Top 5 360 Review Best Practices
A 360 review is a type of employee performance review that allows all employees and managers to provide feedback about a colleague’s performance. Unlike a typical employee performance review in which an employee’s work performance is evaluated only by their manager, a 360 review includes feedback from peers and subordinates, and in some cases even customers and other people who interact with the employee.
This is extremely important when it comes to 360 reviews since having feedback from everybody helps employees better understand what needs to be improved and what they are doing really well, as well as how everyone they work with views them as a teammate. This is also very important for managers as it paints a much better picture of their employees’ impact on their colleagues and the organization as a whole.
So as you can see, 360 reviews are extremely powerful when it comes to evaluating the performance of your employees, but it’s important to make sure that you are performing them right. Here are a few best practices to ensure that you are getting the best feedback possible from your team members!
1. Always get your employees to provide self-assessments
360 reviews are effective because they gather feedback from multiple different touchpoints that affect the employee, but one type of feedback that cannot be overlooked is the self-assessment by the employee themselves. This ensures that you not only get an understanding of what others think of that employee, but also what that employee thinks of themselves and their performance.
2. Ensure that anonymity and confidentiality are provided
360 reviews are only effective if the team members providing feedback are confident that their feedback is going to be kept anonymous and confidential. If an employee doesn’t believe that their feedback will be private, then they will be much less likely to be honest or candid, which affects the whole review process. To get the best feedback possible from all of your employees, make sure that it is kept anonymous and confidential.
3. 360 reviews should be performed every several months
Ideally, they are done either every quarter or at most, every 6 months. Any more frequent and not enough time is given to track growth and progress between reviews whereas any less frequent and the reviews lose their effectiveness. If your organization has also adopted the OKR methodology, then these periods align perfectly with the recommended OKR periods meaning they can go hand-in-hand!
4. Survey questions should be focused around trainable skills or behaviors and should be kept positive
The ultimate goal of 360 reviews is to provide your employees with opportunities to grow. Therefore, survey questions should reflect that and be focused on skills or behaviors that can be trained or improved. In addition, you want to avoid any negatively-phrased questions since they end up causing discouragement instead of encouragement. You want to give your employees the mindset that change is endorsed by the organization.
5. Surveys should be kept short and simple
360 reviews are not meant to be research projects with dozens of questions in each survey. You should stick to a maximum of 3 questions per survey to ensure that the most important topics are covered and so that your employees don’t get discouraged from answering them. If there are too many questions, employees will feel overwhelmed and lose their interest in responding to each question, skewing your data.
Follow these best practices and your 360 reviews will become a valuable resource for fostering growth in your organization. Add in the OKR methodology to track your goals and the sky’s the limit!
Which 360 review & OKR software is best for my business?
There are many options out there for software that can assist you in implementing both these methodologies, but if your organization bases itself in Salesforce, then there really is only one choice. Axy Employee Management is the best 360 review software available in Salesforce and the best part is, it automatically comes included with Axy OKR at no additional cost meaning that you can adopt both of these valuable methodologies at the same time.
Check out Axy OKR on the Appexchange and take advantage of the free 30-day trial to see if it’s right for your business! Feel free to also get in touch with our team if you’d like a personalized walkthrough of the tool.
