360 Degree Feedback Software for Performance Reviews

The 360 Degree Feedback process gives your company a holistic view of how each of your employees performs within your organization. PerformYard’s easy-to-use performance management platform makes executing 360s simple and consistent, providing HR, managers and employees with diverse feedback and performance data. 

360 Feedback software should handle every stage of the 360 process and streamlines the flow of information throughout your cycle. Look for features to facilitate nominations, create staged review cycles, manage sign-offs, aggregate data and make the process simple for employees. 

PerformYard is a top rated 360 degree feedback system. Connect with our team to see if PerformYard can streamline your process. Click here to see PerformYard.

PerformYard’s Approach to 360 Reviews...

PerformYard believes that the most effective 360s processes focus on great feedback and engaged employees. Therefore the best 360 feedback software should streamline and simplify the process so employees can spend more time with what matters, the feedback, and less time on trying to figure out workflows.

PerformYard gives HR teams the flexibility they need to design the right 360 process for their organization. Choose who can nominate who and if it requires sign-off, choose who can see feedback and if it is anonymous, create multiple stages like peer feedback stage followed by manager feedback stage, use any type of question you’d like, etc. HR teams get unlimited flexibility to setup the process they need.

Then PerformYard will manage the cycle for you, alerting employees to complete each next step in the process. Employees get brought directly to what they need to do next, no need to remember how to use the software, just click the link and sign-off, give feedback, nominate a reviewer, whatever is needed at that moment.

We sum up our approach as flexible features for HR and a simple employee experience.

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Key Features of 360 Reviews in PerformYard

Here are a few key features that show how PerformYard sets your 360 review process up for success.

Streamline Peer Nominations

One of the largest administrative challenges of 360s is establishing who will review whom. Often the relationships aren’t clearly defined on any organizational chart. Someone on your Analytics team may have spent a lot of time working with Marketing this year, but last year they did more projects with Finance, HR often won’t know that. That’s why a nomination process is so important.

PerformYard allows a lot of flexibility here, HR can choose to have employees request feedback from peers, have peers offer to give feedback, have managers define peer feedback relationships, or HR can setup the peer reviews. All of these options can also include a sign-off step where either a manager or HR approves the peer feedback assignment.

Control Feedback with Anonymity, Visibility and Sign-Offs

During 360 reviews employees from all different levels are providing feedback for other employees also at different levels. Some individual contributors may not be familiar with providing constructive feedback, and some employees may be uncomfortable providing feedback outside of the established hierarchy. 

Each exchange of feedback is an opportunity for conflict to arise. That’s why controls are so important. Not every organization has a culture of transparent feedback. Anonymizing feedback, hiding feedback altogether, or having managers/HR sign-off on feedback all help your organization ease into using diverse sources of feedback. 

After a few cycles of experience and training, you can choose to move to a more open feedback strategy, or not. 

Create Multiple Stages

The best 360 strategies use staging to manage their process. Often the 360 will have period where self, peer and external feedback is collected. Then another stage where that feedback is reviewed and potentially sent back to get more clarity. Then managers synthesize the feedback into a clearer narrative with next steps. And finally the manager and employee meet to discuss.

A staged process enriches your entire strategy because it allows everyone to digest and react to the feedback, and then decide on next steps. Your 360 process should not be about collecting pieces of paper that get forgotten, it should build to a productive conversation between an employee and their manager about all the opportunities that the feedback has uncovered. Staging your process facilitates this.

Integrate 360s with Your Performance Management Strategy

It’s important to remember that 360s work best as part of a larger performance management strategy. At the end of a 360 will you set goals for development and then followup on those goals in check-ins throughout the year? When peers and managers are writing their feedback should they work from memory, or use the performance notes they’ve been keeping all year?

That’s why PerformYard offers an entire suite of performance management tools, so you can manage all elements of your strategy in one place. Bring together 360s, check-ins, goals, feedback, recognition, performance notes and a lot more to build the strategy that’s right for your organization.

Benefits of Using PerformYard for 360 Reviews

360 reviews are a useful performance management tool that you can use to increase self-awareness, transparency and performance at your organization. Because 360 reviews require feedback from multiple team members, they often lead to profound benefits, such as increased communication, trust among teammates, and an understanding of how each employee affects the greater organization. While 360 reviews may be more involved than a traditional manager-employee review process, the holistic feedback they provide can help drive company strategy and more accurately detect high performing employees.

Information technology company J2, who usePerformYard to manage their 360 reviews, had this to say about why they chose the 360 review process: 

“360 reviews have become a big part of our process over the last couple of years. People move around a lot, interact with lots of employees, and contribute to many projects; so feedback from many sources is really important.” 

-- Heather Capel, Vice President of Professional Services.

When manually completed, The 360 review process can be overwhelmed by the sheer number of forms, spreadsheets, and emails necessary to gather and approve all of the feedback. 

PerformYard is a streamlined solution to this manual madness. We provide an easy-to-use interface where your employees and managers can fill out forms and submit them directly to the people who need them without reminders and email threads. See for yourself how easy it is to run 360 reviews in PerformYard.

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What is 360 Degree Feedback Software

360 feedback software helps HR teams manage the 360 review process. The best software will manage nominations, distribute forms, send reminders, organize sign-offs, collect and redistribute feedback, manage performance data and offer analytics. Managing more than a few 360s manually can be overwhelming, so software plays an important role.

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Resources Related to 360 Performance Appraisals

Interested in reading more about 360s? Here are some excellent resources that we recommend to get your research going. 

Getting the Most Out of 360-Degree Reviews (Harvard Business Review)

The Purpose of Peer Reviews in 360s

How J2 Interactive Collects 360 Feedback for 150 Distributed Employees

Do 360 evaluations work? (American Psychological Association)

How Netflix Uses 360 Reviews for Performance Management

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Frequently Asked Questions About 360 Degree Feedback

What is a 360 degree feedback process?

An administrator kicks off the 360 review by providing forms to the reviewers and reviewee. The reviewers typically include peers and managers. Reviewers then submit feedback, which is compiled by the manager and/or HR. This compiled feedback is potentially anonymized or summarized before being shared with the reviewee. 

What are the pros and cons of 360 degree feedback?

Pros of 360 degree feedback include: 

• A holistic look at an employee’s performance
• Improved team communication
• Improved company and team transparency
• Increased employee self-awareness. 

 The cons of 360 degree feedback are: 

• Extensive review training is required to ensure employees provide actionable feedback
• Team performance may suffer if negative, personal feedback is presented
• So much feedback can result in data overload.
  

Making the decision to adopt 360 degree feedback reviews is not something a company takes lightly. See more of the pros and cons of 360 reviews to decide if this process is right for you. 

How much does a 360 performance review tool cost?

Performance management software is typically priced in three ways: pay-per-user, pay-per-employee, and pay-per-appraisal. Get in touch with PerformYard today, so that we can provide you with quote. 

In the pay-per-user model, you will pay for each user registered in the software. In the pay-per-employee model, you will pay for each employee at the company, regardless of whether they are registered in the software. In the pay-per-appraisal model, you will pay for packs of employee appraisals. With the pay-per-user and pay-per employee models, you may have to pay set-up and implementation fees.

What companies use 360 degree feedback?

Experts say as many as 90% of Fortune 500 companies like Netflix, GE, and Facebook use some form of 360 degree feedback in their review process. Companies value the holistic look at employee performance, and understand that more information leads to better business decisions. 

How do I write a 360 review form?

360 review forms are constructed from a number of measurements like rating scales, open-ended questions, and trait selection to describe a subject. These measurements give reviewers the opportunity to reflect thoroughly on a subject: good, bad, and otherwise.