360-degree feedback surveys: template, definition and best practices

When it comes to how your employees view their leaders, managers and colleagues throughout your organisation, it’s important to get the full picture. You need honest and candid feedback about an individual’s strengths and weaknesses, and potential blind spots that may be having an impact on employee performance or morale.

360-degree feedback surveys are a great way to get the in-depth information you need and can be used as a powerful tool to help everyone grow. This type of employee survey captures comprehensive insights from those working closely with an individual whose performance is being evaluated. This means that it gathers feedback from managers and peers.

Through feedback, team members can gain an understanding of their actions and behaviours and how they affect the wider team. This can be considerably different from how they view themselves. By receiving useful insight into what others see, team members can take action to enhance their strengths and improve upon their weaknesses.

Of course, it’s important that these reviews are presented in a thoughtful and constructive way and that employees are willing to incorporate the feedback they receive in their professional growth and efforts to achieve organisational goals. When this does occur, 360-degree surveys can be a real game-changer in terms of your organisation’s success.

Unlike traditional performance reviews, the aim of a 360-degree feedback survey is to gather anonymous feedback about an employee from the people working most closely with them, including direct reports, peers and managers. 

During a 360-degree review, a team member can expect to receive feedback from a wide range of perspectives, with supervisors, direct reports and peers sharing their views on that person’s skills, behaviour and impact on the rest of the team.

The data collected via 360-degree feedback surveys is then combined into a report that identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the individual being assessed.

It’s important to remember that this type of feedback doesn’t actually focus on performance, but rather it assesses the full range of aspects that can be attributed to an employee’s behaviour. The feedback can be eye-opening – or at times, alarming – for the individual being assessed. But it truly is one of the most effective ways to help the person improve their interactions, their communication and, ultimately, their job performance.

The approach to developing a 360-degree review is relatively straightforward, starting with the development of a questionnaire and concluding with sharing the results with the individual being evaluated and discussing an action plan for maximising strengths and addressing weaknesses or blind spots. Here are the steps the process:

1. Develop an employee questionnaire

Rated on a point scale of 4 to 7, this questionnaire asks about a range of aspects of an individual’s behaviours and interactions, specifically communication, teamwork, leadership, initiative and judgement. It also includes open-ended questions so others can provide additional feedback.

2. Ensure the confidentiality of participants

Protecting the confidentiality of your participants is important if you want to collect their most accurate and candid feedback. Although the purpose of the survey certainly isn’t to take a swipe at someone or make them feel bad about the feedback they receive, the mere provision of constructive feedback could potentially result in awkward break room encounters.

Therefore, to ensure that participants are protected and no one is singled out, you may consider summarising feedback responses. This can mask the participants whose answers stand out and helps to ensure that the results are genuine but won’t create problems.

3. Provide training and orientations

Training is important to the feedback process because it takes the results and helps employees understand how to apply it to their professional growth. Therefore, it is key to provide some kind of training where employees can learn and ask questions about 360-degree feedback surveys. Most importantly, having this understanding will give them the confidence they need to answer the questions openly and honestly.

4. Start to elicit feedback from the survey

When distributing the survey, make sure you provide clear instructions so that employees know exactly what is expected of them. If possible, post the questionnaire on your company website so that employees can access it conveniently.