Hi everyone, welcome back. So, we're going to talk a little bit about peer assessments. Peer assessment strategies are often used in higher ed, higher education, and you've been doing them for our courses, in fact. They're assessments made by peer groups of each others work, and can be done anonymously, in small groups, in real time, online, and so forth. But, what is the point of them, and what can we learn from them, and how can we really learn to do them well? So I'm going to talk a little bit about that. What do peer assessments cover? So, this will change depending on your relationship to the person being reviewed. If you're reviewing at the workplace, for example, if you're reviewing a supervisor or a manager, the assessment might ask if your concerns were addressed at a timely manner, or if you had consistent and clear reviews with feedback for development of your own position. If you're reviewing a coworker, you might be asked to speak to that coworker's work ethic, or maybe her accuracy of work and the competencies relative to the work of the areas you share, okay? The surveys, themselves, are often, they'll often ask you to rate an individual and then provide room for more elaborate comments. So what does all of this have to do with career development? As employers look for ways to really assess employee performance, right? So supervisors can't be everywhere at once. They want to assess employee performance, they want to develop talent, and think about ways to fill gaps in the competencies at all levels of the organization. Peer reviews are really becoming more and more popular, and managers and supervisors find that employees are often more candid in assessing their coworkers and colleagues. So, they might actually see, I see my coworkers, for example, in more authentic situations anyway, and you'll be able to speak more candidly and speak to strengths and weaknesses. And a pair of you can also take advantage of employee knowledge. So, it has the potential for team building. They can create space for teams to understand what coworkers do, and potentially create cross-function, what we call sort of cross-function capacity building. So, for example, if I'm doing a peer assessment of a colleague and I learned that she is working on a particular project, maybe something I'm doing in my work space, we can actually end up collaborating and working together, and really energizing these two projects, which had previously been siloed. So, it's a really good way to learn more about your work place, anyway, and about your colleagues. So, a common version of a peer review is the 360 assessment. I'm sure a lot of you have heard of this tool, and that's an assessment which takes into consideration feedback, not only from the immediate work circle of any employee, but also from supervisors and managers, and those supervised by the individuals, so you sort of get that sense of a 360. 360 peer reviews that are well done do share certain characteristics and they're important characteristics for you to remember, even if you're not doing a 360 review. So, for example, they want to clearly explain how the feedback will be shared and that they're geared towards competencies that are accurate to a given position versus a generic instrument, right? And they should also ideally show an individual, or show you where you stand relative to others in similar positions, either in your company or in your industry. I think we've all received surveys that are so general, we don't actually end up saying anything, we don't feel like we've said anything. So good reviews and good assessments don't do that. So then there's, of course, a question of, how can you assess others well, and how can you give your peers beneficial feedback? So, first of all, we have to be mindful of subjective bias and you can't let personal vendettas get in the way. On the other hand, on the other hand, some human resources professionals do suggest that high performers are actually often very well liked among their peers, so what might actually be perceived as a positive bias is actually an accurate appraisal of employee performance. We've talked about this in other lectures. Secondly, and this too will sound fairly familiar to you by now, both those being reviewed and those doing the reviews have to know the standards and the benchmark performances and the desired skills against which they are evaluating their peers. So you can't do this in a vacuum about your organization. The evaluation, in other words, has to have grounded context in the organizational culture, the desired skills, and etc. So if the parameters of the assessment aren't clear, ask your supervisor or manager, or in turn, if you're being assessed, and you feel the assessment isn't clear, ask for clarification. It's really important. And also, learning to hone peer assessment skills and incorporating feedback from peers will likely involve an element of cross-cultural competence, both on the side of the reviewer and on the side of the individual or individuals being reviewed. This is an important piece, right, because in an increasingly global economy, it's certainly crucial that you understand how your peers interpret your work, and how assessments, in general, can be influenced by cultural factors, cultural assumptions, and so forth. So keep that detail in mind. Most peer assessments are developed by a survey company. Sometimes in-house human resources office, but you'll likely have an opportunity also to write open-ended comments. And those open-ended comments are really, really important. Please, however, make sure the comments are specific. So, they're of no use to the person being reviewed otherwise. For example, she is a poor communicator, is far less specific than, she does not return emails in a timely manner and as a result, projects can fall behind schedule. That is very clear and very helpful. Two, the comments should focus on job parameters. So they should be limited to the scope of competencies expected for that position, so we're not going to comment on something that falls outside the scope of a given job or a given position. They also shouldn't be personalized, either positively or negatively, constructive feedback is certainly expected, but avoid the use of overly harsh or inappropriate language that speaks more to personal bias than an individual's talents and competence for their position or where they could perhaps stand a little bit of improvement. You could focus on identifying gaps, as well as strengths, right? It's helpful to receive both positive and more developmental peer assessments. We want our colleagues to keep doing the good things too, and we want to comment where we think they might be able to improve. So a sample peer assessment tool might ask you, for example, to score a colleague on communication skills, including rating how respectful she is, how clearly she communicates, the timeliness of her communication. If you scored that individual either high or low, and you have the opportunity, again, you might wish to write specific examples to back your scores, so the individual can really learn, and you're taking a more developmental approach. So the other side of the coin is how do you receive peer assessments, how do you take the information in that assessment and make it work for you. What do you do once you have information from a peer assessment about you. And, as we discussed in course three, creating your own unique brand is key to setting yourself apart from the competition, it's crucial to strategic career development and career management, so the information learned from peer assessments can be a key part of that branding process. For example, what might you learn from assessing a colleague in a similar position to the one you currently hold? Might it be useful to ask a supervisor for clarification on feedback received. You can also ask for specific examples, or even ask for another informal review within a shorter time frame to assess how you are doing. If you're reviewed on a yearly basis, which is pretty common in most organizations, including my own, you could ask for one in six months, sort of an informal, one halfway in-between. It's also important to think about a peer assessment, both as a reviewer and as someone being reviewed, as an opportunity to include new information in a personal, professional plan for growth, or adding to that personal brand and identify competencies. As with any instrument of measure, the relative accuracy and the pros and cons of using, for example, a 360 assessment or any peer assessment, it's widely debated, right? But you should know, though, that no matter what type they are, that they're a specific type of peer assessment and you might run into them some day, it's a very common tool these days. So, we've learned that peer assessments are not just the stuff of higher education anymore. Industry and professional settings increasingly integrate peer assessment into the review of individual employees, and it's a good tool and opportunity for you to learn about how you can use them. See you soon.
