As a manager or a business owner, it’s easy to become obsessed with KPIs and other business metrics — because ultimately that’s what signals if a business is successful or not.
However, there are times when you need to step away from the hard data, because increasing the number of leads or optimizing your CSAT scores aren't the only things that make a successful business. Ultimately, most businesses need people, and those people need to collaborate to meet their business goals. Otherwise, even if you hired the A-team, if they can’t work together, then your business will start to suffer.
To figure out how individuals are doing in your company, you will need to perform a 360 feedback assessment.
In this article, we’ll explore what it is, how to implement it, and how you can use it to help people grow, give promotions, and even use it to make a better hiring strategy.
What Is a 360 Feedback Assessment?
The 360 degree feedback assessment tool helps you structure how you collect performance feedback from the individuals who collaborate with employees the most, such as:
- Managers
- Peers
- Direct reports
- Clients
- Stakeholders
The tool consists of two main parts:
Data collection and follow-up.
The data collection part usually takes place via 360 degree feedback surveys that combine rating scales with open-ended questions to allow for both quantitative and qualitative feedback. If collecting data for those in the C-suite, then the interviews can involve an executive coach. Participants answering the survey rate individuals across a set of leadership skills, while the subjects of the survey always complete a self-assessment using the same criteria, with the purpose of seeing how responses relate.
With all the responses collected, the leadership team receives a detailed report they can use to build their own self-awareness and identify the behaviors within their teams that need further development.
How a 360 Assessment Differs from a Standard Performance Review
A standard performance review is a traditional way of doing performance analysis — a top-down method where managers assess their team members' skills.
Usually, it’s down to how well those individuals are meeting a predetermined goal (typically related to the business) to assess their eligibility for:
- Compensation
- Bonuses
- Promotion
This feedback is attributed to their manager or direct report, and is performed on a cyclical basis.
A 360 assessment, on the other hand, is confidential and takes feedback from the people who collaborate regularly with that employee. And while a traditional performance review focuses on output, a 360 assessment examines behavioral patterns and how they affect others in the organization. The collected data is then used to create an Individual Development Plan or a coaching engagement, rather than to make a compensation decision.
The anonymity of a 360 assessment also allows reviewers to speak more freely about the employee they are giving feedback to.
Pro tip: A 360 assessment shouldn’t be your only means of assessing how well someone works. A manager who tracks employees' progress will be more objective than a peer who is more influenced by behavior and personality.
What Does a 360 Feedback Assessment Measure?
So, we’ve already touched upon this a little in the article, but what exactly does a 360 degree feedback measure?
When using this tool, you’re exploring an individual's workplace behaviors and soft skills, which will shape how they operate within a team and organization. And to do this, you’re going to need to look into how someone:
- Communicates
- Leads
- Collaborates
- Responds to a challenge
These assessments typically look into the competencies across five core areas:
1. Leadership and Management
Leadership and management encompass strategic thinking and the ability to connect day-to-day work to broader organizational goals, along with delegation, decision-making under pressure, and the degree to which someone empowers the people around them.
2. Communication
Communication looks at how clearly and effectively someone conveys information, how well they listen, how open they are to new ideas and criticism, and how they handle conflict when it arises.
3. Teamwork and Collaboration
Teamwork and collaboration examine relationship-building within a team, the ability to work productively across functions and departments, and whether someone actively creates an inclusive environment that welcomes diverse perspectives.
4. Personal Effectiveness and Character
Personal effectiveness and character encompass adaptability in the face of change, accountability for mistakes and commitments, emotional intelligence, and the ability to manage one's own reactions while responding to others with empathy.
5. Coaching and Development
Coaching and development address how invested someone is in the growth of their direct reports, including how they mentor and give feedback, and whether they implement the feedback they receive.
When collecting information on these five competencies, the reviewers are given structured questions aligned to their specific relationships with the subject of the review. This is because of the relationship dynamics people have, as peers and direct reports' experiences with an individual will be different, and the questions should take that into account.
How to Design and Run a 360 Feedback Assessment Process
You might already be thinking that this 360 feedback assessment is going to be a walk in the park.
Unfortunately, this tool isn’t as simple as sending out a few surveys and calling it a day. To make sure your assessment is effective, there are several phases you need to go through, each building upon the last, and skipping any of these phases will undermine the quality of your data collection.
That’s why we’ve clearly outlined the phases you need to follow to get things up and running.
Phase 1: Define Your Goals and Select Competencies
Collecting data from your 360 feedback assessment requires a clear purpose.
Long before you start formulating your questions or choosing platforms to manage the process, you need to understand what you’re trying to achieve and set a realistic timeline for collecting your data. Is it:
- Leadership development
- Succession planning
- Cultural change
- A general vibe check
If you’re performing an assessment for an individual lead, the process could be over in a couple of weeks. But for a larger pool of assessments (such as across the entire organization), you’re going to need two to three months for preparation and rater participation.
Once you know what it is that you’re assessing, you can start identifying what competencies you want to analyze.
The goals you choose should be a fair representation of the behaviors you want the leaders of the organization to demonstrate, but also goals that are observable and measurable so that your raters actually understand what it is that they’re assessing. For example, if you’re a SaaS, and you roll out a 360 assessment with a goal related to feature launches, how are your HR and marketing teams supposed to contribute to this in a meaningful way? You can absolutely have that as a goal, but it needs to be relevant for everyone. For instance, HR might assess workload management, while marketing could reflect on cross-functional collaboration with sales.
Either way, here you can try and select a set of competencies that makes sense to all leaders, or tailor them to specific roles.
Phase 2: Choose Your Platform and Design the Survey
You have your goals and competencies sorted, now it’s time to get the ball rolling.
Find a platform or surveyor that supports your goals and reliably handles response tracking and report generation. And once you have that, you can start designing the survey itself. Aim for 20 to 30 well-targeted questions, and avoid compound statements (anything containing "and" tends to confuse raters and produce unreliable data).
For example:
How does the person approach challenges?
Then, when it comes to a rating scale, keep it simple.
1 to 5 or 1 to 7 scale — something that clearly defines poor, acceptable, and exceptional if you click one of the numbers. Also, make sure whatever you’re applying the scale to isn’t broad, as rating their “communication skills” is a lot more difficult than assessing how they “adjust their communication style to the audience.”
Finally, pair your ratings with open-ended questions to gather further explanations or concrete examples, such as:
What is one thing this person should start doing?
Phase 3: Select Raters and Launch the Assessment
Have the participant work with their manager to identify five to ten raters drawn from across their working relationships.
Encourage participants to take ownership of this selection because when people choose their own raters, they tend to engage more seriously with the results. The manager should review the final list to ensure it's balanced and that no viable rater has been overlooked.
Then, before launching, brief all participants on the purpose of the assessment and how the results will be used. When people understand the process, they are more likely to engage honestly.
Set a completion window of two to three weeks and use automated reminders through your platform to maintain participation without manual follow-up.
Phase 4: Compile Reports and Facilitate a Debrief
Once the survey is wrapped up, you can use your platform (or have whoever is in charge of conducting the survey) to generate individualized reports highlighting development areas and identify any patterns across rater groups.
Whatever you do, don’t just hand the report over to leadership and call it a job well done. With this report, you can arrange a one-on-one debrief with someone from HR (or a coach, internal or external) to begin the most important step of the process. The purpose of the meeting is to recognize the individual's strengths before delving into what needs to be fixed. Relaying what the individuals do well champions their hard work and opens them up to be more receptive to discussion on where they need to grow.
Phase 5: Build an Action Plan and Maintain Accountability
After the debrief, set aside time to create a development plan to address the gaps highlighted by the 360 degree feedback assessment (SMART goals are a good method for developing these plans).
Remember, this isn’t strictly a work development plan, so the goal should be to change behaviors, not to improve performance metrics. It’s also a good idea to keep it to one or two priorities to avoid overwhelming the participant.
And once the plan is ready, it’s time to establish accountability through regular meetings (usually every 30 days for 3 to 6 months).
So, at the 30-day mark, check in to see if the participant has been able to work on their plan and to help you identify any bottlenecks that could be getting in their way. When you have your day 60 meeting, assess whether the new behaviors are starting to stick. Finally, around the third or sixth month, your final meeting will confirm that the participant is still on track and that their behavioral changes are having a visible impact. Then (assuming your 360 process is yearly), you can do a follow-up assessment at the 12-month mark to measure whether the behavioral change has been fully adopted and noticed by others, and to start the next 360 cycle.
How to Analyze and Share 360 Assessment Results
So, you know your goals, and you understand the phases of a 360 assessment, and what it will look like across an entire year — but one thing we haven’t touched upon yet is how to analyze the data that you’ve collected.
As much as this tool is used to assess individuals, you shouldn’t get stuck or too focused on looking at the individual scores or comments, and you should analyze the data as a whole to understand how well your organization is functioning.
Here are five ways to do that.
1. Start With the Big Picture
Start by reviewing the overview before looking into the individuals.
You will want to see whether there are any behavioral trends across the rater groups (both peers and direct reports). This will help you determine whether a pattern is emerging across all raters — whether a rater referred to an isolated incident or a behavior has been consistently observed.
Looking at the data as a whole will help you identify the competencies and behaviors where raters are both positively and negatively aligned. By doing this, you will have a better understanding of an individual's strengths or if there is a need to further develop an area.
2. Look for Differences Between Rater Groups
Another thing to consider is whether a behavior has been identified across rater groups and whether they share the same view of it.
A quick example could be workload. Let’s say you have a peer who is known to stay behind after 5 pm (regardless of whether this is a failure of the management team or their own preference). A direct report may look favorably on this, while a peer might feel pressured to do the same.
Understanding how people view behavior helps explain how a participant's relationship to others is formed, or how differences in rater exposure to this behavior reflect differences in how raters view it.
Either way, using the same example, someone working past 5 pm is neither good nor bad on paper, but if people in the organization view it differently, it’s worth exploring.
3. Read Open-Text Comments Thematically
Even though this is the most time-consuming part of a 360 feedback analysis, it’s important to pay close attention to it.
Because they are specific and unfiltered, they provide far more detail than a numbered score ever could. When looking at them as a whole, look for things that are recurring across the raters, such as a repetition of:
- Words
- Phrases
- Themes
Again, a single comment about someone's communication style could be an isolated incident.
But if three raters use terms like 'harsh' or 'angry,' this better highlights that this is a behavioral issue.
4. Pay Attention to Self-Rating Gaps
Make sure you’re including the self-ratings in your high-level analysis too, as you can compare the self-ratings with rater responses to gauge the subject's self-awareness.
According to research by CCL, leaders who give themselves a much higher rating than their raters do have a significantly greater risk of derailment than those who under-rate themselves. If the 360 assessment feedback shows someone with a wide gap between their perception of themselves and others, this is a gap that should be taken seriously.
5. Feed the Analysis into Action Planning
Once you’ve finished your analysis and it’s been properly interpreted, it’s time to use that information to create the action plan we covered earlier in the article, choosing one to two things for that participant to focus on.
And there you have it! Everything you need to know about the 360 degree feedback assessment process and how you can build your own.
Another benefit of these assessments is that not only can you get a better understanding of how everyone is doing in your organization, but you can also use your findings to improve how you make hiring decisions based on your company values.
Using 360 Feedback Results to Support Development and Hiring Decisions
Your 360 degree feedback assessment is designed to help you develop your existing employees, but it can also be repurposed to make better hiring decisions when seeking new talent.
Here’s how it works for development, promotions, and hiring:
Supporting Employee Development
As we have covered extensively throughout the article, the main purpose of your 360 feedback assessment is to create formal Individual Development Plans to help your employees and leaders to make behavioral change, with regular check-ins to sustain that momentum.
Supporting Internal Mobility and Promotion
Even though you shouldn’t use the feedback as a pass/fail metric, the data can help highlight whether an individual is suitable for a promotion. For example, the data you collect could highlight that an individual is rated highly across things like strategic thinking and cross-functional collaboration, which could indicate that, with the right support and guidance, they could be promoted to a team lead or manager.
Connecting 360 Results to Hiring Strategy
If the report highlights recurring gaps (particularly among leaders) in communication, delegation, or strategic thinking, even if a coach can address these behavioral gaps, it indicates that your organization currently lacks the essential skills it needs.
Specialist recruitment partners like TalentHub can translate this capability-gap data into targeted hiring briefs, helping organizations build leadership depth deliberately rather than hiring reactively to fill vacancies.
