What is 360-degree feedback?

As the name suggests, 360-degree feedback involves gathering performance feedback on an employee from a multitude of different sources. 360-degree feedback is also known as multi-rater feedback. This type of feedback can be conducted through surveys and questionnaires given to an employee’s colleagues or customers to answer. 360-degree feedback can therefore be used to find how employees fit into company culture, in terms of their personality, soft skills and leadership skills. This is because the information you are gathering comes primarily from those working around them, rather than from a top-down perspective from their line manager.

Which competencies can be measured by 360-degree feedback?

Competencies are the personal attributes that your employees bring into their role. These are frequently soft skills and can influence the way that your employees handle professional relationships with customers and colleagues. You can use 360-degree feedback to measure the following competencies in your employee:

• leadership qualities;
• conflict management;
• ability to learn on-the-job;
• communication and other soft skills.

360-degree feedback therefore should not be used to assess performance and the development of specific skills. An employee’s career path and ability to fulfil the duties in their role can be discussed during an appraisal or other one-on-one meeting instead.

How is 360-degree feedback useful to employees?

A study by Forbes shows that over 85% of Fortune 500 companies integrate 360-degree feedback into their leadership development strategies. However, you may still be wondering how this kind of feedback can be useful to you. 360-degree feedback gives your employees a better understanding of how their character comes across to peers and customers alike. It also shows them their strengths and weaknesses developed so far in their role, which they can later discuss during any appraisals with a team leader or line manager. Therefore, 360-degree feedback should be just one step in providing feedback to your employees on their performance.

This type of employee feedback should ideally be used in tandem with other kinds of feedback, such as coaching and evaluation. This gives your employees a much better overall picture of their performance, as well as giving them the opportunity to respond to your comments with their own feedback.

How can I integrate 360-degree feedback into an employee performance strategy?

One thing to bear in mind when implementing 360-degree feedback is that you ideally need your employees to trust the anonymous feedback that they are receiving. That is why it is not always a good idea to integrate 360-degree feedback into your monthly and/or annual appraisals. With appraisals, you should focus on creating two-way communication between your management and employees, discussing performance objectives and professional development in a clear, open and honest manner. As 360-degree feedback does not give your employees an opportunity to engage in two-way communication with you, it should be used alongside other evaluations and appraisals. This will give your employees more of an opportunity to enter into dialogue with you about their performance, during which you will both have the opportunity to learn from each other.

360-degree feedback is much more useful if you are trying to get an overall picture of how your employee fits into your company culture. This can include how they integrate with the rest of their team and how they come across to customers. A study by Gallup researchers also showed that 360-degree feedback is most useful when used as a tool to boost employee performance and learning, rather than rating employees.

Boosting company culture with 360-degree feedback

Often, your employees will be working alongside other team members on projects, deadlines and customer-facing roles. The relationship that your employees cultivate together as part of a team contributes to what is known as company culture. Company culture also involves your overall team performance, your employee’s workflows and how they achieve targets in the long-term and short-term. 360-degree feedback can therefore boost your company culture by providing insights to both you and your employees regarding their role within their team.

360-degree feedback therefore can give you a picture of your overall company culture. Good company culture involves prioritising your employee relationships and their professional development over your processes. Focusing only on how well your employees are performing in terms of their duties or responsibilities will give you an incomplete insight into how well your company is doing. 360-degree feedback is a great way to make sure that everyone in your company is working together harmoniously as well as productively. This is useful knowledge to gain in the long-term, as it means your teams are more likely to continue to perform well.

Learning about their strengths and weaknesses within their team will help employees access the self-awareness needed to set themselves goals regarding their own behaviour and performance. It will also give them awareness of their own unique role within their team, and which aspects of their workflow they may need additional support or guidance with.

How to present a 360-degree feedback report

Collecting information from an employee’s colleagues or customers is just the first step in providing 360-degree feedback. You should also present the results in a format that is clear and easy for your employee to understand.

Ways of presenting 360-degree feedback reports include spider diagrams or a table summary. Both of these models can include a graphical representation of the different competencies you have surveyed. You can use the results to track differences between an employee’s self-perception of their competencies versus how they are perceived by their peers and customers.

Downsides of using 360-degree feedback

It is worth bearing in mind some of the downsides of implementing 360-degree feedback. These usually arise if you have not implemented this feedback effectively. Disadvantages may include:

• colleagues and customers offering dishonest feedback;
• an employee perceiving personal bias against them during a survey;
• increased distrust due to indirect, anonymously provided feedback;
• taking a long time to receive results from participants.

Participants offering dishonest feedback can pose an issue for both you and your employee. Some colleagues may offer overenthusiastic feedback on employees who they like on a personal basis, while offering overly negative feedback on an employee whom they personally dislike. Dishonest feedback can give you an inaccurate picture of how an employee is responding to tasks, or their personal qualities. Therefore, if you plan to conduct a 360-degree feedback survey, it is important to receive results from as many different participants as possible.

To ensure that your feedback system is most effective, you need to maximise the accuracy of the survey, while minimising bias as much as possible. You can do this through the following techniques:

• ensuring the survey participants regularly interact with the employee;
• gauging first whether you think that the participants’ emotions or relationship with the employee will influence the outcome;
• making sure participants are confident in the results that they are providing;
• using a standardised data collection process;
• keeping the format of your surveys the same for each employee;
• using 360-degree feedback primarily for performance and development;
• guaranteeing participants can provide their results anonymously.

Ensuring that every part of your survey is anonymous makes it more likely that your employee will receive honest feedback from survey participants. It is important, however, to supervise and give guidance to those providing feedback, to make sure that they understand how 360-degree feedback works. You may wish to offer training in 360-degree feedback first to those colleagues who are providing feedback. Overall, however, 360-degree feedback usually gives you well-rounded insight into the personal qualities of your employees and how they fit into your company culture. 360-degree feedback is useful when used alongside performance evaluation. As this type of feedback is anonymous, consider keeping an open, two-way communication line with your employees so that they can discuss the results of their feedback with you confidentially.