How to get a closer look at employee performance with a 360° feedback template

Great feedback is like a compass, showing your team which direction to take to improve their performance and achieve their goals. 

Getting the right guidance helps employees avoid pitfalls and progress more quickly in their roles. Without sufficient feedback, team members become unsure about their next moves. The impact can be profound — employees who feel there is a lack of regular assessments and actionable advice at their workplace are 63% more likely to leave their jobs.*

The 360° review is an effective way for companies to ensure their feedback is hitting the mark. A full range of insights from different members of the team, key collaborators, and managers makes for a comprehensive, well-rounded performance appraisal.

Our guide shows how you can implement effective 360° reviews, with a detailed breakdown of everything you need to include — from ratings and open-ended questions to action plans. Plus, we’ve included a customizable 360° feedback template to help you get started.

*Textio Language Bias in Performance Feedback, 2023
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🥪 Feedback is more than food for thought

Give employees insights on every aspect of their performance from multiple perspectives so they can turn feedback into action.

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Running an effective 360° feedback process

The key to a strong 360° feedback process lies in creating a positive and constructive environment.

Make sure your employees see reviews as a tool for growth and improvement, not a means of discipline. You don’t want your team to just tolerate performance reviews. Ideally, your people should welcome and appreciate them as opportunities to learn and grow.

Since 360° reviews often involve employees giving bottom-up feedback on their managers, make sure your teams feel comfortable sharing their opinions about team and company leadership. They’ll be more likely to do so if their organization values what they have to say. Indeed, a recent study found that 71% of employees say they’re more confident about sharing feedback when they feel heard at work.

When team members are receptive to feedback from their colleagues, they’ll gain deeper insight into their performance and understand how to tap into their strengths. What’s more, they’ll be able to work on their areas of growth with a positive attitude to reach their full potential.
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🪆Looking for a review tool that fits your business?

Explore our list of the best 360° feedback software with detailed insights into each platform’s use cases, features, and pricing.

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Why use a 360 degree feedback template?

Collecting 360° feedback about a team member’s performance can be a challenge. There are practical considerations to keep in mind, both around collecting feedback and deciding how to interpret what people have said or tie different comments together. You may also find some team members reluctant to share their honest feedback, whereas others could show certain biases.

A template can help you overcome many of these obstacles. Here are some of the ways standardizing your 360° reviews can benefit you:

• Quantifiable data — When you rate the same competencies with each round of reviews, you can find patterns in performance. You can see, for example, whether there’s an upward trend, which suggests the employee has improved.
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• Efficiency — A structured process is predictable and, therefore, easier to implement. With each round of reviews, your team will become faster, as they know exactly what to expect.
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• Clarity — As your company becomes more familiar with the standardized review process, they’ll have more clarity on how to complete reviews and which aspects of their colleagues’ performance to focus on, making each review cycle run more smoothly.
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• Convenience — Employees will be more enthusiastic about participating in reviews when the process is made easy. This helps you to achieve greater buy-in across teams.
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• Documentation — Standardized reviews provide evidence of how an employee was performing over a period. If there are any disputes, perhaps concerning promotions or pay raises, you can use the review results to explain company decisions.
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🌟 Go beyond the template with Leapsome’s AI-powered review tools

Build and kick off effective 360°performance review cycles in minutes. Once you have responses, generate summaries, spot trends, and create action plans using AI.

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How to use Leapsome’s template

Our template is easily customizable, so you can input the competencies best reflecting your team skillset and company values. You’ll also want to edit the template based on your team members’ roles and responsibilities. For example, in the template, we’ve included a row for direct reports, but if your employee doesn’t manage anyone, you could substitute that box with another colleague or collaborator, or even with a client or partner instead.

We recommend focussing on three key competencies and using the same questions for every group surveyed. This will allow you to gain deep insights into each employee’s performance, and provides a fair basis for measuring employee growth.
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Leapsome’s 360° feedback template

Our template is based on HR industry best practices and expert insights.

Above all else, our 360° feedback form aims to prioritize your people — both the employees under review and their colleagues who fill in the boxes. We’ve developed our template to cover every area your team may need insights on to grow and improve.

It’s best practice to share a copy of this template with each reviewer individually and consolidate the results at the end. This mitigates privacy and data protection concerns, and prevents employees from being influenced by each others’ comments.

🕸️ Want a strong, consistent yet flexible review framework?

Easily customize our 360° review template to suit your company’s unique structure.

👉 Download template now

7 key factors to consider in your 360° reviews

To get 360° feedback that’s easily integrated into your continuous performance management, you’ll need to think strategically about every element of your review process. 

Here’s a breakdown of 7 major factors to consider, so you can see:

• What’s essential
• What’s open to change
• Where you might adapt the template
• When to use software
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1. Reviewers

For an effective 360° review, managers need to involve a diverse range of team members who can give unique perspectives on the employee’s performance. Aim for at least three or four for a well-rounded evaluation.

Employees can also nominate potential reviewers based on the team members they feel can give a strong assessment of their performance.

If the employee under review doesn’t have reports or direct colleagues, they may need to replace some reviewer categories in the template with other connections. Managers and HR teams can advise employees to consider people they have collaborated with or mentored, even informally, who could give feedback.
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2. Review timelines

Being clear on dates and timelines will help you gather feedback efficiently and convey expectations to reviewers. Clear review timelines help you to understand how particular aspects of performance connect with specific progress paths, projects, or even company changes.

Ideally, reviews should happen within a designated time frame, linked to the specific period you’re in, whether it’s a monthly, quarterly, or yearly review. Comparing feedback from different review cycles allows you to measure progress and pinpoint the impact of your employee development initiatives. 
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3. Rating scale

A clear rating system will allow you to quantify and compare your results. 

There are pros and cons to different scales. It’s worth considering how you’re weighting the results and whether employees may choose middle, neutral options to be polite when that’s an option. Decide which system to use based on what you think are the biggest risks in your unique company culture.

Remember, a dedicated people analytics tool like Leapsome can help you analyze the ratings and qualitative survey content, using the power of AI to give you insights into performance development and generate action plans.

4. Open questions

A mix of quantitative and qualitative data will give you the best perspective on performance. That’s why it’s best to ask reviewers to leave both ratings and open-ended comments. In the open sections, they can explain the rationale behind the number they chose and add any extra information they believe is relevant.

If you’re distributing your review template manually, that will mean a lot of extra work, copying, distributing and consolidating the documents to prevent reviewers seeing each other’s comments. For maximum efficiency and impact, consider using dedicated HR software with built-in performance reviews tools. With Leapsome’s Reviews module, you can easily build out and distribute reviews surveys and collate responses while keeping respondents fully anonymous.
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5. Areas of strength

Highlighting an employee’s strong points not only boosts their morale but shows them what they should keep doing — and do more of. 

It also gives you an idea of each team member’s unique contributions to the company, which you can use to recognize their achievements and consider which roles they might progress into. For instance, positive feedback for collaboration and communication may indicate someone who’d make an excellent team lead.
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6. Areas of improvement & action plan ideas

Reviewers may be reluctant to share constructive feedback for their peers’ performance, but identifying growth opportunities is key to steering your teams’ personal and professional development. Ask reviewers to make their ideas specific, relevant, and achievable to give the employee the best chance to benefit from them. 

It may be worth providing workshops on how to give honest, actionable feedback with empathy to prepare teams for the 360° review.

Once managers have the feedback, advise them to use areas of growth to work out a training plan in collaboration with reports. They can use tools like Leapsome’s Learning module to create personalized development plans and easily track progress. For example, they could arrange for a team member who’s not meeting their targets to complete a relevant online course as well as shadowing an experienced colleague.

If you notice the majority of employees are struggling with a specific skill, you could introduce a company-wide learning path on the same platform. Leapsome lets you create multimedia learning content using a mix of preexisting training and your own custom-made resources.

To help you define areas where your employees would benefit from additional training, use Leapsome’s AI-powered review tools to easily analyze and summarize 360° review content — including suggestions on actionable next steps. That way, you can save time while making sure your employee development action plans are based on objective, data-driven best practices. 
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🔬Don’t miss a single detail

Leapsome’s 360° feedback tool runs automatic review cycles that are easy for your team to view, complete, and action.

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Gather feedback & drive growth with Leapsome

Having an effective 360° review process ensures that, as your company evolves, your performance management keeps pace.

Leapsome’s Reviews module supports people teams and managers in delivering comprehensive and impactful feedback. 

You can:

• Auto-schedule review cycles
• Summarize written feedback
• Consolidate responses
• Generate action plan ideas
• Analyze performance data

Performance reviews are only one part of people enablement. Leapsome’s all-in-one solution helps you to put review data to use through our Goals and Meetings modules and Competency Framework tools. That means you can use your performance review insights to create clear talking points and meeting action items, set meaningful objectives, and build structured frameworks to support employee development.

By connecting your engagement, development, and performance initiatives, you can make sure your business is a place where employees can grow and thrive.
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🪢 Close the loop between performance, engagement, and development

Leapsome’s people enablement platform lets you manage every aspect of the employee experience from reviews and feedback to surveys and training.

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