Building Your Questionnaire

A well-designed questionnaire helps ensure that the feedback you collect is clear, relevant, and actionable.

Building your questionnaire involves defining the questions, structure, and format used to collect feedback in your project.

You can either:

• Create a new questionnaire from scratch, or
• Import an existing questionnaire from the library or a previous project

Key Steps in Building a Questionnaire from Scratch

Before creating questions, consider what information you would like to collect.

Many 360-degree feedback questionnaires focus primarily on competencies and behaviors, but questionnaires can also collect demographic information, role-related information, or other project-specific data.

Competencies: Define What You Want to Measure

Start by identifying the areas/competencies you want feedback on, such as:

• Leadership skills
• Communication
• Teamwork
• Role-specific competencies

Clear focus helps ensure your questionnaire is meaningful.

Create Behavior Questions for Each Competency

Behavior questions are rating-scale questions used to calculate competency scores and averages in the resulting reports. Responders answer these questions by selecting a rating on the scale you have chosen (for example, 1–5 or Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree).

For each competency, add one or more behavior questions that reflect the behaviors or attributes you want to measure.

Effective behavior questions should be short statements that:

• Are clear and easy to understand
• Focus on observable behaviors
• Are relevant to the Subject’s role
• Measure a single behavior or concept at a time

Examples:

• Communicates clearly and effectively
• Demonstrates sound judgment
• Follows through on commitments

Define Rating Scale

The rating scale determines how Responders will evaluate each behavior question.

Panoramic Feedback supports a variety of rating scales. You can customize both the number of rating points (e.g., 1–5, 1–7, or 1–10) and the labels used on the scale (e.g., Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree). Choose a scale that best matches the type of feedback you would like to collect.

The selected scale should align with the wording of your behavior questions.

Using a consistent rating scale throughout the questionnaire helps ensure that results are reliable, easy to interpret, and comparable across competencies.

Add Narrative Comments

Include open-ended questions to capture written feedback. These questions can be placed within sections and/or at the end of the questionnaire.

Comments often provide:

• Context behind ratings
• Specific examples
• Additional insights and suggestions

Choice and Information-Gathering Questions

Questionnaires may also include questions designed to collect information rather than evaluate competencies or behaviors.

These questions are placed in a separate General Section outside of Competency areas. As a result, their responses are collected and reported separately and do not contribute to competency scores, averages, or other rating calculations.

Examples include:

• Radio-button questions
• Dropdown selection questions
• Single scale questions
• Narrative comments (multi-line text fields)
• Single-line text fields

These questions can be used to gather demographic, organizational, or project-specific information, such as:

• Department or business unit
• Location
• Length of time working with the Subject
• Frequency of interaction with the Subject
• Other information relevant to the assessment

Reviewing Your Questionnaire

Before launching your project, review:

• Question clarity and wording
• Structure and organization
• Consistency of rating scales
• Placement of comment questions
• Accuracy of information-gathering questions
• Overall questionnaire length

Previewing the questionnaire helps ensure a smooth experience for Responders.

Tips for Building an Effective Questionnaire

• Keep the questionnaire focused and concise
• Avoid overly complex, ambiguous, or duplicate questions
• Ensure questions are relevant to the Responders
• Balance rating questions with opportunities for written comments
• Collect only information that will be useful to your project
• Keep the questionnaire reasonably short (ideally no more than 50 questions) to help reduce responder fatigue
• Test the questionnaire before launching