A comprehensive guide to 360-review

What is a 360 review?

360 review can be defined as a review where employees receive feedback from peers, subordinates, managers, and even clients sometimes. Organizations widely accept review 360, for it is a well-rounded process that offers employees the opportunity to understand and compare how their strengths and weaknesses are viewed at various levels of the company. Traditional reviews, where only managers of employees reviewed them, are not as effective. 360-degree performance reviews help identify any gaps and address them. It also brings additional issues to the fore, such as training requirements, team management, customer communication, etc.

360-degree performance reviews come handy in three key ways: to replace the annual review process, to augment professional development, or to identify critical patterns and discrepancies across multiple groups.

When performing 360 reviews, employees can give and receive feedback in the following categories: leadership qualities, communication skills, teamwork, quality of performance, and customer relations.

What are the top 5 benefits of 360-degree reviews?

Organizations rely on 360-degree performance reviews because they work. 360 performance reviews build a bigger picture from the perspective of various stakeholders. Let us look at the top 5 pros of 360 performance reviews.

1. Multi-source feedback: Traditionally, only managers weighed in on an employee’s performance. Even though useful, it wasn’t a wholesome view of employee's performance. With 360 reviews, you get a broader perspective that provides performance insights from multiple functions and stakeholders.
2. Identify blind spots: In organizations, when you are working on multiple projects or with numerous functions, there could be concern areas that an employee may not be aware of. This review process helps bring to the fore such areas, arming management to address them at the earliest.
3. Identify training needs: Thorough employee feedback highlights improvement areas. This makes it easy to identify and implement any training requirements that will help improve the employee’s performance.
4. Offers constructive feedback: Participation from multiple sources helps give well-rounded feedback. This is crucial in improving the employee’s performance. It helps the employee become a better manager, colleague, and subordinate.
5. Proves visibility: An employee may work with various peers and functions over their tenure. With 360-degree performance reviews, peers and subordinates get to give feedback on the employee’s performance. This not only ensures organization-wide visibility but also they are efforts are valued.

360-degree performance review surveys

Review 360 takes some co-ordination since it’s multiple stakeholders participating in an employee's evaluation. You have numerous colleagues, peers, managers, and customers giving performance feedback. Conducting surveys is an excellent way to gather input for 360-degree performance reviews.

Here are the top five reasons why you should use an online survey platform or tool for conducting 360-degree reviews.

1. Simple and quick: Building and conducting online employee performance surveys are hassle-free and fast with survey software. Most of the tools have pre-defined surveys, which can be edited to suit your needs. It gives you the freedom to use your own set of questions, making it user-friendly.
2. Easy data gathering: Data gathered from online employee surveys is stored centrally with its unique tracking and storing properties. This is useful in not only data gathering but also accessing. This comes in handy when you are doing multiple surveys for many employees all year round.
3. Easy data sharing: It’s essential to share your survey data with key and relevant leaders for effective 360-degree performance management. With online survey tools like QuestionPro Workforce, you can easily share data with various people and even assign role-based access. This helps maintain data privacy, shareability, and ease-of-access.
4. Reporting dashboards: Online survey tools provide you with options to create and customize dashboards. These can be shared directly with relevant managers for further analysis. It helps in review 360 since it lets you put in fields that help monitor things like KPIs, goal management, etc.
5. Customize your surveys: Online survey platforms come with a host of options. These are not only restricted types of surveys but also the level of customization that you can do. You may have your brand colors in surveys, domain names, your own data centers, and much more. Depending on your requirements and needs, you can customize your tool and surveys.

Identify patterns in your workplace

Whether you’re looking for a way to streamline your review process or help your employees grow, 360 performance reviews certainly help. Not only do 360-degree reviews increase accountability, but your organization can disseminate the data and apply it company-wide to fix repetitive issues. These can be oversights during the training process or even procedural matters that can thwart employee growth.

Organizations conducting 360 reviews certainly helps in improving employee performance and employee experience. Data gathered from such reviews can be fed into your performance management system and used to develop and enhance training plans, feedback programs, etc.