Best Practices in a 360 Performance Review

By Susan M. Heathfield

Are you looking for the framework and questions you need to add the 360 review to your formal employee performance management and improvement process? It’s a useful tool because it allows managers and employees to receive helpful feedback from peer coworkers and managers who are not in their reporting chain of command. The 360 review also provides a format for the boss and his or her boss to give feedback, too.

This is valuable because it provides a more balanced look at an employee’s performance and contribution. The 360 review provides an opportunity for employees who work together to identify strengths and areas that need improvement. Structured appropriately and administered effectively, the 360 review deserves consideration in a performance development system.

As with any work system, a carefully designed 360 review process will produce the most benefit. When you don’t provide a structure, employees tend to write a book because they don’t know when they have said enough. They are also not sure about the topics and work behaviors you seek feedback on, so they tend to write about anything and everything that comes to mind.

This mind dump results in a lot of work for the manager who must pull all of the feedback together to provide meaningful advice and recognition for the employee. So, consider a framework, even if it’s as simple as the Wheel or Starfish in which employees respond to these questions. What do they want from the coworker in order to move the team forward? They identify what they want the coworker to:

• Stop
• Start
• Continue
• Do More of
• Do less of

Conclusion

These resources make recommendations for best practices in a 360 review. They deal with the most significant questions that must be answered as you pursue a 360 feedback process in your organization.