Decide Whether to Include the Spidergraph in Individual Feedback Reports

Spidergraphs are great, but it's not always recommended to include them in your feedback reports

One of the options for your feedback report is to include a spidergraph.

Here's how it will look:

 

The spidergraph contains a lot of useful information, and can be used to answer:

  • Where are my top strengths?

  • Where are my weaknesses?

  • Where are my top areas for improvement?

  • Where are there groups in strengths/weaknesses/areas for improvement in the same section?

It can be particularly useful graph for comparing participants (which you may want to do as a coach). It makes it easy to spot similarities and differences between the needs of different participants.

However, we don't necessarily recommend including it in your report.

Why we don't recommend including the spidergraph

When we designed the 360 Feedback report, we got feedback from hundreds of HR directors, managers and employees. Some *loved* the spidergraph, but many more found it confusing. It distracted them from reviewing the rest of the report and creating an action plan.

There are two big problems with the spidergraph:

  1. Many employees simply won't have used this type of graph before, and will not feel confident that they are reading the data correctly

  2. It can answer a lot of questions (as listed above), but this makes harder to focus on each question in turn. 

We came up with a much better solution. Rather than using a spidergraph to answer lots of questions at once, we use individual pages to answer one question at a time. This lets us guide the employee through the feedback, giving them the information they need to make an action plan, and not distracting them with more.

And we're happy to say that the end-result is a report that customers rave about it! 

When should I consider including the spidergraph?

The only reason that we would recommend including the spidergraph is if your employees/coaches are used to having this information available, and use it as part of your feedback review meeting.

For the majority of customers, we recommend leaving this page out :)