Customer delight

Case studies

RBS global 360-degree feedback tool

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) appointed ETS to develop a new 360-degree feedback tool, which was to be used globally by some 4,500 senior managers and executives.

Roger Farley, Performance & Organisational Development Manager at RBS, describes the business need for 360:

We identified a need for 360-degree feedback to provide additional data for line managers to assess the performance of direct reports. It has quickly become an integral part of the performance management approach for senior leaders. Individuals are now better informed about their performance, and the organisation has been able gather a wealth of information on leadership behaviours, which is helping with development planning and our understanding of business culture.

An associated benefit of embedding 360-degree feedback for RBS is that it also contributed to the compliance with regulatory insight on pay and performance, demonstrating that feedback is gathered for senior leaders on a range of behaviours beyond profitability.

In designing the questionnaire to be used in the 360, ETS ensured all questions are aligned to the RBS Leadership Framework. In addition, some parts of the RBS business have decided to add questions to the 360 that are specific to their area. The programme is hugely complex with a total of 27 different questionnaires available and 18 of these running in parallel during the main feedback window in the autumn. There are a total of 76 different population groups involved in the RBS 360 and each one has different administration settings and reporting processes. In order to produce individual reports for people in scope by early November, the process of nominating feedback providers and completing questionnaires commences in early September.

The 360 programme has been tremendously well received across the organisation, with a review showing that the overall experience was very positive for participants. The Performance & Organisational Development team at RBS evaluate performance management processes by speaking to a random selection of employees to get feedback. Those involved in the 360 programme highlighted how user-friendly the bespoke 360 tool created by ETS was and the value of the data they got from 360-degree feedback.

There is now strong support within RBS to extend the 360 programme to a wider range of employees.

Roger Farley explains how RBS found the experience of working with ETS on the 360 programme:

We chose ETS from a host of suppliers as we knew a bespoke solution was required for our 360 programme given its size and complexity. The tailored 360 tool created by ETS meets all our organisational requirements and has integrated well with our other HR processes. We have forged a very good partnership with ETS and continue to be impressed – in particular – by their project management expertise and ability to keep such a complex programme on track.