The management wants to know such things as:

All of these questions, and more, can be answered through 360 evaluations. An employee who likes to work within groups, for instance, will actively seek out the aid and company of others and will, in turn, offer to help them if he or she perceives that they need it. Likewise, an evaluator can observe the way an employee behaves when asked to do a certain task or work with a certain colleague in a certain place.

People might be able to tell if a fellow employee is thinking about leaving the job. The individual may mention it in passing or say things that would appear to imply so much. If this turns out to be the case, employers want to know why the person is dissatisfied and what could be done to make him or her want to stay.

The way in which people are trained to do their various tasks has a great impact on how well they perform. If people are improperly trained, one wants to know specifically how, and what needs to be corrected.

The most valuable thing about 360 evaluations is that they are conducted anonymously. Anonymity can enable the management to learn things they could not otherwise find out. In addition to the signals that people deliberately give out, there are those that they transmit involuntarily and unconsciously, and a trained person can easily spot these unconscious signals and figure out what they mean or at least could mean. Knowing that something is wrong is the first step towards fixing it, and knowing where things are going well is the first step towards making them even better still.