Participating in a 360 degree review can be daunting, especially when you are not confident about how to give 360 degree feedback. Without enough guidance or insight into the purpose of the review, its participants might feel reluctant to engage sufficiently with the process. This can lead to skewed results, compromising the validity of the feedback and devaluing the review.
As experienced business psychologists, we understand the importance of educating everyone involved in the review process to ensure they know how to provide 360 degree feedback. In this article, we will offer our key tips on how to give good 360 degree feedback, as well as examples of positive and negative feedback responses to support your colleagues’ development.
Importance of Effectively Giving 360 Degree Feedback
The success of any 360 degree feedback process relies on its participants’ ability to provide honest and accurate responses to 360 degree appraisal questions. The integrity of these responses is of the utmost importance, as it not only informs the self-development of each individual involved in the process but also allows an organisation to reap the benefits of its invigorated workforce.
Here are some of the main benefits of giving effective 360 degree feedback:
● Encouraging self-reflection
When some receive feedback from their peers, they gain new perspectives of themselves, which can help them become more self-reflective. This will empower them to start their self-development, putting energy into working on their weaknesses while leveraging their existing strengths.
● Increasing employee engagement
While negative feedback in isolation can be demoralising, when an employee is given negative 360 degree feedback, the context of the review can motivate them to improve their performance. Likewise, positive feedback can lose weight within a fast-paced work environment, so highlighting an employee’s strengths through effective feedback can be reassuring and even boost their confidence.
● Building relationships and increasing productivity
Receiving positive feedback from the colleagues you see every day is an excellent way to improve your working relationships while fostering positivity within the work environment. This positive atmosphere can contribute to developing stronger lines of communication within your team and building trust among employees, creating a more united workforce with increased productivity.
While giving good 360 degree feedback offers many benefits for businesses and value for its leaders, it is important to be aware of the detrimental effect that poor quality feedback can have. When your 360 degree review yields limited or misleading responses, it can disillusion your participants and make them reluctant to engage in future reviews. Furthermore, planning and executing 360 degree reviews often requires an enormous amount of resources, which would be wasted if your participants were unclear on how to give 360 degree feedback effectively.
10 Tips on How to Give Good 360 Degree Feedback
Whenever we organise a review for one of our clients, we ask that all participants watch our short instructional video, which offers clear guidance and practical tips on how to give good 360 degree feedback. The following section will outline some of the tips included in the video.
1. Be considerate
Above all else, we recommend that you be considerate of your colleagues’ emotions when you are providing 360 degree feedback. While the anonymity of 360 degree reviews can embolden participants to get something off their chest about their boss or coworkers, being too harsh could upset the recipient or prompt them to disengage from the review.
In order to avoid offending your colleagues, we would recommend adopting an empathetic tone of voice when giving coworkers 360 degree feedback. Before you write your responses, it can be helpful to imagine how you might react if you received the same comment from someone else, then amending the tone as necessary.
2. Be objective
Unless you are explicitly prompted to give 360 degree feedback to this effect, your responses should offer an objective review of your colleagues’ professional performance, rather than providing personal observations. Airing your personal grievances with one of your colleagues will distract from the salient aspects of their feedback, diminishing the value of the review and potentially breeding resentment between employees.
3. Be honest
Despite the anonymity given to 360 degree review participants, employees can struggle to provide honest responses to questions about their close colleagues or managers out of fear that their comments could impact their personal or working relationships. For the success of the review, participants must give honest 360 degree feedback that offers an accurate reflection of their colleagues’ strengths and weaknesses.
To achieve more accurate data, we recommend that participants move swiftly through the questionnaire, trusting that their immediate response is likely to be most reliable.
4. Give examples
Unsupported criticisms can cause conflict, especially if your observations do not align with what other colleagues are saying about the employee in question. When you are giving negative 360 degree feedback to your colleagues, it can be helpful to offer examples of when you have witnessed their poor performance. While this could negate the anonymity of your feedback, it provides clarity to the recipient while reducing the likelihood of them dismissing or trying to refute your comments.
5. Avoid recency bias
When you are providing 360 degree feedback on the performance of your peers, you should avoid basing your responses on recent events that may have left a positive or negative impression on you. Rather than focusing on one instance or interaction you have had with the colleague in question, your feedback should be informed by multiple examples of their performance relative to the criteria being examined.
6. Use the whole rating scale
Many participants tend to favour either extreme of their feedback rating scale, resulting in their colleagues receiving scores much higher or lower than their true performance level. Relying too heavily on these answers compromises the accuracy of the review, exaggerating an employee’s strengths and weaknesses in certain fields while eradicating the nuance that would better inform their subsequent development.
This practice is commonly a symptom of the ‘Halo effect’, which is when the feedback provider allows their overall impression of the recipient to influence how they rate them across the board. To avoid this, we recommend that participants focus on one question at a time while trying to separate their overall opinion or relationship with the participant from their decision-making.
7. Offer constructive criticism
Most respondents are reluctant to give negative 360 degree feedback as they are worried about phrasing their criticism appropriately. While negative feedback is an essential part of 360 degree reviews, any criticism you give should ideally be accompanied by suggestions for how your colleague can improve in relation to the competency in question or resolve an issue with their current performance. Posing your criticism constructively gives your colleagues the framework to begin their development, while reducing the likelihood of them dismissing or disengaging from the process.
8. Include positive feedback
When participants receive overwhelmingly negative feedback, it can lead to disappointment and disillusionment with the review process, such that they make no improvements or even worsen their performance. Wherever you can, we advise participants to give positive 360 degree feedback, praising your colleagues for their strengths as much as you draw attention to their weaknesses.
9. Consider your position
While your involvement in the feedback process might be mandatory, you may wish to moderate your participation in the review depending on your position within the company. If you are relatively new to your organisation, it is safe to assume that your view of your colleagues will be less informed than the perspectives of those they have worked with for many years. Likewise, managers may have greater authority over the members of their team, but this can come at the expense of having an intimate understanding of their competencies.
In cases where you are asked to give 360feedback on coworkers you are less familiar with, we recommend erring onthe side of caution and limiting your negative feedback so as not to skew data or cause accidental offence.
Examples of How to Give 360 Degree Feedback
While most of your responses should be in accordance with an established rating scale, occasionally you will be prompted to provide written feedback on your colleagues as additional evidence of their performance. While it can feel awkward to write about your personal experience with a colleague, your responses must be accurate while maintaining a cordial tone.
If you are unsure how to give 360 degree feedback in this manner, we have created some examples to help you provide honest yet respectful feedback to your colleagues, whether your observations are positive or negative.
Examples of Positive 360 Degree Feedback
● Giving clear instructions
“I appreciated the clarity of instructions you provided at the start of each project. Tasks that initially seemed complicated became much easier to understand and complete following your clear explanations and instructions.”
● Appreciating their help
“I would like to thank you for the additional support during our last project. I faced many challenges that I would not have been able to overcome without your guidance and support. Watching how you handled each situation has taught me a lot, and these experiences will inform how I approach future projects.”
● Creating a positive environment
“The positive influence you had on the workspace created the perfect environment for building strong relationships within the team while increasing our productivity. I am certain that the positive environment you created helped us to reach our targets more easily and efficiently.”
● Good management
“Your management style helped us overcome many obstacles while strengthening bonds between members of our team. By leveraging the skills of different individuals, we were able to reach our targets effectively while developing a strategy that will make our next project easier to tackle.”
Examples of Negative 360 Degree Feedback
● Raising areas for improvement
“While I am very grateful for the support you have given me and the wider team, we would appreciate collaborating on strategies to improve our independence when tackling the next project.”
● Addressing an increased workload
“Meeting my deadlines has proven more challenging since you increased the number of tasks assigned tome. I would appreciate any advice you give me on handling my new workload.”
● Issues with communication
“I appreciate that our previous projects have had larger workloads, which has placed additional pressure on you and the wider team, but I feel like our level of communication may have suffered as a consequence. While your direction helped us complete the project on schedule, I believe improving our communication going into our next project could remove some of the stress from the process.”
● Managerial feedback
“I understand that your schedule has been busier lately, but I was hoping we could have more regular meetups throughout our next project? I would appreciate being able to clarify that we are on the same page regarding our progress and on the right track to meet our targets.”
How to Give 360 Degree Feedback to Your Boss
Providing feedback on your colleagues can be daunting, but giving 360 degree feedback to your boss adds another layer of tension to the process. While you may feel reluctant to criticise your boss’s performance, withholding your insight into their weaknesses could be detrimental for you, your team or even the wider organisation. That being said, it is in your best interest to extend the same cordiality to your boss as your other colleagues and managers.
When giving 360 degree feedback to your boss, we recommend focusing your responses on the following criteria:
● Employee engagement
It is important that your boss is available to speak to employees should any obstacles arise that they are best placed to resolve. If you have experienced any issues communicating with your boss, you should raise this in your feedback.
● Problem-solving skills
From guiding employees through new or surprise challenges to resolving conflicts between colleagues, departments, or clients, identifying and solving workplace problems is crucial for any managerial position. Whether your boss has excellent or deficient problem-solving skills, it would be beneficial for you to address their approach in your feedback.
● Leadership skills
It goes without saying that your boss should be an exemplary leader, but how should you assess their leadership skills in your feedback? We recommend focusing on their ability to provide structure and direction to your workplace, without giving orders.
Who Facilitates Giving 360 Degree Feedback?
Choosing the right person to facilitate your 360 degree feedback is important not only to the success of your review, but to your organisation's continued operation and productivity. While Learning and Development teams might seem like the obvious choice, most organisations have limited L&D resources, which can place a strain on productivity due to staggering the feedback process.
Human Resources can serve as an efficient alternative; however, your HR team may not have the same understanding of developmental strategies as your L&D specialists. Depending on your employees’ routine interactions with your HR team, there maybe some underlying anxiety during employee feedback, preventing them from properly engaging with the review.
Entrusting feedback for each department to its respective manager might seem like an efficient solution. Despite this, unless your manager understands how to give 360 degree feedback effectively, they could similarly feel anxious about relaying feedback to their team. It can be especially awkward when managers have to relay their own responses with regards to an employee and they may feel the need to dampen their criticism.
In order to facilitate effective 360 degree feedback that does not impact your resources or compromise the time and effort invested into the review, you should consider using an external feedback company. In addition to supporting you with writing, organising and distributing your questionnaires, external feedback companies can provide their own facilitators to ensure your organisation can continue to operate as normal throughout the process.
Work with ETS When Giving 360 Degree Feedback
We hope this article has improved your understanding of how to give 360 degree feedback and gives you the confidence to respond honestly and constructively to your colleagues ’,managers’ and boss’ questionnaires. If you believe your organisation would benefit from the insight of experienced business psychologists during your upcoming 360 degree review, contact us today. A member of our team would be happy to talk to you about our services.
