Regardless of an employee’s performance, successful companies want their people to learn, grow and develop.

But employee evaluations aren’t just about the company. They aren’t about improving performance for the sake of compensation and promotions. The workplace should be a place where personal development is front and centre. If your company can make that claim, your employees will be happier people.

As Eric Mosley wrote, when one manager writes the performance reviews, “This makes that one manager a potential single point of failure for the process.”

Still, 360 reviews are only as good as their implementation. That implementation starts with the design of the survey itself. Here are a few tips to help you make your 360 review a resounding success:

This may seem obvious, but it’s also crucial. Designing a 360 evaluation survey requires thought and research. In order to get feedback that’s useful for your company, you have to know what you want to find out. As Gwen Moran wrote, “It’s important to understand the skills and qualities you need in your top performers” when you’re coming up with questions to ask your peers. This means not only their hard skills, such as their areas of knowledge and expertise. It also means their soft skills or “people skills,” as well as character traits and skills that are common to top performers in many fields.

Once you’ve moved beyond the hard skills, determining the skills you need in a top performer calls for some creativity. Will you need someone who’s good at teamwork, at self-motivation, or both? Do they work in a fast-paced customer service environment? Do they have to be able to work under pressure and show patience? Do you want to identify leadership traits? What should the problem-solving skills of top performers look like? Think long and hard about the role and your business culture when designing questions.

You can’t get useful answers if employees can’t understand the questions. Here’s an example of a good way to word a survey question, in this case asking respondents to rate an employee on punctuality:

“Comes to work on time.”

Here are the general rules used in choosing that wording, with an example of breaking the rule in parentheses beside it:

The right wording asks about objective data: a person’s actions or behaviours. It uses clear and simple language and asks about one behaviour at a time to avoid confusion. Finally, it keeps the tone of the survey positive, describing desired behaviours. As Colleen Francis recently warned, “Negativity in the office can be a real business killer.” Francis gives the good advice that “eliminating negativity from your team starts at the top with you.” Don’t let your wording make your workers feel that performance evaluation is a negative process.

Consider including open-ended questions. Or allowing respondents to comment in addition to giving a rating. These kinds of answers give you a different kind of insight. No matter how well you do your research, you can’t be expected to cover everything. Long answers allow respondents to give input on what they think is important. They will feel valued for being asked for their ideas, and you can benefit from them. Remember, too, that a rating scale can only tell you so much. Evaluating employee performance is qualitative as well as quantitative.

Don’t overwhelm respondents with questions, or yourself with data. Concentrate on what’s important. It goes back to “Know what you want to know.” You will also get a better quality of answer if you give respondents time to think about the questions.

At the same time, keep in mind that the survey has to be thorough. You’re not going to find out everything that you need to know, or get a complete picture of an employee, by asking a dozen questions. When doing your research, think about how many questions you need to ask in order to cover each area of employee competency.

If you don’t know where to begin, start with a template. Choose a 360 employee evaluation with the flexibility to customize questions and other aspects of the survey. This relieves you of the burden of starting from scratch.

Consult the Experts

You may want your 360 survey to be as customized as possible but still feel unsure about how to design the best survey for your needs. In that case it’s time to talk to the experts. Arrange a consultation with your provider to take advantage of their knowledge and experience.