What is 360 Degree Feedback: Process, Applications, and More

360 degree feedback is often touted as the most used and even misused feedback exercise in the stack of performance management and employee development tools. This comprehensive guide to 360 degree feedback will help you understand its fundamentals besides delving deeper into its process and intricacies.

Aside from detailing the elementary ‘what’ and ‘why’ of 360 degree feedback, we will answer some other practical questions concerning the 360 feedback mechanism, such as:

• What is the most efficient way to undertake 360 degree feedback in your organization?
• What is 360 degree feedback used for?
• What are the advantages of using 360 degree feedback? What are the limitations of 360 evaluation?
• What are its must-have features if you wish to adopt a 360 feedback tool?

We will also strive to respond to some frequently asked questions on 360 degree feedback, besides including excerpts of quotes from people we asked about 360 degree feedback assessment.

We understand that most organizations are gearing up for their annual review process. Thus, if you seek a more holistic approach to conducting reviews and planning employee development initiatives in the coming year, this guide is just for you!

To understand the fundamentals of 360 feedback assessment, it is essential to understand who needs a 360 feedback assessment.

Whether you are a startup of 20 people or a conglomerate with thousands of employees, whether your primary business is technology-powered products or offering services and expertise, your people, your employees are your company’s most valuable asset. And people require continual growth, which can manifest in individual growth, performance-linked growth, and organizational growth for success. This is where performance management takes center stage.

One-way feedback is often deemed to be counterproductive as it is more susceptible to bias. Many practitioners also realize the shortcomings of face-to-face feedback, a widely practiced process in organizations worldwide. Many stakeholders feel uncomfortable giving feedback, especially when it is less than favorable. Face-to-face feedback also narrows the objectives as the current performance takes precedence over future growth and development.

The holistic and multi-way standard performance management and development process of a 360 evaluation is critical to addressing the one-way feedback challenges.

What is 360 Degree Feedback?

360 degree feedback or 360 degree evaluation is a method or process in which employees of an organization anonymously receive feedback from the people they closely work with, typically managers, colleagues, subordinates, and sometimes even customers. Typically, 360 degree feedback consists of a questionnaire that every rater, including the employee being evaluated, has to rate on a scale and add remarks and comments to support the rating.

The purpose of 360 degree feedback is to offer a holistic employee perspective. Also called multi-rater feedback, it involves numerous stakeholders anonymously rating an employee on a list of workplace competencies. Every competency required for the role under consideration is tied to one or more statements in the survey. Thus, 360 feedback helps gauge an employee’s readiness level on all the competencies required to succeed in that particular role. The employee also fills a self-rating.

Anonymous feedback enables employees to get broader feedback with more ease than getting stuck in the intricacies of what and how each rater has rated them. 360 feedback is solicited from stakeholders from all levels of the hierarchy, allowing employees the opportunity to understand how their work is being viewed. It offers them a well-defined reference for their work in the broader organizational context.

More importantly, 360 degree feedback covers a wider gamut than just performance evaluation. The exercise’s objective is to offer a wider focus and help gauge not just apparent but also the employees’ hidden strengths and weaknesses. Such a mechanism helps them through focused development plans and places them in the right direction to contribute better toward achieving organizational goals.

360 degree feedback, also known as 360 degree evaluation is important because it creates a bridge between individual developmental goals and the organization’s growth and vision. The purpose of 360 degree feedback is to enable every employee to gauge himself/herself from others’ perspectives, uncovering strengths and weaknesses that can help them succeed in the organizational context. Further, 360 feedback evaluates employees beyond just their performance and focuses on their behavioral competencies and aptitude, augmenting the mechanism’s importance.

360 degree feedback allows employees to develop the skills and competencies required to succeed in the organization, thus putting the onus on their success on their personal development. From an organization’s perspective, 360 degree feedback is a great initiative to encourage employees to set their personal goals and work toward them with determination, creating a culture of development and appreciation.

While there is a debate on the importance and effectiveness of 360 degree feedback, like everything else, it has its pros and cons.

The Advantages & Disadvantages of 360 Degree Feedback

• It can be viewed as more valid and reliable over input from just one person.

• It is a great way to inculcate accountability in employees and motivate them toward development. 

• 360 evaluation provides a complete view of employees whose accomplishments often get sidelined in a team.

• It promotes transparency within an organization.

• Aligns employees with the organization’s goals and vision. 

• Including external stakeholders, such as customers, enables organizations to understand their expectations, improving stakeholders’ satisfaction.

• Improves communication, thus reducing bias and discrimination.

• 360 degree feedback benefits both the employee and the organization. Employees’ personal growth fuels organizational development. 

• While 360 degree feedback isn’t recommended solely for performance appraisals, it does lend credibility to the process by providing a holistic picture.

• 360 degree feedback helps employees to accept as well as differentiate their impression of themselves versus how others view them. 360 feedback helps employees increase their emotional intelligence and become self-aware of their strengths and areas of improvement. Thus, it serves as a significant development tool. 360 feedback findings can be easily collated to provide constructive feedback and create an individual development plan to improve employee output.

• The initiative’s success majorly hinges on a healthy mix of individuals with a reasonably prolonged familiarity with the employee. Else, conflicting feedback can negate the objectives of 360 feedback evaluation. 

• Often, disproportionate attention is accorded to the negatives and weaknesses of the employee, without adequately accounting for his or her strengths. This can discourage the employee, resulting in mistrust. 360 feedback must be conducted after involving experts to mitigate such challenges.

• The organization must genuinely believe in the power of 360 feedback and care about employee development. A half-hearted 360 degree feedback exercise may not benefit anyone.

• The 360 feedback questionnaire plays an integral role in achieving the desired results. A poorly formed questionnaire can significantly dent the credibility and efficacy of the 360 degree feedback process. Questions should be formulated to elicit actionable recommendations and results. They must be customized to the organization’s needs and functions to drive effectiveness.

• The efficiency of 360 degree feedback depends overwhelmingly on expert administration and experienced raters. Given extensive data collection and analysis, it is best to trust a web-based tool for a reduced duration, ease of implementation and reliable results.

Having discussed 360 degree feedback advantages and disadvantages, it is well-established that it offers umpteen potential when done right. If you are still wondering how your organization can gain from the 360 degree feedback method, read ahead to know how it can be incorporated in reskilling and training initiatives, leadership development, high-potential identification and succession planning.

Use cases of 360 Degree Feedback Assessment

360 degree feedback can be an excellent developmental tool as it helps identify training needs and improvement areas. 360 feedback provides employees with insights into how developing certain competencies and skills can help them excel at their jobs.

360 degree feedback presents a holistic overview of an employee, considering their present performance and future potential. When you detail an employee’s strengths and weaknesses, eyeing his/her professional growth, it lays a foundation for development. The feedback collated from the manager, co-workers and others, with a comprehensive competency-based questionnaire, carefully present the gaps in an employee’s abilities. Moreover, the 360 review process can motivate employees to continually develop themselves and achieve their training goals.

360 degree feedback assessment also helps determine team or group development needs, which can alleviate an organization’s collective performance. 360 feedback is an effective way to gauge training needs and encourage employees to work on them with individual development plans.

360 degree feedback is lauded for its integrated approach, allowing the raters to evaluate an employee beyond his or her performance level, making 360 feedback an excellent organizational planning tool. 

Identifying an organization’s most valuable employees is often a challenge. 360 degree feedback, owing to its full view of an employee from multiple hierarchies and vantage points- supervisor, subordinates, peers and customers, can help organizations find their high-potential employees, the next managers and business successors and leaders. 360 feedback can help identify the obvious competencies required to succeed in an advanced role – effective decision-making, strategic problem solving, risk-taking appetite, result orientation, propensity to lead, adaptability and agility, etc.

Organizational planning requires a thorough evaluation of employees to gauge their potential and set them on the right course of taking up critical roles in the future.

360 degree feedback is often used as a performance appraisal tool. It helps capture feedback from various perspectives, lending enhanced objectivity to the appraisal process. In many cases, if the manager alone gives feedback, the process may become prone to subjectivity and bias. 

Active involvement of the employee is another notable upside of using 360 degree feedback for performance appraisals. Every rater in the 360 degree feedback process shares an equal weightage rather than the manager’s feedback and ratings getting more importance, making the process fair and equitable. 

We believe that 360 feedback can definitely be used in the performance appraisal process. However, it is best suited as part of a broader individual and organizational development plan. 360 degree feedback should be used cautiously for performance appraisals. Proper sensitization is a must to streamline the process and make everyone aware of the repercussions of misleading feedback. The ‘sensitive nature’ of approaching performance appraisals and compensation through 360 degree feedback can not just damage morale but also lead to employees leaving the organization.

Now that we know all about the possible use cases and benefits of 360 degree feedback, it is high time we tell you how to actually conduct a productive 360 degree feedback process. The next section helps you delineate every step of the process to make it a resounding success.

How it is implemented is the most critical factor for the success of 360 degree feedback. Each aspect of the 360 degree feedback process, starting with choosing the raters, designing the questionnaire, streamlining its management, analyzing results to taking action, needs a certain kind of expertise. But the foremost question that needs asking is about the involvement of different stakeholders, who they are, how they are chosen, and how they impact the process.

Who Is Involved in 360 Degree Feedback Process?

All the people whose work is directly impacted by or related to the employee’s work can be involved in the 360 degree feedback process. Usually, the employee, i.e., the feedback seeker, along with the HR or their manager, chooses a balanced panel of raters.

While raters can be chosen randomly, having the right raters can significantly affect the feedback process. The right mix of raters, their interpersonal relationship with the employee, and their duration’s association can all impact the success of a 360 review process.

What Is A 360 Degree Feedback Process?

The 360 degree feedback process is an exercise through which an employee receives inputs on their skills and competencies from multiple stakeholders with whom an employee has a working relationship.

The 360 degree feedback process is carried out in three core steps:

Designing the survey

Once the raters are agreed upon, designing the survey is the next vital component that shapes the direction of the 360 degree feedback process. Whether you choose to do it yourself or partner with a web-based tool, you will find many 360 degree feedback templates and questions to choose from. 

However, a web-based tool, such as Mercer | Mettl’s 360View, can markedly simplify the 360 degree feedback process by allowing you to choose from a library of pre-built 360 feedback templates, developed by experts who have studied the industry for many years. You can also choose to create a fully- customized feedback template aligned to your organizational requirements, in tandem with a dedicated team of subject matter experts of 360 degree feedback, with questions designed to assess your targeted group and focused competencies.

Executing the survey

One of the many challenges in conducting 360 degree feedback is the completion rate. 360View is especially known for its ease-of-use and is designed to enhance the completion rate with its in-built functionalities. 

To successfully roll out the survey, you need to set up multiple emails to invite and remind participants to complete their ratings. Every stakeholder needs to understand the objective and outcome of the exercise for it to offer meaningful outcomes. 

A tool like 360View can help you send personalized and automated emails to different stakeholders to increase the completion rate. It can also help schedule auto-reminders to be sent for follow-ups to streamline the process.

Since 360 degree feedback questions can be answered on-the-go, it is an added advantage if the tool is mobile-friendly and allows the participants anytime, anywhere access. This can greatly improve the completion rate. Often, participants start the survey but have to leave it midway to attend to more pressing work. In such situations, a tool with an autosave option is a savior, enabling participants to pick up from where they left without losing data.

While it is as much about having the right people answering the right questions, it is also equally about ensuring an easy and seamless process. A web-based 360 degree feedback tool, such as Mercer | Mettl’s 360View, can do just that by providing a single dashboard for end-to-end setting up of surveys, tracking the status of all respondents, adding more participants, sending ad-hoc reminders, one-click report downloading, etc.

Analyzing the survey

The 360 degree feedback process doesn’t end with all the raters completing the survey questionnaire. In fact, that is just half the process. The other half is collating the results, analyzing the reports at an individual, role and department level to create actionable developmental plans. 

As this part of the undertaking can drive the maximum ROI of the 360 feedback process, organizations must reach out to a team of well-qualified psychometricians to create industry-leading reports with actionable insights that identify gaps in perception across self, managers, peers and others.

A report of a good 360 degree feedback tool should have a detailed competency summary, open-ended feedback, a personal development plan, and offer powerful customizations. Some other features of a comprehensive report are:

Auto-graded and customizable reports can add significant efficiency to the process. The results are also easy to gather and share with the employee. Using a web-based tool such as 360View automates the process, making it more time-efficient, objective and seamless. In fact, the right 360 degree feedback method can also help understand organizational dynamics. The 360View tool has an additional feature known as ‘group analytics,’ through which one can gauge the relationship shared among various people from different departments, geographical locations, experience levels, etc.

Features to assess in a 360 degree feedback tool

Now that you are well acquainted with the 360 degree feedback process, you may agree with us when we say that 360 degree feedback requires certain expertise and experience to achieve its end goal.

There are various 360 feedback tools on the market that help organizations conduct systematic and effective 360 degree feedback. While we can’t recommend which tool to choose, we can provide you the information you need to select the best from the lot. 

Here’s what you need to consider when selecting a 360 degree feedback tool:

Survey Design: Content

• The ability to choose from available questionnaires or opt for customized content as per the role, competencies and other organizational requirements.

• Multiple language support.

• A competency framework for every role and level.

Survey Execution: Platform

• Bulk uploading of participants on the dashboard: No need to maintain different excel sheets for different participants. Simply make a list in excel and upload it onto the platform. The dashboard will do the rest. 

• Custom or templatized invitation emails and reminders for a higher completion rate: Invite participants and regularly and automatically follow-up with them through automated emails and reminders -no running around to catch hold of individuals physically and having to make awkward conversations repeatedly. Let automation take care of it.

• Progress tracking of all surveys on a single dashboard: Get live updates and a detailed activity log to track all the key events performed in a survey – who has completed the survey, or how close are they to completing it.

• Auto-saving of responses to promote ease-of-use, drive better completion rates and prevent any data loss.

• The Ease of accessibility: Mobile-friendly features that can be accessed on-the-go, save time and result in higher completion rates.

• Great employee experience: Employee-friendly features such as auto-save and a single consolidated email with all the necessary information.

Survey Analysis: Reports

• Compilation of reports and data: Intuitive, easy-to-understand and analytical reports that are customizable to highlight different aspects, such as:
  • Hidden strengths: Where the employee rated himself/herself lower than the average rating of other respondents.
  • Known strengths: Areas where the employee received the highest rating.
  • Blind spots: Where the employee rated himself/herself higher than the average rating of other respondents.
  • Areas of improvement: Areas where the employee received the lowest ratings.
• Automated reports: Automailing of results to individuals and managers as defined.
• Benchmarking of competencies for a more optimized result.

Mercer | Mettl 360View: The Most Employee Friendly Cloud-based 360 Degree Feedback Tool

Dr. John Sullivan lists the 40 ‘most impactful problem areas’ of 360 degree feedback that can deter maximizing its effectiveness. 360 degree feedback has great potential and has a high-yielding impact on employee productivity. But it often fails at the most fundamental level – the building blocks – the right set of survey questions, the right panel of raters, the right tool for the right execution, and the right way of measuring its success rate.

A poorly executed 360 degree feedback process can do more damage than good to your organization. Organizations must consider these pitfalls and ensure a thorough approach toward 360 degree feedback.

Max Life Insurance used Mercer | Mettl’s 360View and was delighted by its offerings, including powerful features and customizations.

Challenges & Business Requirements

When Max Life Insurance first reached out to Mercer | Mettl, it was already conducting 360 degree feedback but was not entirely satisfied with its erstwhile vendor. Its 360 feedback was largely intended for employee development initiatives, aside from contributing toward measuring performance appraisals.

Some of the challenges Max Life Insurance faced were:

• The absence of a user-friendly tool
• The absence of good quality reports

Mercer | Mettl’s Solution

Mercer | Mettl streamlined the 360 degree feedback process for Max Life Insurance.

The solution incorporated:

• A customized workflow to enable the feedback-seeker to choose his/her own raters, which was then approved by his/her line-managers, post which a mail was sent to all the raters.
• An easy-to-use tool for effortless navigation.
• A comprehensive report with spider charts, visually appealing charts, competency benchmarking, etc.
• An individual development plan.

Impact

Through Mercer | Mettl’s detailed reports and developmental plans, Max Life Insurance could scale up its employee developmental initiatives. The individual and personality developmental plans provided by Mercer | Mettl enabled Max Life Insurance to create a culture of learning and development in the organization.

“The evaluation of your employees’ performance can be an agonizing, difficult, or stressful ordeal; that is, if you let it. Or, it can be a positive motivating experience that produces positive results. Performance management can have a significant effect on your own career as well as your staff’s. 

Performance management is about improving your employees’ work performance that is measurable and trackable rather than simply discussing your wish list of expectations that somehow always seem to fall through the cracks.

Many organizations are removing layers of management and putting more emphasis on teamwork, empowerment, continuous learning, and self-management. Leading edge organizations are experimenting with multi-source assessment procedures, i.e., 360-degree feedback – a powerful tool to achieve even better performance information and motivate behavioral change. 360-degree feedback tool combines the multi-source feedback from work associates such as the supervisor, peers, and colleagues, subordinates, and even internal and external customers – a “win-win-win” situation for the employee, manager, and organization.” – Elliott Jaffa, Behavioral & Marketing Psychologist, Business Development Consultant, Revenue Generation & Soft Skills Training, Dr. Elliott B. Jaffa Associates.

Source: https://www.smartsheet.com/performance-review-managers-cheat-sheet

How is 360 degree feedback implemented?

360 degree feedback is implemented through a careful process in which:

• A panel of raters is selected to provide feedback to the employee

• A survey questionnaire is circulated to all the stakeholders, including the employee, which is filled by providing ratings and remarks against each question.

• Afterward, the results are compiled and analyzed to provide an actionable development plan to the employee.

What is the purpose of 360 degree feedback?

The purpose of 360 degree feedback is to set an employee on the development path by providing them with actionable feedback and recommendations. 360 degree feedback helps personal development that fuels organizational development. 360 feedback can help gauge training gaps, strengths, and areas for improvement for the employee. They are great indicators for identifying employees with exceptional potential for critical roles. 

What are the pros and cons of 360 degree feedback?

360 degree feedback is a great addition to an organization’s performance management system, and it has its pros and cons. 

The pros of 360 degree feedback are that it drives employee and organizational development by making employees aware of their strengths and shortcomings to improve their output. It provides a comprehensive view of an employee’s potential beyond present performance, promoting trust and transparency within the organization. 

The cons of 360 feedback are that if not undertaken with the right questions, objectives and expertise, it can fail, resulting in distrust and even discourage employees. 

How 360 degree feedback can improve performance?

360 degree feedback can improve performance by:

• Making employees self-aware of their known and hidden strengths, blind spots, and areas of improvement.

• Providing action-oriented feedback.

• Offering a personal development plan with detailed insights and development activities to be undertaken.

How do you respond to 360 feedback?

360 degree feedback should be taken positively, and proactively responded with determination and motivation. Individuals are often unaware of their hidden strengths and shortcomings. 360 feedback simplifies feedback from different perspectives and hierarchies and helps an individual or employee act on those insights. 

360 degree feedback is a great instrument for self-development and puts employees on a path of success as they get to know the competencies most valued by their organization. If their organization is conducting 360 degree feedback, an employee should make the most of it by working on their personal development plans.