At Ipsen, the continuous feedback and “speak up” culture is embedded in our Ipsen Way of Being. In full alignment with the global strategy, we also promote the culture of continuous feedback and an open, honest and candid dialogue with all our employees in our DACH organisation. To shift from the strategy to implementation of the feedback culture, we already launched our 360° Feedback project at the end of last year. Our bold ambition is to give all our managers and leadership team members the “gift of feedback” from their team, colleagues and supervisor.

In line with our rollout plan, we have divided our managers into three cohorts: sales managers, office-based managers and leadership team. We started last year with all sales managers, and are continuing this year with the other two cohorts, so that by the end of this year all our managers will have gone through the 360° Feedback.

Our process is a little different because we don’t just use an online tool, but we split the whole 360° into three parts to ensure we get honest and whole feedback for each particular manager. We work together with our external coach so that we can ensure confidentiality and anonymity for the feedback givers.

The first part of our 360° Feedback is based on an online survey, which is composed of our Ways of Being and function-specific questions as well as a free text field (optional). Answering the online survey is of course completely anonymous and should not take longer than 10 minutes. The feedback givers consist of the manager’s team, supervisor as well as key stakeholders and peers who receive an invitation directly from the feedback receiver.  The feedback givers are selected and discussed with the HR and the particular feedback receiver.

The second part of the 360° Feedback consists of structured telephone interviews with approx. 6-7 stakeholders. For this, the feedback giver (consisting of employees/colleagues/supervisor) are selected by the HR department and are contacted directly by our external coach for a feedback interview of about 20-30 minutes.

The evaluation of the anonymous data is also carried out by our external coach, who summarises the results of the online survey and the feedback from the individual interviews in a report for the respective manager. This means that neither the final report nor the answers and feedback from the online survey can be used to draw conclusions about the statements or opinions of individual persons. We guarantee this 100%.

The last part of the 360° Feedback consists of the review session for the manager with our external coach. Here, the manager receives in-depth support by an external coach who discusses and jointly analyses the above mentioned “summarised report” with the respective manager in a 90-minute individual coaching session. The report with the cumulative 360° feedback is intended to enable our managers to better understand and reflect on their individual strengths and development areas and to work on those aspects that need development in their role as manager, colleague or employee. In addition, the manager works with our external coach to develop an “one-pager” that summarises the insights gained and which the manager then presents to his/her own team and to his/her manager.

We firmly believe that the 360° Feedback process offers all managers a valuable opportunity for reflection and development, and the participation rate of our employees so far shows the willingness to share their own honest feedback as well!

Feedback is a gift and every feedback counts!

DACH HR TEAM