360 degree feedback collects views from the people around someone rather than only their manager. It produces genuinely new information — and turns into something else entirely the moment it affects a salary.
360 degree feedback gathers views on someone from the range of people they work with — their manager, their peers, the people who report to them, sometimes customers — rather than from one line manager alone. The premise is straightforward and correct: a manager sees a fraction of how someone works, and the people alongside them see a different and often more accurate fraction.
It works well for development. It works badly, and sometimes destructively, when it is attached to pay or promotion, and the difference between those two uses is the whole subject.
The predictable finding, across most organisations that run it, is a gap between how people rate themselves and how others rate them — and the size of that gap correlates with seniority. That is uncomfortable and it is the most valuable output of the exercise.
Once feedback influences a rating that influences money, the incentives invert. Reciprocal arrangements appear — you rate me well, I rate you well. Genuine criticism becomes risky, because a colleague may guess who wrote it and the professional cost is real. Managers gain a reason to steer who is asked. The data does not just get noisier; it becomes systematically biased in a direction nobody can measure.
The reasonable position is to keep 360 feedback developmental, shared with the person and their manager, and to leave performance and pay decisions to a process where the evidence is attributable and can be challenged. Organisations that ignore this usually rediscover it within two cycles, at the cost of the honest answers they had in the first round.
Anonymity is what makes honest answers possible, and it is weaker than participants assume. In a team of five, a comment about a specific incident identifies its author regardless of the label on the form. Be honest about this rather than promising more than you can deliver: say that responses are aggregated and comments are passed on without names, and that in a small group people may still recognise a voice.
The related risk is the feedback used to settle scores. A moderation step — someone reading comments before they are passed on, removing personal attacks while keeping the substance — costs little and prevents the one bad experience that ends the practice.
Ettex Forms is the collection side: a form per person with the same behavioural questions, responses landing in one place, and a link sent to each respondent so nothing arrives as a reply-all thread. Responses can be reviewed together before anything is passed on.
It has no anonymity guarantee built for this purpose. Forms records who submitted where a respondent is identified, and it has no dedicated 360 module — no automatic aggregation into a report, no rater-group weighting, no separation of results from the person collecting them. For a small company that is usually fine with a trusted person handling it; for a formal programme where anonymity must be structural rather than promised, a dedicated tool is the right answer.
Feedback gathered on someone from their manager, peers, direct reports and sometimes customers, rather than from a single line manager.
Generally no. Attaching it to money produces reciprocal ratings and suppresses genuine criticism, biasing the data in ways nobody can correct for.
Six to ten. Fewer makes individual answers identifiable; many more produces fatigue and flat, uninformative scores.
The person suggests names and the manager adds a few for balance. Pure self-selection produces a friendly panel.
Partly. Aggregation helps, but in a small team a specific comment can identify its author. Say so rather than over-promising.
Once or twice a year at most, with enough gap to act on the previous round.
Keep it developmental, ask about behaviours rather than traits, use six to ten respondents, deliver the results in a conversation — and keep it well away from the pay decision.
A non conformance report captures work that did not meet requirement — what it was, what was decided, who authorised it. Raised late or written vaguely, it becomes paperwork nobody can act on.
A whistleblowing policy tells people how to report serious wrongdoing and promises they will not suffer for it. Whether the promise is believed is decided by what happened to the last person who used it.
A subject access request asks you to hand over the personal data you hold about someone. The deadline is short, the search is wider than people expect, and preparation is what makes it routine.