When it comes to performance reviews, managers and employees alike often struggle to know what to say.
As a manager, your opinion of an employee’s work is valuable, but it can only go so far. In reality, many managers don’t work directly with their staff, and may not have an accurate impression of their performance.
That’s where 360 feedback comes in. 360 feedback is when multiple people are asked to provide feedback on an employee’s performance. This might include their direct manager, their teammates, their colleagues outside the team and potentially even clients and third parties. But not everyone collects 360 feedback, and they’re missing out on the wealth of information available to them from other people.
Manager-only feedback vs 360 feedback
Manager-only feedback can only go so far. If you don’t work directly with your employee in their day-to-day role, you may not know much about their performance. If you only spend a couple of hours a week working with your employee, it’s difficult to know how they’re performing the rest of the time and in different circumstances. Equally, even if you work closely with your employee, the manager-employee relationship means that you probably get a very different perspective of their work than their colleagues.
360 feedback, on the other hand, gives you a much richer, more comprehensive insight into an employee’s performance. The manager’s input is still included, but it’s bolstered by the views of other people who will have different experiences of working with the employee. For instance, as a manager, you may believe that your employee is performing well across the board. However, 360 feedback may surface that several other people are concerned about the employee’s organizational skills, giving the manager the chance to raise this concern with the employee and support them in becoming more organized.
What questions should I ask in my 360 feedback forms?
A combination of qualitative and quantitative questions will give you a valuable set of 360 feedback to work with. You will also want to include at least one “open response,” where the person completing the form can include their own freeform answer. Some examples of good 360 feedback questions are:
- Does this employee work well with others?
- Can you rely on this employee to perform their role as you would expect?
- Does this employee take initiative to solve problems?
- How do you find working in a team with this employee?
- What does this employee do especially well?
- What could this employee improve?
- What other feedback would you like to share with this employee’s manager?
Most people will give more honest feedback if their responses are anonymous, so consider performance management tools that allow respondents to identify as teammates, coworkers, clients etc. to ensure the feedback you collect is as accurate and valuable as possible.
What should I do with this data?
Once you have collected your 360 feedback, you can then start to analyze the employee’s performance more holistically. Is there a big contrast between your assessment of their performance and their colleagues’ views? Are there any interesting trends in the responses that you hadn’t identified yourself? How do they compare with the rest of their teammates?
You can use your 360 feedback similarly to how you’d use a manager-only assessment – to ensure that your employee is performing at the desired level, to see how they are performing compared to their teammates and to identify broader trends across your team. However, you will have much richer data to draw from with minimal extra effort on your part.
How do I collect 360 feedback?
The easiest way to collect 360 feedback is with your performance management system. Opt for an agile performance management system such as Totara Perform to ensure that your software adapts to your organization’s approach to performance management.
For instance, Totara Perform allows you to collect 360 feedback on your own schedule, so you’re not tied into a rigid calendar. You can also set your own questions and ensure all feedback is collected safely and securely within your system, meaning you can tackle all aspects of your agile performance management process from a single system. Your 360 feedback will then be available for you to review, analyze and report on, ready for your next performance discussion with your employees.
