How Can You Help Yourself Become Free From Subjective Bias And Improve Your Performance

Getting honest feedback from a number of sources is largely beneficial to evaluate your performance in an unbiased way and build upon that feedback to improve yourself. Nobody is free from subjective bias! With this in mind, as an Optometrist working and collaborating with people around you in the workplace with different skills and expertise, you cannot go far without receiving external feedback that supports your individual development plans, understanding those feedback coming from different perspectives, and building a culture that encourages feedback in your practice. In other words, you need your work to be rated in one way or another by someone who knows you very well, agrees to provide feedback anonymously about you, and has watched you perform every day.

Real-time feedback for all eye care professionals in the workplace is very salient as it constantly evaluates and rates the daily tasks as they are being performed and works on improving and adjusting as well as adding other methods to perform those tasks. Real-time feedback is usually processed by two or three colleagues or staff people you interact with immediately and you know their feedback is right as it is directly related to the task you are performing. The problem with getting feedback from a small group of two to three people risks having the perspective of the whole group skewed by one individual who sees things differently. Therefore, when it comes to performance beyond the individual tasks you perform every day you need to have 360-degree feedback that can be obtained anonymously from the widest possible range of people in your practice preferably more than eight persons (who work with you as peers as well as people above you and below you in the organization, partners, suppliers, customers, or anyone who interacts with you at work), requires filling out a detailed questionnaire that sometimes takes up to an hour, and that its results are objectively analyzed and discussed with the colleagues who you mostly trust and are the most competent for this task.

No matter how you do 360-degree performance feedback it needs to include:

Gathering information in a systematic way including collecting the information in a specific and consistent way through software;

Analyzing the information and data collected and presenting it in a way that is useful to you and your manager (or the persons who agree to help you analyze feedback) to help develop action plans, career decisions, and practice strategies;

When doing 360-degree performance feedback, it is very important to understand the organization’s culture in using anonymous feedback as well as the number of people giving feedback.

An organization with a significantly open culture will accept anonymity and sometimes also will be free with the identification of the persons behind the feedback. However, an organization with a closed culture will not tolerate the identification of names and even when the feedback is anonymous you become focused and obsessed with the importance of figuring out how to identify who is behind the feedback than the feedback itself.

The number of people providing feedback should not be small to prevent one individual’s feedback effect on the whole group’s perspective and should not also be too large which makes it cumbersome to gather, collect, and analyze data and understand each individual perspective. In general, in an Optometry practice, 6 to 10 feedbacks are ideal to provide you with meaningful 360-degree performance feedback.