal development and improvement of team working by raising awareness of how others perceive individuals as contributors to the group.

As feedback emanates from various sources, it leaves little room for any discrimination or bias. Any discriminative angle of the supervisor can be nullified if the multi-source feedback shows that the supervisor’s inputs are not in conjunction with those of coworkers, customers and other constituents. It can create motivated workforce and thereby better organisations.

The companies which use 3600 performance appraisal system think it’s the most essential thing to improve productivity. Companies such as Tata Infotech, Ashok Leyland, Asian Paints and Wipro are effectively implementing this method. They feel that feedback is very important to enable them to make necessary changes in the attitude and work culture of employees.

Yet, this is actually followed in a few companies only as many of the Indian companies are hesitant to implement it due to the fear of upsetting the traditional hierarchical structure thus creating an imbalance. However, one shall find that around 90% of the Fortune 500 global companies have embraced this system which has yielded them better results.

3600 performance appraisal is time-consuming and expensive especially in large organisations. The perception of immediate superior has limited importance as opinions are collected from many persons. The large number of people who give feedback may not be serious in their opinions. But if done with care, it can definitely be a better method of performance appraisal.