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I am often approached by HR colleagues who have been asked to deliver 360 feedback for their clients but don’t know where to start. Sometimes this is because the client themselves doesn’t really understand why they want to roll 360 feedback out, it has just been recommended or positioned as a good idea. When we don’t know why the 360 is being delivered it is really hard to know which examples of questions or reports are going to be helpful. Therefore, the purpose of this blog is to provide some 360 feedback examples and questions that will help you to determine whether 360 degree feedback is the right decision for your organisation and, if so, how to select the best questions. I have also provided some links to some 360 feedback examples for managers, other relevant templates and reports at the bottom of the page.
So, first of all, why does your client want to carry out a 360 feedback process? What skills or behaviours are they looking to measure? It is helpful to think about behaviours or skills in the context of a specific role or seniority to maximise relevance e.g. People Manager, Sales Leader or Individual Contributor and to select the questions accordingly. However, it can feel daunting when we are starting with a blank sheet of paper and this is why we included six 360 questionnaire templates within our brand new Actus 360 NOW tool to provide inspiration and help you to get started quickly and easily. You can use these as a starting point but, generally it is more powerful if you can align the feedback questions and categories with the specific requirements within your company or that of your client.
As alluded to above, generic 360 feedback examples are a good starting point, however if your client already has a competency or values framework then you can customise your 360 questionnaire by using the behavioural statements within it. If you are struggling to find existing behavioural content within your company or client and don’t have the time to start from scratch then you might find inspiration by downloading our free competency dictionary. You can use this to prioritise the categories of behaviour that you want to encourage in your organisation (I would suggest that 6 is about optimum) and then select three or four behavioural statements behind these. In case you are wondering, a behavioural statement is something observable – that someone demonstrates physically or verbally. What is key however is ensuring that you are only asking for feedback on one behaviour per statement. This often means simplifying and prioritising what you are looking to understand from that question.
This example was taken from a clients competency framework: Planning and Organising which was defined as ‘Thinking ahead, managing time, priorities and risk and developing structures and efficient approaches to deliver work on time and to a high standard’. While it might be efficient to ask this statement as one 360 feedback question, the reality is that the response could be quite confusing. If someone receives a lower rating against this statement they may not know what the development area relates to. Is it about delivering work on time or the quality of the work? Is it about their ability to prioritise, manage risk or develop structures?
Try to simplify and prioritise the most appropriate statement for the role in question, taking into account the seniority of the role that the questions are aimed at. It is possible to take the
same competency or value and choose statements that are appropriate at different levels for different management roles for example:
Individual Contributor: “Plans ahead and delivers work on time”
Team Leader: “Manages people and resources to deliver work on time”
Senior Manager: “Establishes efficient systems and processes”
It can be harder than it looks to ask just one question per statement, so sometimes we might find ourselves adding a little more complexity to avoid having a ridiculously long set of questions e.g. Senior Manager: “Establishes and embeds efficient systems and processes”
However, keeping the principle of one question per statement in mind when you are designing your 360 will make the feedback easier to understand.
Your 360 template doesn’t need to be set in stone and if a question seems to duplicate or cause confusion, don’t be afraid to adapt or change it. The only challenge with this is measuring trends in behaviours over time, nevertheless it is more important that the questions are relevant and clearly understood.
Some 360 templates don’t include categories or free text boxes and I believe this is a missed opportunity. Categories are really useful to guide the respondent as to the context of that particular question and are helpful for identifying overall patterns and gaps in terms of development needs (See the spidergraph on the image above for an example of this). Free text provides the opportunity for the respondent to provide context for their response. Try to incorporate both in your 360 template.
If you simply want to take a look at a 360 feedback example report, to get an idea of what one looks like then you can download one below. You can also tune into the HR Uprising Podcast where I share lots of tips about how to set up and deliver a 360 process. You can also read more about 360 feedback by downloading our free e-book below.
Hopefully, you found what you were looking for within this blog, links to all the downloads mentioned are easily accessible at the bottom of this page. If you are looking to run 360 feedback within your business or within a client, then you might find Actus 360 NOW a brilliant option for you as it is a cost effective, scalable 360 solution that comes ready configured with 6 x 360 feedback example templates that you can adapt as you wish. Simply sign up to your own portal and then you can add licences as you need them. You can find out more below:
Find out more about Actus 360 NOW
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