Guide · Choosing
360 review vs peer feedback vs engagement survey: which one answers your question?
Choose a survey based on the question you need to answer. Peer feedback looks at how a team works together, a 360 review at how one leader lands, and an engagement survey at how people across an organization experience their work. Each is built for its own question, so using one for another’s job gives results that are hard to act on. This guide compares the three in a table, then by the situations where each fits.
About 8 minutes to read · Sources at the foot · Last reviewed
The one-line versions
- Peer feedback (a team survey): one team rates each other on observable behavior, and the team talks about the result together. The unit is the team.
- 360 review (a Leadership 360): many people around one person — reports, peers, sometimes a manager — describe what working with that person is like. The unit is the individual.
- Engagement survey: everyone in the organization answers the same questions about their own work and their own team, once, and results are reported as group numbers. The unit is the organization and its units.
A 180 is a 360 with one direction removed — usually the reports rating the manager without peers or self. A pulse is an engagement survey run short and often. Neither changes the row it belongs to below.
Side by side
| Row | Peer feedback / team survey | 360 review | Engagement survey |
|---|---|---|---|
| Question it answers | How does this team work, as its members see it? | How does this person land on the people around them? | How do people across the organization experience their work and their teams? |
| Who rates whom | Everyone on the team rates everyone, including themselves | 3–25 colleagues rate one subject; the subject predicts what they will say | Everyone rates their own experience; nobody rates a person |
| Typical size | 3–12 people | One subject, several raters | Whole organization, in headcount bands |
| What is rated | Specific behaviors over a recent window, plus team climate | The subject's leadership behaviors and their effect | Team climate, engagement, intent to stay, likelihood to recommend |
| What comes back | Team pack (group numbers), a private note per person, a debrief agenda | A private report for the subject; themes, never verbatim comments | Group numbers with intervals for organization, unit, manager; themes from open text |
| Who sees individual answers | No account can read another person's ratings or comments as written. A named facilitator, if the team has one, also reads each member's private note and sees raters named beside rating patterns | No one sees individual ratings, including the subject; results appear only as aggregates above a floor. A facilitator the leader names reads the confidential note as written | No one at the organization reads an individual's answers |
| Smallest reportable group | 3 raters for a person's scores; 5 for question-level detail. Other results have their own minimums | 3 raters, or nothing is shown; 5 for question-level detail and the overall questions | 5 respondents per group by default (an organization may raise it); groups that could be worked out from others are hidden too |
| Compared with last time | Each run after the first is compared with the team's previous one, scale by scale; a change is marked only when it is reliable | A review that follows the subject's earlier one is compared with it, behavior by behavior; a change is marked only when it is reliable, and the raters also look back at the earlier review's growth areas | Each cycle is compared with the previous one, group by group, where the group and the questions match; a change is marked only when it is reliable |
| Asking the same people again | About six weeks after release, a team lead can open a short pulse on the team's commitments | Once, 60 to 90 days after release, the subject can ask the people who answered two to four questions on the behaviors they chose to work on, and sees whether each moved | No follow-up of its own; the next cycle asks again |
| Follow-up built in | A debrief agenda (about two hours) and a pack that proposes two commitments; the team can add its own. About six weeks after release, a team lead can open a short pulse | A brief, commitment tracking, and a plan of about an hour for sharing back with the people who gave feedback | Group reports. A manager whose group was published, in a cycle that let managers read their own group, gets a 30-minute guided team conversation. No debrief pack |
| Developmental or evaluative | Developmental. Facets does not add survey feedback to performance records | Developmental. The subject decides whether to share a summary | Organizational; not about individuals |
| How it is priced (in Facets) | Per run, per team | Per leader | Per cycle, by headcount band |
Minimums count completed responses, not team size, and each kind of result has its own. Who can see what lists every viewer, and its reporting minimums table lists every threshold.
Which one you actually need
“Something is off on my team”
Peer feedback. The information you need is inside the team — who goes to whom, whether people agree about what is going wrong, and how each person’s self-view compares with how teammates see them. A 360 on the lead alone answers a different question; an engagement survey will show the team’s climate score but cannot produce the conversation. The debrief is the deliverable. How to run it.
“I want to know how I land as a leader”
A 360. It is about one person, it needs enough raters that no single voice can be recovered, and it should be private to the subject — the point is self-knowledge, not a file. Ask two things of any 360 before using it: whether raters’ comments are ever shown verbatim (they should not be), and whether the subject is asked to predict their raters’ answers before seeing them, which turns a score into a gap worth talking about. Why the prediction matters.
“Leadership wants a number for the whole company”
An engagement survey. It is the only one of the three designed to be summed. What to insist on: error bars with every mean (a difference of 0.3 between two teams of six is noise), a reporting floor, and — the part that is easiest to skip — protection against recovering a hidden small group by subtracting the visible ones from the total. Read the thresholds guide before choosing a vendor.
“We want to combine them”
Combine the instruments, not the data. Asking the same team-climate questions in the engagement survey that the team survey asks means a unit’s numbers mean the same thing wherever they came from — that is worth having. Joining the data — reading peer feedback into a manager’s file, or a 360 into a performance rating — undermines the honesty that made people answer in the first place. Keep developmental feedback apart from any evaluative record. In Facets, survey feedback is not added to performance records; the one route is the leader’s own choice, described under how the two are kept apart.
The mistakes that happen when they are confused
- The 360 rolled out as a team intervention. Twelve people each get a private report about themselves and nobody gets a shared picture of the team, so the team never talks about it together.
- The engagement survey read as a manager league table. A unit mean of 3.6 against another’s 3.9, with no interval and no headcount, becomes a ranking of managers. The numbers are not precise enough for that, and once managers know they are used that way, next year’s answers tend to shift.
- Peer feedback as a performance input. The first time a peer rating affects someone’s review, the rating stops being about behavior and starts being about alliances, and later runs measure politics more than behavior.
- A pulse instead of a decision. Asking monthly and acting annually teaches people that answering changes nothing.
How the three are built in Facets
Facets offers all three, built on one questionnaire and one set of privacy rules, so the figures below are the ones the products use.
- The team survey is peer feedback: 3–12 people rate each other on 16 behaviors across 8 dimensions, rate themselves, predict how they were rated, and answer 34 core statements about how it feels to work on the team (a few more when the team is remote or works across other teams; the extended dimensions are a team setting). Results are a team pack, a private note each, and a two-hour debrief agenda. Priced per run. For teams.
- The Leadership 360 invites 3–25 colleagues; nothing is shown to the leader below 3 raters, question-level detail needs 5, and comments are never quoted. The leader predicts their raters’ answers first. Priced per leader. The Leadership 360.
- The engagement cycle asks everyone the same 34 core climate statements about their own team, plus 6 questions about their own work and the organization and 2 optional written ones. It reports group numbers with 95% intervals for the organization, each unit and each manager, and hides any group under 5 respondents, along with any group whose answers could be worked out from the others. Priced per cycle, by headcount band. Engagement cycles.
- The manager tools are a separate record a leader keeps for their reports. Survey feedback does not move into it automatically. The one route is a Leadership 360 summary that the person it is about chooses to send; if the recipient attaches it to that person’s record, it is used when drafting their assessment. For leaders · Every price on one page.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a 360 review and peer feedback?
Is an engagement survey the same as a 360?
Can 360 feedback be used for performance reviews?
Which is better for a small team: a 360 or a team survey?
How often should each be run?
Sources and notes
Definitions follow conventional usage in the organizational-feedback literature and vendor documentation reviewed in 2026; the Facets specifics are read from the published instrument and pricing pages. The point about 360s and pay is practitioner consensus rather than a single cited study; the research page discusses what feedback does and does not do.
Pick the survey that matches your question.
A team of 3–12 people that wants to work better together: the team survey. A leader who wants to know how they land: the Leadership 360. An organization that wants a picture across groups: the engagement cycle.