Need help writing your self-assessment for a performance evaluation review?
Here are 5 points to consider.
What is a performance evaluation?
A performance evaluation is an essential tool for facilitating team communication. Managers and employees get the opportunity to assess the past and discuss future expectations. An assessment also provides an opportunity to set individual and team goals. An evaluation provides a chance to identify personal and group objectives.
Importance of self-assessments
A performance evaluation is a crucial tool for facilitating team communication. Managers and employees get the opportunity to assess the past and talk about expectations for the future during periodic evaluations. Self-assessment provides a chance to identify personal and group objectives and can equally be helpful for employees and managers. The evaluations are usually short and take less than 15 minutes to complete, which is advantageous for all involved.
For Employees:
- Employees frequently complete a self-assessment in addition to their performance review.
- It allows them to reflect on who they are as staff and identify their strengths and flaws.
- These assessments are essential for professional and personal growth, and they help employees to improve by getting feedback on their work and behavior
For supervisors:
Employees’ self-assessments offer them various benefits:
- They shed light on the employees’ perceptions of themselves about the group and the company.
- They draw attention to discrepancies or miscommunications between the manager and the employee.
- Self-assessments allow managers to hear from employees about what inspires and encourages them to perform their best work.
Self-assessments are important for employees and managers as a lever of professional growth. Despite its importance, writing a self-assessment is not an easy task. Analyzing oneself can be immensely difficult, especially when that analysis is submitted to a supervisor for review.
Best practices for writing a self-assessment
1. Be proud.
One primary goal of the self-evaluation is to highlight your accomplishments and recollect milestones in your professional development. A good self-assessment should highlight tasks and projects that highlight your best work. Connect your actions with a manager’s goals and emphasize the impact those achievements had on the whole business. If your manager wants to reach a particular goal, explain how you contributed to achieving it. Your accomplishments should relate to your company’s goals.
2. Be honest and critical.
Not only should your accomplishments be highlighted in self-evaluations, but you should also consider how you could have done better. Being truthful entails pointing out areas that need improvement or previous mistakes that served as a valuable lessons. Admitting your flaws is vital to demonstrating your ability to learn and grow. However, it’s crucial to avoid being negative in your evaluation. When criticizing the areas where you need to improve, use developmental language. Do not admit your weaknesses but say, something like: “here’s an area I want to improve on. This is what I’ve learned and what we should do moving ahead.
3. Continuously strive for growth.
Self-assessment must never become static because people are constantly adjusting, learning, and evolving. It’s crucial to remain committed to improving and educating yourself regardless of whether the year has exceeded your expectations or fallen short.
Self-assessment is a great way to show that you are not content with where you are today. Adopting a growth mindset prevents people from becoming too transfixed on their perceived failures. You must always be in a state of continuous growth. Managers will also be willing to improve and take on new things as coachability. Assessment of your goals and objectives for the coming year shows that you are not content to settle. If an employee struggles, making room for growth could improve their performance. On the other hand, a thriving employee requires opportunities for growth to prevent boredom or stagnation.
4. Track your accomplishments
It’s helpful to present detailed statistics to support your successes when talking about them in your self-evaluation. Most colleagues and managers know how you have performed, but having data to support any claim makes it more credible. Keep track of your daily and weekly accomplishments so that it is easier to determine how valuable they are to the company.
5. Be professional
Always write self-assessments professionally. This entails desisting from criticizing the boss for ineffective management or your coworkers for making your life more difficult. It also entails refraining from waxing lyrical about a boss or coworker you like. Professionalism is vital when giving either negative or good comments. Being professional means treating the appraisal as seriously as any other important task across your desk. See your self-assessment as a piece of art that evolves. Whenever you’re writing a self-assessment, use examples to support your assertions and be sure to spell- and grammar-check your documents.
A good self-assessment requires keeping things simple and using brief, unambiguous bullet points. The overall structure of your self-assessment might depend on your industry or job description.
Performance evaluations are usually conducted annually at work, helping everyone benefit from knowing where they stand and how they are doing in relation to the organization’s goals. However, it should be an ongoing process to fairly and accurately assess employees and foster a culture of continual communication and feedback.
Employees should be encouraged to offer feedback to their managers as much as their managers offer them feedback. By doing this, “recency bias” will be avoided. Additionally, it will foster a collaborative environment where staff members are encouraged to provide management with feedback.