The Culture Amp Manager Effectiveness 180 Survey is a simple but powerful way for organizations to capture actionable feedback for their people leaders. If your organization is new to the employee feedback process or your managers have expressed frustration with not getting enough valuable upward feedback, this is a great way to start.
When to Use a Manager Effectiveness Assessment
To get the most value from our tools, it's important to understand when to use each template. While the Manager Effectiveness 180 Survey is an excellent choice for broad, group-level insights, our Manager 360 and Manager Effectiveness 180 (Pulse) templates offer different strengths for specific situations.
Establishing Training Needs: If you're looking to identify gaps and inform future learning and development opportunities, the Manager Effectiveness 180 Survey is a great way to assess manager capabilities across the organization. This provides an excellent data set to understand where to focus training efforts, both before and after a program rollout.
Rapid Growth: When your organization grows quickly, promoting individual contributors into people management roles, the Manager Effectiveness 180 Survey can provide new managers with clear insights into how they can improve their core management capabilities. For a more holistic view of a manager's strengths and development, consider the Manager 360 template, which gathers feedback from a wider range of stakeholders, including peers and their own manager.
Employee Feedback: If feedback from engagement surveys or other mechanisms suggests a shortage of core manager capabilities is impacting employee effectiveness, an upward feedback survey provides managers with needed guidance on which behaviors to focus on first.
Employee Turnover: While our research suggests that people generally don't leave managers but leave organizations, if you are seeing high levels of voluntary turnover in specific parts of your business, an upward feedback survey for managers can be helpful.
Front-Line Manager Turnover: If you are losing a larger-than-expected number of managers, an upward feedback survey can point to key capabilities where the organization can provide training and development to support managers and help them feel more capable in their roles.
What Is an Appropriate Time to Roll Out an Upward Feedback Survey?
When it comes to survey cadence, a good rule of thumb is to only survey as often as you can act. For organizations with an established ritual of gathering and acting on employee feedback, twice a year is probably appropriate for the Manager Effectiveness 180 Survey. Others may find that once a year is enough, especially when run alongside other feedback mechanisms like Engagement and Individual Effectiveness programs.
For situations requiring more frequent, light-touch feedback, the Manager Effectiveness 180 (Pulse) template is designed for high-frequency deployment, such as quarterly check-ins, to track trends over time and reduce survey fatigue.
Regardless of what cadence fits your organization, it is vital that you allow time for your managers to address the feedback they receive. This includes sharing it with their direct reports and manager, developing plans to address any opportunities for improvement, and acting on the feedback.
➡️ Next:
First, visit our Manager Effectiveness 180 Survey article for background on the management behaviors that our survey template seeks to measure for your organization.
Next, review the Survey Preparation Checklist for the steps involved in setting up your account and survey.
Before you launch, consider which manager-specific demographics will provide you with the most insightful and actionable results.
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