Company trends to build more and more open workspaces where employees will have more chances to communicate, interact, work as a team to deliver the jobs. Going with that, to understand how the employees give their feedback to the others is very important to ensure the open working environment would not be down by any possible conflicts among the employees as well as to match good teams.

To understand how employees think about others, 360 degrees feedback will be the most practical method to apply; but how to define a good process and how to implement it in a specific organization would not be an easy task.

360 degrees feedback, in brief, is a process that allows employees to give their comments or feedbacks to other employees that they know or work together some a period.

Who can provide the feedback to other employees?

The employee would be able to give comments or feedback to other employees should be at least cover the following types:

– Team member: employee works in the same team, same project, same department who already had the chance to work together daily so they will understand how other employees are.

– Manager: the direct manager who manages employee jobs and responsibility to evaluate the employees.

– Employee under level: the other employees who work under to be appraisal employees.

– Customer/Partner: this could be used for some special employee groups (sales, partner relationship management …)

The number of feedbacks attendee should not be too many, from 5 to 10 should be the good range.

Process and feedback results 

To start the process, first and important, the feedback is anonymous, so employee relationships are not affected. The only person who should know all the names of feedback person HR or in-charged personnel to manage 360 degrees feedbacks data.

360 degrees feedback should be on the competency and can be applied for job performance; some general competencies that could be considered are communication, teamwork, attitude, task assignment, presentation skill, problem-solving… The feedback can be based on the rating (A, B, C …), points (1, 2, 3 …), or can be just a free comment.

The outcome of feedbacks process should be used for reference purpose but should not be directly used for benefit calculation or promotion, it can be used for a manager to support them in the yearly peer to the peer appraisal process, assign the tasks more appropriate, or define better training needs to improve employee competencies.