Everyone gets nervous when they open their 360 degree feedback report — even those with thick skin. This is because your peers, managers and even those who you manage have rated your experience, behaviour and skill set. There’s no way of know what will be on the other side of that envelope.

Talk about feedback overload!

We all know feedback can be useful. At its simplest, you take the feedback from people and do more of what they like and less of what they don’t like.

360 degree feedback reports give you a detailed numerical analysis about your strengths and development opportunities. But the analysis is only as good as the information that’s submitted in the first place.

Here is a list of the most common 360 degree feedback mistakes that people make when providing feedback:

1. Behaviour

Being nice

If you don’t want to offend someone, then don’t give him or her bad ratings. This will only result in you continuing to get reports late, being missed off distribution lists or being talked over in meetings. Honest feedback is the best gift you can give someone.

If you were in his or her shoes, wouldn’t you want to know where you can improve?

Assessing behaviour instead of performance

Most evaluations are, unfortunately, subjective, with a large part of the evaluation focusing on “the person” including an assessment of his/her personal traits such as commitment and behaviors. These factors may (or may not) contribute to performance, but they are not quantitative measurements of output. Performance is about numbers, quality, volume, and dollar value.

Shining halo

It’s natural for coworkers to become friends simply because they spend so much time together during the day. But, this can put a rosy glow over their feedback. It’s important to focus on each question individually and think about specific work-related examples to justify the ratings you are handing out.

Out for blood

When you feel the need to draw blood with spiky harsh feedback, think again. Surveys are not always completely anonymous – so it could come back to haunt you. Try to limit yourself to harsh feedback on the one or two behaviours that need to change. It’s even better to address this problem behaviour when it happens rather than waiting until feedback is required.

So the next time your feedback is required, make sure it’s honest and your ratings can be justified with work-related examples.

2. Feedback Questions

Bland central

You may be asked to give feedback on someone you don’t know well or deal with infrequently. Avoid giving bland, middle-of-the-road ratings and consider skipping the questions you can’t answer or comment on. This type of feedback isn’t useful for anyone.

Asking too many questions

When you start to ask too many questions, the answers start to become less meaningful as your employees plod through the questionnaire in an effort to just get it over with. The only way to avoid this is by keeping your 360 feedback questionnaires concise. In most cases, you shouldn’t ask more than 10 questions.

Asking vague questions

As business expert Eric Jackson said in a recent article for Forbes, you must “Make sure that the tool you select is going to give back actionable information.”

If your questions become too vague, your entire feedback system will not be able to help you achieve your goals. In order to avoid this, you must make sure to ask specific questions that target the behaviours you want to discuss.

For example, instead of asking them to “rate how you think Jimmy’s performance has affected the team,” ask them to “rate Jimmy’s ability to develop strategic goals and objectives.”

3. Gathering Feedback

Infrequent feedback

Executing evaluations once a year is inconsistent and downright silly. A business operates throughout the year, and so should its quality control program. At the very minimum, formal feedback to employees should be granted at least quarterly or sooner.

Using traditional self-assessments

Traditional self-assessments simply do not work. For example, if an ambitious employee wanted to perform a self-assessment midstream (in order to improve), then the processes at best would most likely not allow that employee access to that assessment. Having a real-time, virtual assessment scoreboard would be an ideal solution to traditional self-assessments.

Gathering feedback from only one person

360-degree feedback earns its name by being comprehensive; a part of what this means is getting a complete picture of how someone’s performance is affecting the team by asking the team.

Instead of only asking a single supervisor, 360-degree feedback gains insight from everyone who works with them. To not do this would counter the effects of its design.

Not reinforce confidentiality

The anonymity of 360-degree feedback exists so that all responses will be 100 percent honest. This is because many people do not feel comfortable giving honest, complete feedback when they know that the person being reviewed will know what they said.

Although your 360-degree feedback system will be anonymous, some people have grown accustomed to feedback that is not, so to achieve the desired results, make sure that you reinforce the fact that their responses will be anonymous.

To learn how our 360 degree employee evaluation software tool can help you improve employee performance, simply contact us to schedule a free one-on-one demo .