What is 360-Degree Feedback

What are the Four Parts of 360-degree Feedback?

The main difference between the 360-degree feedback approach and other employee insight methods is the multiple input sources. To be considered a 360-degree feedback campaign, administrators must gather the following sources of feedback:

Self-assessment: Having employees evaluate themselves is a crucial aspect of 360-degree feedback that provides a different outlook on potential issues. These assessments also promote a sense of self-awareness that can lead to better relationships with their peers and better work forecasting.
Peer feedback: Coworker ratings counterbalance the typical manager assessment by providing companies with a snapshot of an employee’s collaboration skills and team spirit. This type of feedback acts as an essential counterbalance to manager feedback and provides deeper insights into team dynamics.
Subordinate feedback: Managers must be evaluated by their peers, but the way their team views them is often more important. This data source can illuminate underlying leadership issues and if a manager needs more tools or training to manage their team effectively.
Supervisor feedback: The way an employee interacts with their manager is very telling and can be one of the most accurate assessments of an employee’s overall impact on the organization. It is also often the data source that employees care the most about since it has the most potential to affect a promotion or role change.

360-degree feedback provides a comprehensive evaluation by gathering insights from multiple perspectives—self-assessment, peers, subordinates, and supervisors. This approach provides the most well-rounded understanding of employee performance, allowing businesses to make data-backed decisions.

What is the Purpose of a 360 Review?

The purpose of the 360 review concept is to offer a complete overview of an individual’s performance and behavior by obtaining multiple sources of feedback. Since this feedback comes from the individual and all colleagues, companies can quickly determine which discrepancies are present and how to fix them.

Using a comprehensive survey data collection and analysis platform like Explorance’s Blue greatly improves the 360-degree review process. Collecting feedback and analyzing it quickly becomes tedious when done by hand, and Blue's powerful machine learning features allow for in-depth analysis of qualitative data.

What are the Strengths of 360-degree Feedback?

The strength of 360-degree feedback is its ability to generate objective, constructive, data-driven overviews of employee workplace performance.e

With more detailed and regular feedback, employees improve their feedback once they see results from their employers based on their answers. Seeing 360 evaluation answers becoming new policies and changes in the office is the best feedback loop any employer can provide.

360-degree feedback promotes a feedback-centric culture within your organization, greatly improving any business's operational efficiency. More regular input promotes employee development and retention and allows you to run a more optimal business.

The best way to maximize the positive aspects of 360 surveys is to conduct them as regularly as possible. This consistency gives employees something to look forward to and an opportunity to provide more detailed thoughts with advanced notice.

The data collected in these reviews should jumpstart discussion around an employee’s career and growth within your business. Doing so helps you evaluate if you simply need to direct employee toward existing resources or if you need to implement new measures to facilitate their success.

What is One of the Most Common Criticisms of the 360-degree Feedback System?

The main issue some professionals have with 360-degree feedback is that it can be difficult to implement. This issue is particularly true within larger corporations with distributed business units and asynchronous processes. Without the proper technology and feedback training, companies can quickly encounter quality control problems.

Take the case of a paper survey, for example. In this scenario, employees may be worried about anonymity and accountability and provide embellished answers to avoid upsetting the boss. Office politics can also quickly taint the data through peer pressure.

All surveys can also be affected by leniency or severity biases that can influence the collected data. A peer or manager being too nice or too critical can throw off the entire process if the data isn’t cleaned thoroughly to account for this situation before being analyzed.

Recency bias can also come into play if an employee has recently struggled on a project leading to harsher critiques. However, this is easily counterbalanced by conducting regular survey to see if previous reviews validate a trend or not.

This situation emphasizes even further the importance of having a dedicated technological platform like Explorance’s Blue to gather data anonymously, securely, and conveniently to fuel the best insights possible.

Is 360-degree Feedback Outdated?

In short, 360-degree feedback is far from outdated. The methodology has been a favorite of HR departments for many years. The biggest shift within the 360 feedback framework is how comments are gathered and analyzed.

Over the years, new generations have entered the workforce and have a different outlook on what they want from their jobs. As Gen Z enters the workforce, workplaces must run comprehensive generational comparisons of their staff to identify trends and potential improvements to fix new divides between groups.

360 evaluations aren’t going out of style anytime soon. However, the questions they contain and their structure must be updated every time you launch a new survey. Having a quarterly review of your questionnaire and putting strategic improvements in place is a good practice to get into, particularly when you’re dealing with high volumes of data.

Is 360-degree Feedback Reliable?

When done right, 360-degree feedback can be an incredibly reliable and valuable type of employee review available. It encompasses entire teams' answers, and the fact that these surveys are typically held more regularly leads to more complete data that can safely be used for decision-making.

The only caveat with this type of employee assessment is that it can quickly fall prey to biases if it isn’t executed properly. As soon as one of the four types of feedback essential to 360-degree feedback is skipped or executed improperly, all the benefits of this process go out the window.

Another important aspect that impacts the reliability of data in this methodology is your employees' feedback literacy level. Like other skills, people often assume they know how to provide good feedback, but they may need training or individual coaching on best delivering and receiving comments.

Another significant factor in the reliability of 360 reviews is the quality and structure of the feedback provided. Showing your staff how to provide actionable, constructive feedback is the best way to any potential reliability issues within your 360-degree data.

What are the Core Components of 360-degree Feedback?

Employee insights campaigns must meet a certain set of characteristics in order to be classified as 360-degree feedback programs. Here are the three essential qualities of 360 assessments:

Multiple data sources

The name “360-degree feedback” implies an all-around view of employee experience. This reality can only be achieved through a diverse set of opinions from all levels of seniority. Ideally, a 360-degree review also includes former employees' input to identify why they left the organization.

Frequency

360 assessments must also be done regularly to be considered fully functional. The ideal schedule is to hold a quarterly survey to match your business's ebbs and flows. For example, you might find out that your staff is always more stressed in Q3 of the fiscal year, leading you to provide more perks or internal support during that time.

Convenient interface

Surveys are often perceived as tedious obligations, which means your organization must do everything it can to minimize that perception. The most efficient measure to achieve this is to integrate a survey platform to make the feedback collection as user-friendly as possible.

How Do You Give Good 360-degree Feedback?

The best way to ensure you and every other employee can give good 360 feedback is to train them on best practices. Teaching your staff to provide good feedback might seem strange conceptually, but most people don’t give enough attention to this skill. Many people assume they can give good feedback, but they may not have a reference point for how to structure it properly to achieve the desired impact.

A yearly presentation and a refresher page shared internally before the survey are often enough to demonstrate best practices and remind workers of the value of strong feedback. This training should focus on methods for structuring feedback efficiently.

It’s helpful to teach your staff a framework like the Situation-Behavior-Impact model to help them provide the full picture without bias. This model also ensures the resulting feedback is of higher quality and much easier to analyze.

Another important concept to teach is constructive feedback. This type of input is well-rounded and provides counterbalances within the statement. The focus should be on actionable comments that the recipient can implement quickly.

Example: “Hailey is a great manager, but she tends to keep all her feedback for formal reviews. Wish she gave us more feedback during the year.”

What are Some Examples of Good 360-degree Feedback Questions?

Good 360-degree feedback questions provide parameters to structure the feedback to be specific, detailed, and facilitate analysis. The categories you use to build your questions can vary greatly and should be unique to your organization’s reality.

That said, the general themes outlined below are almost always present and are monitored by many businesses worldwide.

Job satisfaction

Satisfaction at work and engagement levels are intricately linked, but asking about them too directly can be accusatory. Focus on asking about the positive aspects and ensure workers have the opportunity to answer both in a scale system and in a qualitative way to determine the severity of any potential issues.

Quantitative example: On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with your current job role? Qualitative example: What aspects of your job do you find most satisfying? Qualitative example: What aspects of your job do you find most satisfying?

Managerial support

As one of the touchiest subjects of an engagement survey, discussing relationships with managers must be approached carefully before introducing this question with additional reinforcements of your confidentiality guarantee. It’s also ideal to construct questions based on a good manager’s peripheral traits to infer their performance without making your staff feel like their answers could be traced back to them.

Quantitative example: Rate your manager's effectiveness in supporting your career development (1=Poor, 5=Excellent). Qualitative example: Can you describe a situation where your manager provided you with significant support?

Professional development

Everyone wants to feel fulfilled in their job and learn new skills that will allow them to grow into a future role. However, it’s difficult to quantify, and some people think about it differently. With your executive team, set concrete metrics for effective professional development and ask questions around them to build an accurate image of professional development.

Quantitative example: How many professional development trainings have you attended this year? Qualitative example: What additional training or resources do you feel you need to perform your job better?

Work environment

It can be difficult to understand work environment issues for executives and managers, who often have their own offices they can customize to their liking. In your questions, focus on well-defined themes like desk ergonomics, noise levels, and desk equipment, and also offer employees opportunities to provide personalized suggestions.

Quantitative example: On a scale from 1-5, how would you rate the physical comfort of your work environment? Qualitative example: What changes would you suggest to improve our work environment?

Work-life balance

Many companies understandably have little to no data on what happens with their employees once they are out of the office. This situation can make the assessment of work-life balance complicated. However, with specific questions in an employee engagement survey, companies can at least ensure the work part of their lives isn’t causing any undue stress.

Quantitative example: How often do work demands interfere with your personal life? (1=Never, 5=Very Often) Qualitative example: What can the company do to improve your work-life balance?

How Do You Build a 360-degree Feedback Assessment?

Building a 360-degree survey should be given plenty of attention since every step can affect the final result and the quality of the data collected. Having a clearly defined plan also helps the implementation of this process go smoother and be integrated naturally within the company.

Here are some proven steps to build a successful 360 campaign:

Define your goals

The goal of a 360-feedback program can vary greatly from one company to the other, and since this type of evaluation is very flexible, it can have multiple goals. Examples of those measurement objectives include:

Performance evaluation: 360-degree evaluations eliminate much potential bias from the manager of an employee through varied feedback sources to get a true rating of a person’s work output.
Skill and resource allocation: Companies can evaluate if each employee is in the correct team or position through varied questions and careful data analysis.
Manager assessment: Since every employee, even at the leadership level, is evaluated by their team and peers, every 360-degree feedback campaign doubles as a manager assessment to ensure your leadership is used best.
Improvement in communication: Regular employee feedback tends to foster better day-to-day communication between teams by normalizing the process of providing input to team members often.
Career development: 360 reviews are a great opportunity to identify any shortcomings certain employees might have and provide extra on-the-job training or mentorship to develop them further.

Define your audience

360-degree feedback can be a daunting task, and it is often best to start with a smaller pilot project that targets only a single or a few departments. This separation keeps the data manageable as you learn how to conduct this type of survey.

Even as you grow your program, it’s a good idea to keep each survey segmented so you can easily evaluate individual portions of data and compare each. Using this methodology, you can identify what you’re doing right and try to replicate success in areas where your organization could use improvement.

Build your questionnaire

The questions you ask will shape the data you collect and show your employees that you understand their concerns. Determine the categories and ensure you have a good mix of qualitative and quantitative questions.

Include various stakeholders, including members from a wide range of leadership levels, in this process so you have a realistic view of your company's opportunities for growth. Having a varied committee also demonstrates to your staff your desire to hear their voices.

Select your technological tool

While 360 assessments can be done with paper forms, this method has several issues that are easily fixed through a complete feedback platform. Tools like Explorance’s Blue are so beneficial to 360 feedback programs that rapid digital platform adoption is becoming the standard worldwide.

One of the biggest challenges of any survey is driving the response rate up to ensure optimal data quality. Having a dedicated online platform for employees can help in several ways:

Anonymity and confidentiality: Most employees initially view employer surveys as a tool to check on and tie comments back to them. Using a feedback-gathering platform allows you to guarantee anonymity or confidentiality so employees feel safe to answer.
Integrations: Having a tech platform also allows you to integrate other data sources on top of the four typically found in 360 reviews. For example, you could add reviews from sites like Glassdoor to get a more complete view of the opinion of your company from current and past employees.
Data management: Having the data directly fed into a database greatly reduces the odds of human error when transcribing data. This setup is also far more secure, considering that this data is highly sensitive in the event of a breach.

Collect user feedback

Build a communication plan around the 360-degree feedback platform and educate your staff about the importance of this process. Use multiple channels to keep your entire workforce informed. Some examples on how best to communicate the program include:

Physical posters: Put posters around the office and points of congregation to ensure all employees have frequent, varied reminders of the 360 review process.
Emails: Send regular emails segmented by department at various points before the feedback-gathering process.
Intranet: Post on your company intranet about the upcoming survey and begin a preliminary feedback gathering process through comments on the post to anticipate any potential issues.

Analyze your data

Data analysis is the most important step of any 360-degree feedback process. It allows you to identify trends and extract actionable insights that you can use to evolve and grow your business.

Create a variety of reports to illustrate the data for different audiences. For example, build an executive report to show results to management and validate future surveys. However, simplified reports should also be made for employees at large.

Sentiment analysis is also a helpful tool for monitoring your staff's feelings through qualitative questions. Using a machine learning tool like Explorance MLY, you can identify words, sentences, and modifiers that are frequently used to map out trends hidden within the feedback.

Once your data analysis is complete, put together a plan of action and clearly define the changes that will be made based on the data collected. This step is potentially the most important of all for future surveys since it shows your willingness to enact change based on employee feedback.

If your staff sees you are willing to make changes from their comments, they will be emboldened to provide good feedback in the future since they’ll know it actually brings improvements.

What is 360-degree Feedback?