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.

5. Analyse the data

You may find it easiest to analyse your data by department or division. If you do this, you can conveniently identify organisational strengths and weaknesses and use it to promote training and development.

6. Develop and distribute results

After your analysis of the results has been completed, conduct review sessions that will allow employees to sit with a facilitator to go over the results and establish appropriate goals and objectives.

For starters, the aim of traditional performance reviews is to assess performance. These reviews certainly have their place in terms of ensuring employee growth and development by assessing the productivity and results generated by a particular employee. 

Typically, traditional performance reviews are administered by management alone, with a manager assessing and sharing with the team member how well they are performing in their job. 

However, performance reviews are not able to capture the full range of aspects that contribute to an employee’s success. 360-degree feedback fills that gap by not focusing primarily on performance but rather on all aspects that contribute to an employee’s behaviour which can help improve that employees’ interactions, communication and overall job performance. 

Beyond that, 360-degree reviews help diversify and deepen performance data and measurement, provide unique vantage points and perspectives and show managers and leaders where they can improve.

Ultimately, with 360-degree feedback, you and your employees will learn things about yourselves that you probably would never have otherwise discovered.

There are a wide range of benefits associated with conducting 360-degree feedback evaluations. Once an organisation starts adopting this approach, they can see clear advantages, such as the following:

Simply put: when you know yourself better, you perform better. When employees see the full scope of the factors and components that make up their job performance, they can make adjustments accordingly. For instance, if people have difficulty communicating with an employee, then that employee may use that feedback to develop a plan that will help them communicate more effectively.

It’s been said that 360-degree feedback surveys help boost productivity and effectiveness within teams. Strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement can be identified through this process. Also, it allows each team member to recognise their own contributions to the team and make any necessary adjustments. 

Build even more efficiency into your team when you work on employee surveys together.

Most employees have some level of self-awareness regarding their strengths and weaknesses, but 360-degree reviews will help them fine-tune certain behaviours and prioritise areas of focus. Feedback can reveal the areas of improvement, which would then allow individuals and departments to develop action plans in order to increase performance. As a result, staff may develop goals that would hold individuals accountable for their own work and contributions to company goals.

Receiving feedback from multiple sources is essential for career development because it offers the most candid assessment of an employee’s performance. In addition, it provides insight into the areas that employees need most to advance their careers. Improving deficiencies, building strengths, aiding alignment with organisational goals and becoming a better leader are all areas in which 360-degree feedback can support career development. 

Since 360-degree reviews provide feedback that identifies areas for improvement, employees can use this information as a guideline and participate in training sessions that will help them improve.

When feedback comes from multiple sources, within various job functions, discrimination on the grounds of age, gender and race is reduced.

Although 360-degree feedback surveys have many advantages, they should not be viewed as a total replacement for more traditional performance reviews and other tactics and approaches for evaluating how employees are performing in all aspects of their work.  Here are some of the potential downsides to or limitations of 360-degree feedback. 

Because these surveys are relatively new, many participants still lack the experience they need to provide feedback effectively for the areas of focus. Employees can also inflate the ratings to make a colleague look like an exceptional employee. Conversely, ratings can be deflated to make a colleague look like they’re not doing a great job.

Since surveys are often anonymous, this prevents employees from seeking out clarification or a deeper understanding regarding particular responses. That is why it’s important to develop 360-degree process coaches, i.e. so they can help employees understand their feedback and develop action plans.

Sometimes, the devil is in the detail. If a 360-degree survey is designed without careful planning, it can be difficult to get buy-in from managers and leaders or to elicit responses that are productive or relevant to improving an employee’s performance. To avoid a poorly designed survey, the development process should extend beyond solely your HR department to include input from a cross-section of people throughout your organisation. 

One downfall of 360-degree feedback surveys is the time and effort required to administer and complete them. When preparing for a 360-degree review, bear the following in mind to help work out how much time you will need:

It can take between six and 12 weeks to complete all of these tasks, and this will be on an annual basis!

As for completing the surveys, colleagues, managers, direct reports and peers must all take their time to read through the questions and provide comprehensive, meaningful and thoughtful answers. If the appropriate amount of attention isn’t given, the feedback will not provide usable, actionable feedback for the manager to use in the development plan. 

It’s obvious that 360-degree feedback offers myriad benefits to the person being evaluated, those who work closely with them and ultimately, your entire organisation. Here are three of those potential benefits:

One of the most unique and powerful ways in which 360-degree feedback can be useful is that it creates greater self-awareness among those who have been evaluated. It’s human nature for each of us to have a particular perception of ourselves and also to assume that others view the world in much the same way as we do. 

360-degree feedback exposes us to how others perceive us. This can prompt greater introspection and self-awareness that can result in individuals modifying their behaviours for the better. These insights are not always negative either. In some instances, individuals are not aware of behaviors they exhibit or actions they take that are valued and appreciated by their peers or direct reports. Having a greater awareness of these strengths is not only a confidence booster but can also help an individual become more focused on maximising those strengths, both for their own benefit and the benefit of those who they work with. 

During the results review process, those who have been evaluated via 360-degree feedback will often look for some additional clarification about certain aspects of the findings. This could be a certain observation that departs dramatically from how the individual believed they were perceived. This opens the door to a more meaningful dialogue about issues that might be far more difficult to discuss without the supporting data from the 360-degree feedback. 

The best relationships are those built on honesty and trust. In reality, 360-degree feedback has the potential to build on those two factors, creating meaningful and mutually beneficial exchanges, as opposed to traditional performance reviews, which often amount to one-sided conversations. It’s also true that 360-degree feedback encourages an open exchange, and the feedback can often be the foundation for improving a wide range of workplace relationships by providing guidance on how to interact and communicate more effectively with others. 

Ultimately, these benefits and more can lead to stronger performance and happier, more satisfied and productive employees. 

Since 360-degree reviews focus on behaviours, they can be used widely in order to promote the kind of culture that the organisation requires.

In their book The Art and Science of 360° Feedback, Richard Lepsinger and Antoinette D. Lucia recommend using them when the company wants to:

It’s clear, then, that one of your first steps in deciding to conduct a 360-degree feedback exercise is identifying which behaviours make a difference in your company, because you will need to promote them.

Another important factor involved in deciding whether to use a 360-degree review is that the subject of the review has to believe in it. The team member being evaluated must be committed to using the results in a constructive manner and seize the opportunity to develop as a professional and a person. After all, it’s a rare opportunity for them to have everyone else focusing on them and their participation in the team.

The creation of 360-degree feedback surveys has evolved considerably. What used to take months to plan, execute and implement can now be done using our 360-degree employee evaluation survey template. When you use a template, you can customise your survey to each employee and edit it to focus on your company’s broader goals and desired behaviours. 

Before creating your survey questions, you must decide on the competencies that you would like to receive feedback on. Interpersonal skills, communication, conflict management and collaborative leadership are a few examples of what competencies are.

It may be a good idea to allow the employees to select the assessors themselves, because this will increase the chances of them taking the feedback seriously. However, they are also more likely to choose people who they have a good or familiar relationship with, which could result in a degree of bias or favouritism in the responses. Including a manager or HR may be an ideal way to ensure a more objective process.

Email is the easiest and quickest way to distribute feedback surveys. You can reach a larger group when sending surveys via email and, because you won’t have to buy envelopes and stamps, you will also reduce costs.

Once the results have been submitted, it’s important to schedule a one-to-one session with each employee to discuss the results and establish the next steps. Also during this time, action plans setting out professional goals and highlighting areas for improvement are drawn up.

Following up on how an employee has responded over time to 360-degree feedback is key to continual improvement. Make sure you establish check-ins throughout the year, during which you can discuss the actions being taken based on the feedback received.

When it comes to writing your survey questions, you need to make sure that they are going to yield answers related to your overall purpose or goal. Therefore, your questions should be specific and straightforward. 

Other things to bear in mind when drafting your survey questions include the following:

Bear in mind that respondents are more inclined to participate in your survey if they are not required to answer all of the questions. Therefore, allow most of your questions to be optional to answer.

Here are some examples of the types of questions that are asked on a 360-degree feedback survey.

The next time performance reviews come up on your calendar, you may want to consider the option of using 360-degree feedback surveys in your team. It’s a great way to help key members of your team develop in their careers and to build a positive culture inside the company.

Get started on your 360-degree feedback survey now with SurveyMonkey. Choose your plan and use our 360-Degree template today!