What Is a 360-Degree Review? Definition and Best Practices

Traditional employee performance reviews are a time-honored way for managers to evaluate their direct report’s performance. But these reviews have a limitation: They typically include just two perspectives — the manager’s and the employee’s. And an individual’s contribution to the workplace and current skill set extend far beyond simply meeting their goals. 

Enter 360-degree reviews, which collect feedback from a broader range of stakeholders, including peers and cross-functional teammates. Altogether, those critiques can provide a more comprehensive view of an employee’s skills and competencies, including how well they lead, communicate, and collaborate. Here's how to implement a 360-degree review process at your organization and give your employees more thorough assessments to help them develop their careers — and benefit your company, too.

What is a 360-degree review?

While traditional performance reviews share manager feedback with an employee, 360-degree reviews collect anonymous feedback from several of an employee’s team members, colleagues, or subordinates. Because they feature feedback from multiple sources rather than just an employee’s manager, 360-degree reviews provide a more balanced and detailed view of an individual’s performance.

Whereas standard performance reviews tend to look at an employee’s overall performance and their ability to meet goals, 360-degree reviews dive deeper into an employee’s specific competencies to give a more holistic picture of their strengths and weaknesses. By including feedback from individuals who work with the employee in different capacities, 360-degree reviews essentially provide a full circle of viewpoints about the employee’s work. 

A 360-degree performance review might surface perspectives on an individual’s ability to lead a team, work cross-functionally, and collaborate with teammates. With their comprehensive approach to employee performance, 360-degree reviews are an effective way to fairly evaluate an employee’s workplace contributions and identify areas of improvement that can help guide their professional development.

How to Give 360-Degree Feedback

Collecting and giving 360-degree feedback involves quite a bit of effort, but it’s worth the investment. If you’ve never used this framework before, you might be wondering what the 360-degree feedback process looks like. To help you implement your own 360-degree reviews, here’s a step-by-step guide on gathering and sharing actionable feedback with employees.

1. Outline primary objectives.

Before rolling out 360-degree reviews, leaders must identify the primary objectives for gathering the feedback, connecting specific goals in each review cycle to individual development and organizational aims. 

For example, amid plans to deploy new technology, a 360-degree review could focus on employee development issues, targeting workers who may need upskilling. Feedback from senior leaders, mentors, and subject matter experts may be vital to identifying employees who are best positioned for key learning and development programs. 

Or, 360-degree feedback could aim to evaluate overall employee performance across the organization. That goal likely would require a single set of review questions for each job level so organizations can establish performance benchmarks and compare skills as they rate employees. 

When tying organizational and individual goals and objectives to 360-degree reviews, human resources leaders must remember that this kind of employee appraisal could be new to some people. For 360-degree reviews to be conducted effectively, training must be incorporated into every step, including this first one to ensure managers understand the purpose behind gathering 360-degree feedback.

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2. Develop a timeline.

Unlike traditional performance review processes, 360-degree reviews include more people and data points, and that requires developing processes to keep everything on track. Timelines with strict deadlines for each step — communication, collection of feedback, analysis of results, creation of career development plans, and follow-up — can ensure the reviews and appraisals are collected without delay.

Implementing systems that efficiently gather and analyze feedback can streamline the work. Technology that supports the review process, such as Lattice Feedback, ensures the right people answer the right questions during each 360-degree review and alerts them as deadlines approach. 

Review templates, whether for 360 performance reviews or 360 developmental reviews, can also expedite the work. Employing templates limits any duplication of efforts, especially when they can be customized to fit the specific needs of different roles within the organization.

3. Brainstorm and organize questions.

To get started, you’ll need to decide what questions you want to have answered about your employee’s performance. These questions should be personalized to each employee based on their role, responsibilities, professional goals, and strengths. Common areas that 360-degree reviews can help assess include leadership, communication, collaboration, teamwork, creativity, and project and time management. You may also want to include questions that touch on your company values and reveal to what extent an employee embodies them. 

Aim to have around 50 questions on your final survey, or for it to take respondents 10 to 15 minutes to complete, so people aren’t overwhelmed by survey length and can take the time to leave meaningful feedback. You’ll also want to incorporate a mix of Likert-scale questions, where respondents must choose from a list of answers ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” on any given statement, as well as open-ended questions. This combination provides both quantitative and qualitative data to help guide your analysis.

4. Select your 360-degree review participants.

Next, you’ll need to select who will be on the 360-degree review panel. Each reviewer should be purposefully chosen for your specific employee. They might be teammates who can talk about that person’s collaborative and interpersonal skills, cross-functional colleagues who can speak to their project management abilities, or direct reports who can weigh in on their leadership capabilities. 

Choose participants from a range of relationships with the employee — including peers, direct reports, managers, and even clients — to build an all-encompassing view of an employee’s performance. Select enough participants to ensure you get balanced, diverse perspectives, and take care to secure the anonymity of your sources.

“To maintain rater confidentiality, it’s best to include at least three people per group, meaning peers, colleagues, or direct reports. That allows for their data to remain confidential, and comments and feedback become harder to trace,” advised Bryan Gillette, founder and principal consultant of Summiting Group, an executive coaching and organizational strategy consulting firm.

Ensure reviewers understand the task at hand. Communicate the importance of honesty and provide guidelines on giving constructive feedback that guides improvement and centers the employee’s work output and interactions, not personality traits. 

Implementing measures to ensure anonymity, such as using a platform like Lattice that can collect and aggregate feedback anonymously, can bolster the process, too. Anonymity allows reviewers to speak more openly about an individual’s performance which, according to a 2020 article in Harvard Business Review, generally leads to “far greater honesty and candor.” 

5. Request feedback.

Whomever you select as reviewers, provide them with specific, detailed instructions. Include information on what a 360-degree review is, when their feedback is required, why their responses matter, and how their comments will be used in the feedback process. It might also be useful to remind your participants what helpful feedback looks like. 

For example, “Jessica’s leadership skills just aren’t up to snuff” doesn’t give Jessica or her manager much to learn from or discuss. Instead, encourage respondents to share specific examples of when and how Jessica’s leadership skills negatively impacted the team. This could look like, “It can be hard to track Jessica down and get her input on key projects or her help eliminating roadblocks, which makes it difficult to ensure we’re on the right track. It would be helpful if Jessica could have more frequent one-on-one meetings with project leaders to keep activities moving forward.” 

This kind of specific feedback can help the reviewee be more conscious of how their actions impact others, enabling them to grow personally and professionally from the review experience.

You’ll also want to cover a few logistical details like where respondents will need to share their feedback — via an online form, email, or Excel document, for instance — and any applicable deadlines. You can send out an anonymous feedback survey to collect responses, use any existing feedback tools your company has, or try this peer performance review template. Lastly, remind the reviewers that their responses will be anonymous, so they can feel comfortable sharing candid but constructive feedback. 

Without the right tools in place, the 360-degree review process can become time-consuming and unwieldy. Performance management platforms like Lattice Performance can help. Lattice allows organizations to embed expectations and instructions, including deadlines and information about how the feedback will be used, into a single platform. When participants sit down to rate individuals, they’ll be enabled to provide honest, thorough, and anonymous feedback.

6. Organize the feedback and review it with your employee.

Once you’ve collected feedback from your entire review panel, look over the responses and try to segment the findings into two buckets: strengths and weaknesses. Then, schedule an in-person or virtual meeting with your employee to review and discuss the results together. Frame the development conversation as a growth opportunity and end your discussion with clear next steps and a follow-up plan. 

You can work together with your employee to create goals or identify external learning and development opportunities, like an online course or conference, that can help them work on their areas of improvement. As a development tool, a 360-degree review can help direct and shape an employee's personal development plan. 

Benefits of 360-Degree Reviews

1. They offer more balanced, unbiased feedback.

Typically, annual reviews only include the feedback of an employee’s direct manager, but that can introduce bias into the review process if the manager displays favoritism or prejudice. More innocuously, there may be blind spots in a manager’s understanding of an employee's performance. As a result, many employees believe their employer’s appraisal process is unfair. 

According to a 2023 Gallup study of 18,665 US workers, just 22% of employees strongly agree that their employer’s review process is “fair and transparent.” For better performance reviews, according to that article, “It is best to use a multi-source approach to measuring performance that includes a mix of objective and observational measures.”

Because they incorporate peer feedback, 360-degree reviews give a more holistic view of employee performance by collecting and weighing the feedback of multiple respondents. 

2. They help drive employee development.

The feedback from 360-degree reviews explicitly identifies an employee’s strengths and weaknesses, helping employees better understand their unique skill sets and how to leverage them in the workplace. With that guidance, employees can invest time and effort into honing relevant skills.

Comprehensive feedback can also identify professional development opportunities for individuals as they self-reflect on how others view their performance, capabilities, and aptitudes. That self-awareness and self-evaluation could drive them in new directions as they craft a professional development plan that addresses not only their skills gaps but also their individual career growth and potential. 

3. They improve working relationships.

Being aware of an issue is the first step in being able to solve it. When an employee is more aware of their behavior and how it affects others, everyone benefits. Plus, including employee feedback in your 360-degree reviews shares a powerful message: You care about what your employees have to say and want to improve the employee experience for everyone. 

When done well, 360-degree feedback can foster better teamwork and communication. These employee appraisals can promote a culture of open dialogue, boost employee self-awareness about how their actions impact the team, and nurture trust and accountability across the organization.

“360-degree reviews communicate to people that the value of their work is based not only on their managers’ assessment but also on how helpful they are to their peers and what positive contributions they make to the work environment as a whole,” noted Marie Krebs, cofounder of and executive advisor for the HR community People Stories. “As a result, employees will likely make more effort to help and cooperate with their colleagues, which can lead to a more supportive team environment.”

Challenges of 360-Degree Reviews

1. They take additional time.

There’s no getting around it: These comprehensive reviews take serious organization and effort to run smoothly. From brainstorming questions to sharing feedback with employees, 360-degree reviews can be a very time-consuming process. That said, they can also be an invaluable tool for employee development.

2. They can focus too much on weaknesses.

Some people feel that because 360-degree reviews are trying to identify and surface employee weaknesses, they come off as too negative and can hurt employee morale. 

“A potential disadvantage of 360-degree reviews is that if the information is compiled or delivered poorly, it can land poorly or create resentment. If not executed properly, it can harm employee effectiveness, make individuals insecure in their roles, or [cause them to] feel uncertain with their teams,” cautioned Julie Gurner, PsyD, an executive performance coach and consultant.

Luckily, this can be prevented by asking questions and providing valuable feedback about employee strengths as well as areas for improvement. That will enable managers to share more balanced reviews that don’t disproportionally dwell on an employee’s shortcomings. ‍

3. They may invite sugarcoated or spiteful feedback.

Another downside is that 360-degree review participants might be reluctant to share their true feelings about a colleague or manager out of fear of retaliation. Even with the promise of anonymity, people might sugarcoat their responses or leave out crucial examples that could compromise their identity.

“In a workplace without a strong, friendly, and transparent teamwork culture, people might give dishonest reviews for a number of reasons. They could feel unsafe giving negative feedback and only give positive reviews, for example. Worse still, people could give colleagues negative ratings out of spite or in harsh competition,” said Krebs.

The right employee training and workflows can protect against softened or vindictive reviews. Training can help individuals understand how to best frame their concerns or experiences and encourage honest and open feedback. A performance review platform like Lattice, with safeguards protecting a reviewer’s identity baked into the process, can also help elicit helpful feedback from all.

Legal and Ethical Considerations for 360 Reviews

Implementing any new people strategy comes with its own set of concerns. HR teams and managers must always be on the lookout for privacy and fairness issues. The process should be built on practices that don’t invite or encourage bias or discrimination. 

Equitable employee reviews, for example, require specific and thoughtful questions and reviewers who are trained to be aware of their own unconscious biases. Confidentiality, made possible with a well-designed performance management system, enables reviewers to be open and candid in their feedback without fear of retribution. 

Organizational leaders, HR teams, and managers also must follow federal, state, and local nondiscrimination laws to ensure review practices remain in compliance. To avoid even the appearance of bias, uniformly apply performance evaluations and standards across the workforce. Consult legal counsel if managers or direct reports raise red flags about possible discrimination. 

Feedback Training for 360 Review Participants

Offering high-quality feedback doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Some may worry about being too negative, while others don’t know how to frame criticism helpfully. Requiring training and providing reviewers with specific guidelines about how to frame their feedback can ensure participants offer praise and constructive criticism that is both honest and productive. 

Instruct reviewers to provide specific examples as they review their peers, direct reports, and others. For example:

For more advice on crafting and receiving feedback, check out Lattice’s workbook How to Request, Give, and Receive Feedback.

Optimize your workforce with 360-degree feedback.

Despite their potential pitfalls, 360-degree reviews can benefit employees and companies alike. Managers and HR professionals should carefully evaluate whether this type of review process could be useful for their particular workplace culture. 

Because of their comprehensive nature, 360-degree reviews can help your workforce optimize their strengths and improve upon their weaknesses, enabling your employees to become more well-rounded and effective professionals. By being organized, intentional, and positive as you develop and implement your 360-degree reviews, you can leverage them to give employees the direction they need to grow their careers — and improve employee performance and engagement at your company in the process.

Employee engagement, performance management, and manager enablement are HR’s leading priorities right now, according to Lattice’s 2024 State of People Strategy Report. If you’re looking for better ways to bolster employee engagement and performance and support your managers, request a demo to learn how Lattice can help you personalize your people strategy and drive business results.