360 feedback is an enormously powerful tool to help your people reinforce their strengths, identify areas for improvement, and get better at what they do. However, organizing the process requires several design choices that can either turn your 360 program into a huge asset or a useless burden.

If you don’t work for a company that uses 360 feedback, chances are that someone, somewhere in your firm, is thinking about implementing it, even you.

When done well, it’s dramatically effective.

It’s also really easy to get wrong.

The effectiveness of your 360 feedback process involves several key choices that are easy to underestimate but will define the success of your program:

• Should it be anonymous?
• Should it be direct or go through a manager?
• Who should be asked?
• How should the information be presented?
• How do I get people to engage with it?

And that’s just the start.

Nevertheless, some of the existing advice that’s out there underplays the implications of these decisions and leads to some unsatisfactory outcomes.

Bad 360 processes feel onerous, vapid, and performative. But they don’t have to be that way.

This piece is designed to make you aware of all the pitfalls that could compromise your 360 process, and by doing so, help you run a fast, effective process that could really benefit your employees — whether you’re thinking about it for your team, or for your whole organization.

What Is 360 Feedback?

360 feedback is the reaction to information about an employee. It’s from a range of others beyond  those responsible for an employee’s career development (usually their manager) — not direct reports.

It’s not necessarily anonymous, performance-related, or ratings-based (as we’ve seen argued elsewhere), but it could be. These are the types of choices you’ll make later.

For now, it’s simply negative or constructive feedback from a range of people who offer a broader (360) perspective about an employee’s performance and development.

Why Collect 360 Feedback (and Why Not)?

Ok, now we’re getting into it. To a large extent, your answer to this question will define how you structure your entire process. Deciding to collect 360 feedback can boast a number of benefits, ranging from performance management to employee development to improved employee engagement.

To Help People Get Better at Their Jobs

This is generally the number one reason companies run a 360 feedback process. If that’s why you’re here, excellent. You’ll want to remember this as you progress through this guide.

The benefits of a 360 feedback program are multi-faceted, but its foremost advantage is that it helps employees improve by giving them a fuller picture of their work and its impact, beyond their own opinions and that of their manager.

• Broader, more diverse perspectives: Most people are notoriously poor at assessing their own performance unbiasedly. In many organizations, managers will also have their own biases and remain unexposed to the full range of their co-workers and team members’ work. If you limit feedback to just those sources, employees miss out on valuable perspectives that could help them reinforce their strengths, identify areas for professional, personal, and leadership development, and build stronger working relationships.

• The weight of opinion: Getting feedback from various sources means the individual can identify trends. If four colleagues say the same thing about an area of improvement or a strength, it shows where the focus needs to be.
• Build development plans: A 360-degree feedback system can improve professional development through planning. Actionable feedback allows employees to improve aspects such as self-awareness, leadership skills, various other skill sets, and overall performance.

Reasons Not To Collect 360 Feedback

Not every company will need to collect 360 feedback let’s briefly look at some other reasons companies collect 360 feedback but which generally result in poor outcomes so you can get off this train before it leaves the station.

Part of a Performance Review That Impacts Compensation

Never collect 360 feedback as part of a review process that affects your employee’s compensation.

If those giving 360 feedback know that their comments could affect a colleague’s pay. At best, they’ll shy away from giving a full picture. At worst, your process could become a tool for vindictive score-settling.

Now, you may want to include 360 feedback as part of your formal compensation processes and rating scale or to assess people for promotion/lay-offs. If so, all well and good. But you’ll need to be explicit with contributors about how their comments are going to be used, and expect them to have limited developmental value.

Other Feedback Isn’t Happening

Various survey questions over the past decade have shown that employees want more feedback. The fact these surveys keep coming out suggests that employers aren’t making huge strides at ensuring they get it — whether it’s feedback surveys, feedback reviews, or just looking at the raw data.

This isn’t to undermine the scale of the challenge. Giving feedback is a skill which requires thought, tact, care, and a willingness to navigate difficult conversations in the interests of helping someone improve. In some organizations it therefore doesn’t happen very often.

In these situations, introducing a 360-degree review process is tempting — especially to ensure employees get at least some feedback once or twice a year. But this is the wrong solution to a bigger problem.

If your team isn't used to giving each other feedback day-to-day, they’re not going to respond well to forced employee feedback initiatives. That’s not to say 360 feedback can’t play a powerful role as part of the feedback culture at your company. But it should be just that — a part of it — not the focus.

Assessing Team Performance

One Harvard Business Review article talks about a company which uses 360 feedback to identify conflicts between individuals. This allows managers to intervene and prevent the disagreements from festering.

Other examples of 360 feedback forms include questions about individual’s attitudes towards their team/company/manager. In short, they’re trying to gather information on the team/company rather than individual performance. This is a survey.  Whilst it’s useful for that purpose, it’s not 360 feedback for the individual.

Now you might ask, why not include a few of those questions alongside the individual ones? As we’ll get onto later, just answering the individual questions well is time-consuming enough without also factoring in broader considerations. Trying to tackle individual and team at the same time during a 360-degree feedback process is likely to result in doing two jobs poorly.

Someone Read a Blog Post (Apart From This Post, Obviously)

At your company, the road to human resources hell is paved with “best practice solutions” from other firms. 360 feedback is no different.

You need clarity about what you want to see from your feedback process, and how it can benefit your team and organization. Don’t start with the solution before you’ve figured out your purpose.

4 Considerations for Effective 360 Feedback

At this point, we are assuming that the principal reason for this exercise is to help your team get better at their jobs.

We’ve identified eight key considerations you’ll want to think about so you succeed. The following sections explain the options facing you at each stage so you can decide how you want to proceed and get this process right.

1. How Often Should I Collect 360 Feedback?

Getting this range of perspectives is useful after:

1. Enough time has passed since the last 360 for individuals to use the feedback as a development tool and for others to constructively conduct a self-assessment and reflect on changes in their work
2. A significant event — perhaps a landmark, long-term project, or career milestone

In practice, this means 360 feedback is often collected once or twice a year, although some teams may choose to collect it quarterly.

2. What Feedback Format Should I Use?

You’re going to be asking people for their feedback on each other’s work, so what format do you want that feedback in?

The two formats you see most often in 360 feedback templates are:

• Free text 360 feedback: Respondents give their feedback about an individual in writing, generally in full sentences.
• Ratings-based 360 feedback: Respondents reply to a series of statements/questions and rate the individual on either a numerical scale (e.g. 1 or 5) or a descriptive scale (e.g. “Exceeds expectations,” “very good,” or “despicably terrible”).

We’re going to argue strongly for the former.

If the objective of the exercise is to help your people improve at their jobs, they need to know where their strengths are (and why) and where their areas for improvement are — whether it’s problem solving, teamwork, or something of the like. Delivering that feedback in a rating is nearly impossible.

Let’s compare two examples in answer to the question, “How would you rate Sarah’s communication skills?”

‘4 out of 5’ / ‘Good’

In my work with Sarah, I’ve observed her communication in two ways — over email with colleagues and customers, and in her presentations. Her e-mail communication is a real strength — she’s succinct, responsive, and her tone is spot on for internal and external audiences. But I think she can improve her presentations. I’ve seen her present three times in the past six months and each time she has been very detail-oriented, which although impressive, has meant her overall message has got lost on her audience. She may want to focus more on the impact she wants to have on her audience for future work.

Though this example may seem overblown, it shows the impact your choice of format can make.

Ratings advocates will probably say:

1. Ratings are faster and make for a less onerous process.
2. Ratings allow for better tracking of data and improvement over time.

However, whether ratings systems are in fact quicker is arguable.  Respondents can take loads of time agonizing over whether someone should be a “3” or a “4” out of 5, and the lightweight nature of the responses can encourage organizers to create far more questions than is necessary.

For example, here’s one 360 feedback template from a major company. The creators claimed had 52 questions, had been used 21,500 times, and took 10 minutes. As a result, 21,500 people have been deeply wronged or overlooked.

Second, tracking data is only a useful feedback tool if it’s helpful to the individual (remember we’re treating team data as a separate exercise/survey). Some individuals may find comfort knowing that their colleagues perceive their communication skills have improved from “3” to “4” over the past six months, but we’d venture many would prefer the written detail.

Of course, you could do both.  But then you have to ask whether the additional thought that goes into the ratings in addition to the free text is worth everyone’s time. It probably isn’t.

3. 360 Feedback Questions

Everyone craves feedback in many facets of their professional and personal development. But that’s exactly why you need a culture of ongoing feedback in your team, not why you need a 360 process (see above).

If you try to gather feedback on too many things — in writing — and want it to be good, people will be at their laptops for days and everyone will hate it. It’s not unusual for some respondents to write about five, 10, or even 15+ individuals as part of one of these processes.

You need to think carefully about any 360 degree feedback questionnaire you're going present to your staff. One to three questions is understandable. Any more than five will become burdensome. As such, you’ll want to make sure those questions are really worth it.

We return to the purpose of the exercise for some clues as to what to ask.

You could just ask one open-ended question as part of your 360-degree evaluation:

“What’s the most important thing you feel Alex could do to improve at his job and why?”

or

“What do you think Alex should know to improve at their job?”

This isn't a bad option. But you may receive more feedback on areas for improvement instead of strenght, which are just as important to reinforce.

So you may decide to go for two questions:

‘What has Alex done well over the last 6 months and why?’

‘Where do you think Alex could improve his work over the next 6 months and why?’

This is one question away from the ‘Stop, Start, Continue’ framework which you may also find useful.

These are open-ended and useful example questions, but you might also choose to ask about more specific areas/skills/competencies which are important for a performance appraisal or on-the-job success at your particular firm. If skills in data analysis, report writing, or customer service are vital indicators of performance, then by all means, nudge respondents to comment on them.

The main thing is to only issue a 360 degree feedback questionnaire which is going to result in the most helpful feedback for your people. Extraneous questions only place additional burden on respondents and dilute the time they can spend on more important stuff.

You may even want to ask the individual in question if there’s anything specific they want feedback on. If it’s important enough, dedicating a question to it is worth the effort.

4. In-Person Feedback

Gathering 360 feedback in writing is efficient, and useful for presenting to the individual.  But sometimes respondents may give better advice in person.  It may be worth reminding those participating in your process that they can also speak to people and take notes if they think that would lead to better results.

Who Should Collect 360 Feedback?

By now you have your (short!) list of questions you want to ask respondents about each individual in the process. But who should actually ask the questions and directly receive the answers.

Typically, you have three options:

• The individual
• The manager
• A third party (often People/HR/Ops teams)

Getting individuals to ask for their own feedback comes with a few considerations.  First, the main value of 360 is the collected perspectives an individual receives on their work, not any one person’s opinion.

You want to avoid individuals getting pieces of feedback through one by one, which may be difficult depending on the tool you use to manage this process. Second, sometimes people need chasing to provide feedback, and this may be trickier if a junior employee or first-time manager has to do the chasing.  That said, it’s fine to do it that way.

A manager or a third party can mitigate both those considerations.  They can collect all the feedback before presenting it to the individual, and they may have a better remit to chase tardy respondents.

The main consideration for these last two options is the process of presenting the feedback and whether you’re presenting it to the individual as given, or as a summary (see “What Should I Do With the Feedback” below).  If you’re summarizing, the individuals must trust the manager or third party. Otherwise, the whole process loses its integrity.

Who Should 360 Feedback be Collected From?

You should collect 360 feedback from a group whose collective perspective will provide value on how a person can get better at their job.

This will likely be a range of people with direct experience working with the individual in different ways. They are typically colleagues of varying seniority, but can also include customers, contractors, advisers, or suppliers. You’ll probably need at least five to get useful perspective — any more than that is unnecessary.

Whether the manager or the individual should choose the respondents is a common concern from stakeholders and managers. If you’re trying to collect anonymous feedback, then the manager is a clear-cut option.

Assuming you're not, it shouldn’t just be the individual, for obvious reasons of bias. But if it’s just the manager — and they happen to be more distant from the individual’s work — then they might not include someone who could have valuable input.

We’d recommend both. Either the manager or team member should draw up a shortlist and then this should be finalized in discussion with the other.

Should 360 Feedback be Anonymous?

Ah yes, this question. Here’s some advice we found in some other articles on 360 feedback:

“The key to receiving honest feedback is in the rater’s anonymity.”

“The people who provide 360-degree feedback remain anonymous. Employees need candid, well-rounded feedback to improve and people are more likely to be straightforward if they know their identity is protected.”

This may be true. But it also may be — and probably is — nonsense.

If we’ve acknowledged that the most constructive 360 feedback is in written form, then anonymity becomes arduous to maintain.  In providing the details and context that would be helpful to the recipient, the writer will probably give clues as to their identity.  This renders the ‘anonymity’ pointless or it leads to the writer not including those details, which compromises the quality of the feedback.

Moreover, the person giving the feedback adds valuable context to the recipient and also enables them to follow up with that person if they have any questions. It also encourages more thoughtful responses if the respondent knows they’re going to be accountable for it.

So if “anonymizing” written 360 feedback can be ineffective and dilutive, why are we even having this discussion? We imagine it’s because firms are worried that their employees won’t give very good feedback to each other, and this can be covered up with a cloak of anonymity.

If so, it’s the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

How Do I Get People To Give Good 360 Feedback?

By this point you might have something like this:

• A short list of questions for respondents to give written replies to
• An agreed list of respondents to ask
• A designated person to coordinate the process
• An agreement not to anonymize responses

Essentially, you’re ready to send out your questions and/or arrange relevant in-person meetings.   But you want to ensure that when you do, you get responses which are going to be useful for your people:

Some tips for this include:

• Run a pilot first and get feedback: As with any company-wide initiative, if you’re considering 360 feedback for your whole company, run it on a smaller-scale first, get feedback on how it went, iterate, and improve. Going from 0-100mph and launching company-wide is bound to cause issues and throw up roadblocks. Running it well with a smaller group first will also give you advocates for your process to convince any skeptics (and there will be some).

• Give people time: People need time to consider what they want to say, so giving everyone a few weeks to complete their feedback is helpful. Let people know far in advance that you’re starting a 360 process to encourage tougher feedback in person rather than waiting to put it in writing (you could even encourage this in your messaging).

• Make it simple: Even if 360 feedback is exceptionally well-designed, it can have a negative impact on daily work and productivity. Try to remove as much friction as possible in the tools you use, and the messaging around the process.

• Remind respondents what good feedback looks like: With free text fields, respondents may feel unsure how to structure their feedback. Remind them of some good feedback frameworks to use (like Situation-Behaviour-Impact) and provide some examples. Strong, present leaders who give some 360 feedback examples they’ve received in the past as inspiration and examples of good practice is essential.

• Reiterate the purpose: In your 360 feedback kickoff email, reiterate that the whole exercise is about helping each other steadily improve and that all feedback should be focused on this aim. Respondents should ask themselves, “Would I find this helpful if I received it?”

• Offset recency bias: People instinctively base their feedback on events that have happened more recently, even if the exercise is meant to cover the past 6 months. Remind respondents that they should think back over the whole time period.

• Identify strengths: if you’re not including strength-based questions, you may want to remind respondents to also focus on these, in addition to identifying areas for improvement.

• Emphasize collective perspective: Respondents may be more comfortable giving feedback if they’re reminded that they’re not expected to cover all aspects of the recipient's work. They’re part of a larger exercise and all they need to do is comment on their own experience of working with the individual. The process will take care of the rest.

• Be clear on the process: Respondents are likely to have more confidence in the process if you’re explicit about how their feedback is being collected and how it will be used.  Let people know if it’s going to be anonymous, or summarized, and how it will be presented and discussed with the individual.

What Should I Do With the Feedback I’ve Collected?

Congratulations! By this stage your managers or team members should have collected some excellent 360 feedback.

But this is only half the story.

The value of this whole process is how that feedback is used, so let’s talk through a final few considerations as you discuss the feedback with your team, finalize the process, and make sure it’s a success.

• Preparation: If you’re working with a team who has never received 360 feedback before, prepare them for remarks and comments that may hit harder than they’re expecting. The good parts will feel great, and the critical parts may cause defensiveness, frustration, and deep self-reflection. One way to smooth this may be by sharing some critical feedback you received with your team, your reaction, and how you ultimately used it to your benefit.  Don’t just surprise them with it.

• Collation: As said before, one of the great values of 360 feedback is the collected perspective rather than the comments of any one respondent. Make sure to collate all feedback for ease of access and reflection.

• Summarization: The collected perspective is valuable because it helps you draw out trends in what respondents are saying and identify true strengths and weaknesses. When discussing 360 feedback, both manager and team member should identify the trends they see in the comments. In some 360 processes, the manager’s summary is all that is given to the individual, and the full 360 feedback is not disclosed. But a word to the wise — each comment provides valuable content, and the individual may wonder what was left unsaid by their colleagues and what their manager is keeping back. The summary can always be provided in addition to the full feedback.

• Presentation: Send the feedback and summary to each individual ahead of meeting to discuss it. They should have time to digest the findings in order to have a constructive discussion. Emphasize that if the team member wants to discuss anything immediately, they can of course ask questions; they don’t have to wait for the formal meeting.

• Discussion: Managers should meet with their team members to discuss what was said. However, the tendency with these meetings is often to skip past the good stuff and focus on areas of improvement, but it’s helpful to allocate meaningful time to each. Confirming strengths is just as effective for performance as identifying areas for improvement.

• Action Plan: This discussion should result in several new findings about the individual’s work for consideration as they move forward with their career. To ensure that these findings are acted on, create goals for them to work towards, or commitments to check-in on progress on particular areas in further feedback sessions and 1:1 meetings.

Is There a Tool I Can Use To Make Organizing a 360 Process Easier?

A 360 process is fundamentally about asking a group of people some questions, gathering that information, presenting it for discussion, and storing it for future use.

Given these basic tasks, many unsurprisingly choose to try and organize this process over email.  In practice, this works but is pretty painful. Responses can get lost among other emails, and any replies have to be copied into a further document for presentation, and then stored (lost) on a file system for future reference.

You could also use a survey platform you have access to — likely either Google or Microsoft forms.  These are better than email, but still take time to set up and run the process, given they’re not designed for this explicit function.

To truly harness the power of 360 feedback, consider Unicorn Labs. With our free 360 team dynamics assessment, you can start your 360 process quickly and easily, begin to understand your team, and optimize its performance.