360 Feedback Questionnaire Template

A Complete 360 Feedback Pack, Not Just a List of Questions

Collect structured feedback from peers, managers, and direct reports without the process falling apart before the responses arrive.

This free 360 feedback questionnaire template gives HR teams a complete pack rather than a list of questions. It covers what to decide before launch, how to select and approve raters, what to tell participants, the questionnaire itself, and what to do with the responses once they come in.

360 programs rarely fail because of the questions. They fail because nobody decided what the exercise was for, the employee picked their own raters, or people were unsure who would see their answers and wrote nothing useful as a result. The first three sections of this template exist to prevent each of those outcomes.

It is available as an editable Word document and as a print-ready PDF.

What Is a 360 Feedback Questionnaire?

A 360 feedback questionnaire collects input on one employee from several people who work with them, rather than from their manager alone.

The rater groups are usually the manager, peers who work with the employee regularly, direct reports where the employee manages people, and the employee themselves. Feedback is collected against the same set of behaviors from every group, so the results can be compared across perspectives rather than read as separate opinions.

The value comes from the comparison. A manager sees a portion of someone’s work. Peers see how they operate day to day across teams. Direct reports see how they lead. Where those views agree, you have a finding. Where they diverge, you usually have the most useful conversation available in the whole review cycle.

Multi-rater feedback works alongside the manager assessment rather than replacing it, and most organizations run the two within the same performance cycle.

What Is Included in the 360 Feedback Questionnaire Template?

The template is organized into six sections. The first three cover the program decisions. The last three are the questionnaire and what happens after it.

1. Deciding What the 360 Is For

The first section asks you to choose between a developmental 360 and an evaluative one, write the choice down, and tell every participant which one it is.

A developmental 360 sends results to the employee and their manager and is not used to set a rating, pay, or promotion. Raters answer candidly because they know their input is not being used to judge. An evaluative 360 feeds into the performance rating, requires more raters and tighter structure, and produces comparable data at the cost of more guarded responses.

Both are legitimate. What is not legitimate is running an evaluative 360 while telling people it is developmental, which is the fastest way to lose trust in the process permanently.

2. Rater Selection

Who answers matters more than what you ask, so the template supplies rules rather than leaving the field blank.

The rules cover one manager, three to five peers who work with the employee regularly, three or more direct reports where the employee manages people, and the self-assessment completed before the employee sees any other results. Any group whose results are shown in aggregate needs a minimum of three responses; otherwise, individual raters become identifiable.

The employee may nominate raters, but the manager or HR approves the final list. Nomination without approval lets people select only the colleagues who like them, which is the most common single reason 360 data comes back uniformly positive and completely useless.

A rater log table is included for recording each rater, their relationship to the employee, how long they have worked together, and whether the nomination was approved.

3. What to Tell Raters

The template includes the message to send participants, written out in full with bracketed sections to amend.

It tells raters who the feedback is about, whether responses will be shown with names attached or in aggregate, whether the feedback will be used to set a rating, and roughly how long the questionnaire takes. It also asks raters to select “Not able to assess” rather than guessing where they have not had visibility of something.

4. Rating Questions

The questionnaire uses the same five-point scale as the performance review form, so the two sets of results can be read together, plus a “Not able to assess” option on every item.

20 rated statements are grouped into five sets:

• Collaboration and teamwork
• Communication
• Reliability and follow-through
• Problem solving and judgment
• For people managers only

Each statement describes an observable behavior rather than a trait, so a rater is scoring something they have actually seen rather than forming an impression of the person.

Using the same scale as the review form is also what allows 360 results to inform a calibration discussion later, since both sets of numbers mean the same thing.

5. Open Questions

Four open questions follow the rated statements: Start, Stop, Continue, and one thing you would want them to know.

Start, Stop, Continue produces specific and actionable answers. Asking for strengths and weaknesses produces adjectives, and adjectives cannot be acted on. The fourth question exists because raters frequently know something useful that none of the first three prompts surfaces.

6. Synthesizing the Results

The final section is for whoever writes the summary, and it is where most of the value in a 360 is either created or lost.

It covers looking for patterns across raters rather than treating one comment as a finding, comparing the self-assessment against everyone else, separating what is actionable from what is preference, carrying no more than two or three themes into the conversation, and watching for a single outlier response driving an apparent theme in a small rater group.

A summary table is included for recording themes across raters, the largest gap between self and others, and the agreed focus areas for development.

Developmental or Evaluative: Which 360 Are You Running?

This is the first decision in the template because it changes everything downstream. Choose one before you select raters.

Tell participants which one this is in the message you send them. Most organizations leave it unsaid, and raters then assume the worst and write accordingly.

How to Run a 360 Feedback Cycle With This Template

1. Decide the Purpose and Write It Down

Choose developmental or evaluative before anything else, and record the decision on the form itself so it does not drift mid-cycle.

Every later decision, including how many raters you need and how the results are shared, follows from this one.

2. Build and Approve the Rater List

Let the employee nominate, then have the manager or HR approve. Check the minimum of three responses for any group you intend to report in aggregate.

Where an employee manages fewer than three people, direct report results should not be shown as a separate group.

3. Send the Questionnaire With the Framing Message

Use the message in Section 3 of the template. Amend the bracketed sections and nothing else.

Give raters a deadline and a realistic time estimate. Unframed raters produce vague answers, and vague answers are the most common complaint about 360 programs.

4. Collect the Self-Assessment First

The employee should complete their own responses before seeing anyone else’s.

The self-versus-others comparison only works if the self-assessment was written independently, and it is the single most useful output of the exercise.

5. Synthesize Before You Share

Do not hand someone a stack of raw responses. Work through Section 6 and identify the two or three themes that actually have support across raters.

A person handed eleven areas to work on will work on none of them.

6. Turn Themes Into a Development Plan

Agreed focus areas should leave the 360 with an owner and a date attached, not sit in a summary document.

Record them as items in an individual development plan, or as topics for upcoming one-to-ones.

Who Should Use This Template?

This 360-degree feedback template is designed for:

• HR teams running their first 360 cycle and needing the process rules, not only the questions
• HR teams whose existing 360 produces uniformly positive and unusable results
• Managers collecting multi-rater input ahead of a performance review
• Organizations that want 360 results and review ratings to use the same scale
• People teams that need a defensible approach to rater anonymity
• Anyone running 360s over email or in a survey tool with no supporting process

The template can be used as a standalone Word or PDF document, loaded into an existing survey tool, or adapted to match a current feedback process.

Also Built For

A 360 cycle touches every group in the review process:

• HR Leaders setting the purpose, approving rater lists, and protecting rater anonymity.
• Managers approving nominations and using the results in the review conversation.
• Employees completing a self-assessment and receiving a synthesized summary.
• Executives running a full review cycle without a supporting team.

Related Templates

Multi-rater feedback works best alongside the rest of the review cycle:

• Annual Performance Review Template — for combining 360 results with the manager’s own assessment
• Employee Self-Appraisal Template — for the self-assessment that should be completed independently first
• Performance Improvement Plan Template — for turning a consistent feedback theme into a formal plan

Download the Free 360 Feedback Questionnaire Template

Download the editable 360 feedback questionnaire and customize the competencies, rating scale, rater rules, and participant message for your organization.

The template includes:

• The developmental versus evaluative decision, with what each produces
• Rater selection rules and a rater approval log
• The message to send participants, written out in full
• A five-point rating scale with a “Not able to assess” option
• 20 rated statements across five competency groups
• A separate statement set for people managers
• Start, Stop, Continue, and one thing open questions
• Synthesis guidance and a results summary table

Both an editable Word file and a print-ready PDF are included in the download.

Run 360 Feedback Without Assembling It by Hand

A document works well for a first cycle or a small group. The work grows quickly once you are chasing responses across several rater groups, protecting anonymity thresholds manually, and reconciling every response into a summary by hand.

In PerformSpark, reviewer sets are configurable per employee and visibility settings control which responses are shared and which stay with HR and the manager. Multi-rater responses are summarized against the employee’s goals and competencies, so the manager reads a synthesis rather than reconciling every response individually, and the themes that emerge can be carried into a development plan.