360 Feedback Examples

To run a successful 360 feedback process you’ll need several assets, including:

• 360 feedback questions: what you’re going to ask each respondent.
• 360 feedback email: an introductory email to respondents to explain the process, and offer context and tips to make it a success.
• 360 feedback examples: demonstrations of best-practice to help your respondents give good feedback.

This short article will give you some examples of each to make running your process quicker and easier.

Read More: for a full breakdown of a great 360 process, read our article on How to Get 360 Feedback Right

What is 360 Degree feedback?

360 feedback is just feedback for an employee from a range of others beyond whoever’s directly responsible for their career development (often their manager).

It’s not necessarily anonymous, or performance-related, or ratings-based (as we’ve seen argued elsewhere).   It could be.  But these are choices you’ll make in how you design your 360 process.

Fundamentally, it’s just feedback from a range of people who together offer a broader (360) perspective about an individual’s work to help them improve.

360 Feedback Questions

Your 360 feedback questions should be designed to maximize the opportunity for the respondents to offer constructive advice to the individual, without becoming too onerous that they don’t have the time to answer them well. 

For that reason, we favour a limited number of questions with free-text fields for answers, rather than ratings-based questions.

It shouldn’t take more than 15-30 mins for your respondents to answer your 360 feedback questionnaire. One to three questions is manageable.  Any more than 5 will start to get time-consuming and you’ll want to make sure those questions are really worth it. 

Single Question 360 Feedback Template

360 feedback templates can be as simple as one question:

‘What’s the most important thing you feel Alex could do to improve at his job and why?’ 

Whilst this feels basic, it’s powerful because it forces respondents to highlight the most important thing for the individual to focus on.

Short 360 Feedback Template

This short 360 feedback template can be helpful because rather than just focussing on one area of improvement, it asks respondents to also highlight the individual’s strengths. 

Here’s an example with two questions:

‘What has Alex done well over the last 6 months and why?’

‘Where do you think Alex could improve his work over the next 6 months and why?’

Here’s a further example with three questions which uses the stop-start-continue framework:

‘What should Alex start doing that he's not doing already?’

‘What should Alex continue that he’s already doing?’

‘What should Alex stop doing?’

Competency-Based 360 Feedback Template

If you have specific areas/skills/competencies which are important for performance at your particular company, then you may want to use a competency-based 360 feedback template to make sure individuals get feedback on those areas.  

The key with these templates is not to include too many questions.  It can be tempting to pick lots of areas, which seems like it would be helpful for the individuals, but in reality is onerous for the respondents and can result in poor quality feedback.

You may wish to pick from some of the following, or adapt the format to your own company’s priorities:

‘How receptive do you believe Alex is to feedback? Can you give an example?’

‘How would you describe Alex’s willingness to collaborate with others? Can you give an example?’

‘How would you describe Alex’s communication skills? Could you give an example?’

What has been Alex’s impact on the team's culture over the past quarter/six months/year? Could you give an example?’

‘Has Alex shown innovation and creativity in approaching his work? Could you give an example?’

Learn more: read more about how easy it is to set up your own 360 template in Kommon.

360 Feedback Email

When you send out your 360 degree feedback questionnaire, you may find you get better responses if you use the email you send to remind respondents of the motivations behind the process and some examples of best practice.

Your 360 feedback email might read something like this.

Hi Sarah,

You’re receiving this email because you’ve been asked to give feedback to Alex as part of our 360 feedback process. 

This is a vital part of how we all help each other get better at what we do.  Thank you for taking the time to respond.  There are only three questions and it shouldn't take you more than 30 minutes to complete.

When you’re considering what to write, please consider how you’ve worked with Alex over the past 6 months as a whole.  The value to Alex is in the collected perspectives of his colleagues, so focus your thoughts on what you’ve seen when you’ve worked with him.  Please give specific examples where possible as it will really help Alex to understand his specific strengths, and also where he can improve.

Once you have submitted your feedback, it will be collated by his manager, who will then discuss it with him.  Your feedback will be presented in full and will not be anonymised.

If you have any questions about this process, please let me know.  Thank you again for your time.

360 Feedback Examples

When you send your 360 feedback email you may choose to include some examples of best-practice to help your respondents give good feedback.

These are often most powerful if they are actual examples of feedback that leaders of your company received which helped them improve.

If you cannot collect those, offer sample responses to some of the questions you have posed.  Good feedback often follows the Situation-Behaviour-Impact model:

• Situation: what was the specific situation the individual was in 
• Behaviour: what action did the individual take
• Impact: what was the impact of that action that you want to highlight, and how does it impact the individual’s professional development.

This model gives the recipient the specific context they need to improve.

For example:

‘What’s the most important thing you feel Alex could do to improve at his job and why?’ 

Suggested response:

I have worked closely with Alex twice in the past six months when he ran two marketing campaigns for my product. [Detail on the context of the feedback]  The quality and design of the campaigns was excellent [identify strength], but I think Alex’s communication skills let him down and may undermine his other good work in future [introduce area for improvement].  For example, after we had settled on the initial design for the campaign [situation], I didn’t hear from him again until after the launch, despite emailing him several times for updates [behaviour].  Whilst it didn’t ultimately impact the quality of the campaign, it made me doubt his approach and hindered my team’s work as I had to go and get updates from other members of his team who were less-informed [impact].  It’s a shame because the other aspects of his work were very good.  I worry that without paying more attention to his responsiveness, he will undermine some of his other work in the eyes of not just me but other stakeholders in the company, given that communication is a competency the firm values so highly.