Setting up a project in Spidergap
Setting up your project within Spidergap is really quick!
If you use our standard template, you can be set up in 10 minutes. If you need to customize it to use your own competencies, then it will take another 10-30 minutes.
The time consuming parts of setting up a 360 Feedback project are the decisions you might need to make outside of Spidergap. Such as how anonymous to keep feedback, and the competencies you want to use. Our 360 Feedback planning checklist will help you review the decisions you'll need to consider.
We have sensible defaults for all of these considerations, so for your first test-run we'd suggest using the standard best-practice questionnaire and default settings. You can always customize these later.
Running a trial
It's possible to run a complete trial within a day, or even an hour.
Try and make sure that everyone who needs to provide feedback as part of the trial is available. For a first test-run, you might decide to provide all of the feedback yourself.
You can assess one person for free when you sign up for a free trial.
Running your project
It's possible to run an entire 360 Feedback project within a half a day.
However, it's more common to provide longer timelines so that people can fit in providing and reviewing feedback around their other activities, holidays and sickness.
Typical timelines are:
3-10 days to choose and approve feedback providers
1-4 weeks to provide feedback
1-4 weeks to review feedback
Longer timelines are needed in larger companies as you'll struggle to find a 2 week period where no-one is on holiday!
Spidergap makes administering a project quick and painless. It's easy to review progress and you can send reminders and share reports with a click of the button.
Providing feedback
Our feedback questionnaires typically take 5-15 minutes to fill in. Of course, this will increase if you add more questions, and may be longer for the person being assessed and their line manager who often choose to give more detailed explanations.
We recommend a maximum of 35 rating questions and 3 required text questions to avoid rater fatigue.
To prevent people being overloaded with feedback requests, we suggest:
Keep the number of feedback providers per person under 8
Keep an eye on anyone who is asked for feedback by more than 10 people. This is easy to spot in Spidergap, and you can then manage it if needed (e.g. by asking people to choose alternative feedback providers).
If you follow these tips, the vast majority of feedback providers will spend less than 2 hours providing feedback. This effort is tiny compared to the benefit that they — and others — will get from reviewing and actioning their feedback.