Gathering Organizational Development Feedback in the Church

​What is Organizational Development Feedback in the Church?

Organizational Development, or simply OD, is any systematic, planned process or effort toward the goal of improving organizational productivity, customer/public loyalty or team effectiveness. 

Tools that OD practitioners employ to achieve organizational goals include any of the following, and usually a combination of several of these, among others:

Feedback from other in the workplace can take many forms to accomplish many purposes

Methods
Many methodologies are available to gather feedback in the workplace.  Some of these methods, such as the ubiquitous annual performance review, come from management. 

However, in addition to those in the management structure where an individual reports on the organization chart, feedback also comes from peers, external customers, direct reports or internal customers.  (Internal customers are people who receive services from or serve on teams with the individual receiving the feedback.) 

One of the most powerful feedback methodologies is 360 degree, or just 360 feedback.  Any effort to gather feedback from “above, beside and below,” is 360 feedback:

Above
Any or a combination these people:  the subject’s manager; managers of that manager; external customers or, in some cases, internal functions such as auditing, IT or legal.

Beside
Any or a combination of these people:  peers reporting to the same manager; internal customers; peers reporting to different managers who have important working relationships; and peers in other strategically critical organizations (for example suppliers working with a procurement officer, or bankers working with a finance person).

Below
Individuals who report to the feedback subject, their peers reporting to other managers, or a combination of these people.

Gathering the 360 Feedback
Feedback from “above, beside and below” depends on data collected from individual feedback providers.  Organizations collect the data using a wide variety of approaches, including:

• Questionnaires (administered online or with paper and pencil)
• Current and previous performance reviews
• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Employee satisfaction surveys
• Performance data (sales performance vs. quota; measures of output quality; evaluations of work product such as writing or spreadsheets; forecast accuracy; and many others)
• Published assessment instruments (described below)

Different survey methods, such as interviews, standard internal questionnaires, focus groups and customer comments can add to the data sets.
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