In the last two days, I've tried one experiment with my team: the regular quarterly performance review was for the first time driven directly by the team.
Before we tried this one, I used to act as a person responsible for delivering the performance review to every member of the team. It used to be rather a formal step as feedback was shared continuously, on the other hand, it was a great opportunity to look back and evaluate progress.
This was usually done by collecting the feedback through 1-1s, preparing a summary and sharing that through a dedicated session. Time consumption for me was around 3hr per person. I was ensuring that feedback was shared in a positive way, with described steps to improve and target state. It was also my ultimate responsibility to ensure sharing negative or not-so-perfect behaviors.
Now we have tried quite a different approach: we've sat together as a team and shared all the feedbacks together, using a 'hot seat' method. Every person was evaluated for 20 minutes, started with self-evaluation for 3 minutes, continued through a round table for 14 minutes and finally, the person summarized the feedbacks for another 3 minutes.
There was also a dedicated record steward for each round, so in the end, there are two available summaries: from the evaluated one and from a person, who had no emotions or stress in the particular round. Everyone can review whether his feedback was even recognized properly.
A positive experience is with the willingness to undertake this experiment and very good preparation. 90% of the team had written and well-prepared notes.
Most of the feedback was positive; only very few items or ideas were about the topics, where the improvement is needed. The majority of the to-be-improved items were shared without the desired target state or suggested steps to improve, on the other hand, it still may come from the receiver of the feedback. Often mistake was also sharing general things to improve, without exact examples or description of how this behavior hurts the team.
Overall I'm quite satisfied with these results - it's visible that the teams are able to share basic feedback among others. Due to changes in our company, they'll be soon required to share all kinds of feedbacks by themselves and I'm a bit afraid that negative things will remain undercover for a longer time.