It may be new or unexpected to answer questions about the people around you, e.g. who energizes, motivates, or advises you, along with who you see as outstanding and who needs additional support or attention.
These questions are part of a methodology called Active Organizational Network Analysis, or "Active ONA." Unlike passive ONA which monitors communication tools to identify interactions and sentiment, active ONA involves asking team members directly about the people around them.
How will this data be used?
Leaders have tools that will enable them to make apples-to-apples comparisons of people in the same role, job function, level, and tenure. When the cycle is complete, you'll receive an anonymized report of helpful perspectives of the people around you.
Do these questions bias to extroverts or serve as a popularity contest?
No, research shows the opposite. In fact, these questions are designed to increase accuracy and reduce bias often found in cherry-picked peer reviews and manager ratings. This methodology consistently reveals a large number of "quiet contributors." These are people who are doing amazing work but may not manage up or self-promote.
To prevent this from being a popularity contest, we ask you to substantiate why you chose the people you did on the next screen after you provide your responses. With the power of sample size, managers can use this information to see patterns and identify unusual outliers.
Confirm doesn’t ask, “Who do you like?” Instead, it focuses on the “how” and “what” of how you are impacted by the people around you. This means evaluating concrete actions and outcomes rather than relying on personal feelings or friendships.
How does Confirm ensure a fair and balanced review process?
(1) Context Matters
Gold Stars and Heads Ups given within our system are accompanied by a rationale.
This rationale provides the context behind the recognition, ensuring that it is based on merit and specific achievements.
By requiring this context, we eliminate vague or biased feedback and focus on the actual performance of individuals.
(2) Selective Recognition
To enhance fairness, we set a limit on the number of Gold Stars each person can give.
With a maximum of three Gold Stars per person, we ensure that recognition is meaningful and well-considered.
This selectivity prevents the over-distribution of accolades and encourages reviewers to truly think about who deserves recognition and why.
(3) Holistic Performance View with ONA
ONA provides a comprehensive, standardized, open view of each employee’s performance as perceived by the people around them, not just their managers or cherry-picked peers. It reduces selection bias in peer reviews and favoritism in manager reviews by not gatekeeping who can share what they see about whom. By enabling employee listening that expands beyond explicitly solicited opinions, important insights are given the ability to share their voice instead of being silenced by a selective process.
ONA questions identify who employees turn to for help, advice, and energy, rather than asking, “Who do you like?” Substantiation of skills and behaviors is required for anyone highlighted, ensuring the utility of this additional information.
ONA also leverages a larger sample size, encompassing the entire organization, to identify patterns in skills and behaviors.
Building a Fairer Performance Review Process
At Confirm, our goal is to rightly recognize everyone for the difference they make at work. In a world where only manager opinions and pre-selected peers matter, those that aren't effective at managing up or soliciting specific peers in 360's, even if they are outstanding quiet contributors, get missed.
By focusing on the “how” and “what” of performance, providing context for every recognition, and implementing constraints, we enable a performance review process that is based on tangible impact and meaningful achievements.
ONA enhances this process by offering a comprehensive view of employee performance that reduces idiosyncratic manager rating bias, peer 360 feedback selection bias, and more. By ensuring that everyone is given a psychologically safe method to give visibility to what they see about the people around them, we enable organizations to rightly recognize their team members for the difference they make at work.
Learn more from third party research
For more information about the problems with traditional performance review manager ratings and the "idiosyncratic rater bias" that ONA addresses, see Maynard Goff's study on manager ratings.
For more about the problems with selection bias and small sample size from traditional peer 360's, see this Harvard Business Review article, "The Fatal Flaw with 360 Surveys." Beyond what is mentioned here, internally Confirm has run Peer 360's in parallel to ONA and found that for organizations above a few hundred employees, on average 90% of the "heads ups" surfaced via ONA were provided by a person who was not selected to provide feedback in Peer 360's. This was true whether a person picked their peers, the manager picked the peers, or an algorithm picked the peers. In other words, 90% of the concerns surfaced from ONA are missed by organizations that do peer 360's but not ONA.
To learn more about how performance for knowledge workers follows a Power Law instead of the Bell Curve that so many organizations anchor to, see Dr. Herman Aguinis' paper, "The Best and the Rest: Revisiting the Norm of Normality of Individual Performance." The data from Confirm's ONA methodology consistently produces this Power Law, and for organizations above a few hundred employees, on average about 15% of employees are recognized for creating 50% of the positive impact as seen by the people around them, and about 5% are recognized as generating 50% of the organization's concerns.
To learn more about how to use Confirm's tools to do an apples-to-apples comparison of people in the same role, level, function, and tenure, and how the data from ONA can be used as a critical factor to identify hidden toxic employees who are shielded by their managers, as well as outstanding quiet contributors that managers may not recognize, see our case studies.
To learn how to use Confirm's data to ensure equity is established in your performance management process by normalizing the data produced by ONA based on demographic characteristics, contact your Customer Success Manager who can walk through this process with you.
Confirm is committed to rightly recognizing everyone for the difference they make at work. If you would like more evidence and research than the above to understand why ONA identifies reduces bias, identifies quiet contributors, and finds hidden problems that traditional performance reviews fail to identify, contact us and we'll be happy to provide what we can to support you.