Peer feedback
Peer feedback examples and questions, with a peer review template
Peer feedback examples for collaboration, communication, reliability and cross-team work, the questions to ask peers in a 360 or after a project, a do and don’t list, anonymity and bias guardrails, and a peer review template to download.
By the CLEAR Talent team10 min read
Key takeaways
- A useful peer comment names the situation, the behaviour and its effect. Without all three, it is an impression rather than feedback.
- Ask peers only about what they can observe: collaboration, communication, reliability and how someone works across teams — not goals they never saw.
- Project-based peer feedback, collected while the work is fresh, is usually more specific than a once-a-year request.
- Anonymity only holds with a minimum number of responses per group. Set the threshold and tell raters what it is before they start.
- Peer input is evidence for the manager’s judgement, not a vote. Read it for themes, not for the single harshest comment.
Colleagues see things a manager rarely does: who unblocks others, who goes quiet when a deadline slips, who explains a decision so the next team can act on it. That is why peer feedback earns a place in reviews and 360s. It is also why it so often disappoints. Asked to comment on a colleague, most people write “great to work with” or nothing at all, because nobody showed them what a useful comment looks like.
This guide gives peer feedback examples you can adapt, grouped by the four situations peers see most clearly: collaboration, communication, reliability and cross-team work. It then sets out the questions to ask peers in a 360 or at the end of a project, what to do and avoid when writing a comment, the guardrails that keep peer input fair, and a peer review template to download. Every example is hypothetical; rewrite it around something you actually saw.
What peer feedback is for
Peer feedback is input from colleagues who work alongside someone rather than above or below them. In a 360 it sits next to the manager’s view, any direct reports and the person’s own self-assessment; on its own, it is often gathered at the end of a project from the people who were on it.
Its value is coverage. A manager sees outcomes and the parts of the work that reach them. Peers see the work in progress: the hand-offs, the shared document at 6pm, the meeting where a disagreement was handled well or badly. Good peer review comments add that evidence to a review. Weak ones add noise — a popularity score, or one bad week remembered in detail.
Glossary: what is a performance appraisal, and where peer input fits
How to write a peer review comment
One structure covers almost every comment, positive or critical. Describe the situation, the behaviour you saw and the effect it had, then add what you would like to see more or less of.
Situation
Anchor the comment in a specific piece of work or moment: “During the Q3 pricing review…” is checkable; “generally” is not.
Behaviour
Say what the person did or said, as a camera would have recorded it. Leave out guesses about motives and labels such as “lazy” or “brilliant”.
Effect
Explain what happened as a result for you, the team or the customer. The effect is what turns a remark into something the person can weigh.
Next
Finish with one thing to keep doing or one thing to try. A single suggestion gets acted on; a list of five gets filed.
Peer feedback examples by scenario
Each scenario has two strengths and two development comments. Swap in the real project, meeting or hand-off; a comment that could be about anyone helps no one.
Examples
Peer feedback examples to adapt
| Example comment | Type |
|---|---|
| Collaboration | |
| When we split the onboarding redesign, you checked in on my half before your own was finished. That meant we caught the clash in the welcome emails a week before launch. | Strength |
| In the retro, you credited the support team by name for the fix they found. They asked to be involved in the next project as a result. | Strength |
| On the data migration, decisions were made in your one-to-ones with the vendor and reached the rest of us afterwards. Bringing one of us into those calls would have saved two rounds of rework. | Development |
| When I disagreed with the test plan in the stand-up, the conversation ended there. I would find it easier to raise concerns if we picked them up straight after the meeting. | Development |
| Communication | |
| Your one-page summary of the policy change meant our team could answer customer questions on day one without reading the full document. | Strength |
| You said early that the deadline was at risk and offered two options. That gave us time to agree a smaller first release instead of missing the date. | Strength |
| Your project updates are thorough, but the decision you need from us is usually near the end. Leading with the ask would get you faster answers. | Development |
| In the client workshop, technical terms went unexplained and two attendees followed up with me afterwards. A quick check of the audience first would help. | Development |
| Reliability | |
| Every hand-off from you this quarter came with notes on what was done and what was open. I have never had to chase you for context. | Strength |
| When you could not make the Friday deadline, you told me on Tuesday and suggested who could cover. That is the kind of warning that keeps a project on track. | Strength |
| Twice this quarter, actions you took in our planning meeting were still open at the next one with no update. A short note when something slips would let me plan around it. | Development |
| Review requests to you often wait several days. If you are at capacity, saying so would let me ask someone else rather than hold the release. | Development |
| Cross-team work | |
| You took time to learn how finance closes the month before proposing the new invoicing step, and their team adopted it without pushback. | Strength |
| When operations raised a problem with our release, you joined their call the same day rather than replying by email. It turned a complaint into a joint fix. | Strength |
| Requests to the legal team from our side arrive at short notice and without the background they need. A standard brief would make the hand-over smoother. | Development |
| In the shared planning session, our team’s priorities were presented as fixed. Asking what the other teams needed first would make the trade-offs easier to agree. | Development |
All examples are hypothetical. Select the table to paste it into a spreadsheet, or download it below.
Notice what the development comments leave out: no verdict on the person, no “always” or “never”, and nothing the writer did not see first-hand.
Peer performance review questions
Peer questions should stay on ground peers can see. A handful of rating items plus two or three open-text prompts is enough; the full bank of peer, manager, upward and self-assessment questions is in our 360 guide.
- Rating items
- Follows through on commitments made to colleagues. Shares information others need without being asked. Raises concerns early and directly. Works effectively with people outside their own team. Give each a “not observed” option.
- Open-text questions
- What is the most helpful thing this person does for you or the team? What is one thing they could do differently that would make working with them better? What strength might others overlook?
- Project-based questions
- What did this person contribute that the project would have missed without them? Where did a hand-off with them work well, or not? What would you want them to do the same or differently on the next project together?
Guide: 100 example 360 feedback questions, by competency and rater
Project-based peer feedback
Annual peer requests ask people to remember a year of collaboration in one sitting, and they mostly remember the last month. Collecting peer feedback when a project closes — a launch, an audit, a migration — keeps it specific, and it reaches people who worked closely with someone for a few months but would never be nominated for an annual 360.
Keep it light: two or three questions, sent within a week or two of the project ending, to the people who were genuinely on it. The person’s manager reads the responses with the rest of the evidence when the review comes round, rather than treating each one as a separate verdict.
Peer feedback do’s and don’ts
- Do write about one thing you saw
- One specific example is worth more than a paragraph of general praise. If you have nothing specific to say about a question, choose “not observed”.
- Do include something to keep
- Strengths are feedback too. Naming what works tells the person what to protect when they change something else.
- Don’t write what you would not say
- If a comment would surprise the person, or you would not say it to them directly, rewrite it until you would.
- Don’t pass on second-hand opinions
- “People feel that…” cannot be checked or answered. Write only from your own experience and let others give their own feedback.
- Don’t comment on personality or life outside work
- Describe behaviour and its effect on the work. Remarks on character, health, age or family belong in no review.
- Don’t trade reviews
- Agreeing to rate each other well, or settling a disagreement through a form, undermines everyone’s results. Raise the disagreement directly instead.
Anonymity and bias guardrails
Peer feedback is only as fair as the process around it. These guardrails are worth settling before anyone is asked to write a comment.
- Set a minimum number of peer responses
- With two peers, an “anonymous” comment is easy to attribute. Decide the minimum before results are shown, and tell raters the number before they start.
- Balance nomination
- Employees should not pick only their friends, and managers should not pick only critics. Nomination by the employee with approval by the manager is a common balance.
- Say what the feedback will be used for
- Raters answer differently when peer input affects pay or promotion. Decide whether it is for development, evaluation or both, and say so in the request.
- Read for themes, not outliers
- One harsh comment can say more about a single bad interaction than about the person. Look for what several peers say independently.
- Watch for familiar biases
- Recency, similarity and halo effects affect peers as much as managers. Asking for a specific example behind each comment is the simplest counter.
- Remind raters about distinctive wording
- Even when ratings are pooled, a phrase or an anecdote only one person could know can identify the writer. Say so in the instructions.
A peer review template
This template works as a stand-alone peer review or as the peer section of a 360. Copy it into your own form or download it, and keep the questions you will act on.
Template
Peer review template
| Field | What to write | Filled-in example |
|---|---|---|
| Context | ||
| How you work together | The project or work you share, and how often you work together. | Same product squad for eight months; daily stand-ups and shared releases. |
| Ratings | ||
| Collaboration, communication, reliability, cross-team work | Rate each on your scale, or choose “not observed”. | Collaboration: consistently. Cross-team work: not observed. |
| Comments | ||
| Keep doing | One strength, with the situation, behaviour and effect. | Your release notes let support brief customers before every launch. |
| Do differently | One change that would make working together better, with an example. | Flag a slipping review request early so I can find another reviewer. |
| Anything else | Optional. Something specific the questions missed. | Left blank. |
The filled-in examples are hypothetical.
How CLEAR Talent collects peer feedback
In CLEAR Talent, peers are one of the rater groups in a 360°, alongside the manager, direct reports and cross-functional stakeholders. Employees nominate raters and managers approve them. Each rater scores a targeted set of competencies from your framework on a rating scale you control, with optional written evidence, and a 360 can run on any cadence — including after a project.
Responses are anonymised within each rater group, minimum-rater thresholds are enforced and outliers flagged, so managers see aggregated group data rather than who rated what. The report brings together strengths, blind spots and development priorities, and suggests an individual development plan. Between 360s, colleagues can send kudos tagged to the competency or value the work showed, and those kudos sit with the rest of the period’s evidence when the review opens.