What is a self evaluation?

A self evaluation, or self performance review, is an appraisal of your own strengths and weaknesses. It aims to find out whether you have reached your goals, the skills you acquired and the areas you need to improve. Employers should get their employees to conduct self evaluation tests to see the value of their employees and give feedback on their performance. It can occur by way of writing, where employees fill a questionnaire; or verbally by answering questions and their responses kept as part of their employee record.

The importance of self evaluation

The following are some of the benefits of self evaluations:

They allow employees to showcase their accomplishments

It’s important for employees to have a chance to share the successes they have enjoyed having at the company. This can include the projects they struggled to finish, but were able to push through or their contributions in helping to attain the company’s overall goals. They feel more recognised for their input and get insight into the tasks that are most fulfilling for them when they highlight their accomplishments.

They help managers assess their teams’ strengths and weaknesses

Leaders may not always have accurate details regarding the contributions their team members make during each task. Sometimes leaders also forget about various individual achievements of their juniors, especially when they happened some time ago. This is why self evaluation is necessary for employees to remind their supervisors about the contributions they have made to the success of their respective teams and the company in general. The supervisors or managers will then have current knowledge of each team member’s skills and strengths.

They motivate employees to own their mistakes and accomplishments

Employees can use their past projects and accomplishments to identify the key areas they have to work on and the skills they have mastered. Self evaluation helps them to reflect on such projects and gives them a chance to identify new opportunities where they can apply their strengths. They can also identify projects that can help them acquire and build on new skills to get better.

They assist to quantify an employee’s value

The best time to reassess an employee’s career trajectory and compensation is following their self evaluation. The process allows a manager to check whether the employee has met the essential criteria for promotion. It’s during self evaluation that employees can pinpoint the kind of value they add to the company and determine if they have showcased sufficient skills that show their readiness for additional responsibilities. This can then guide their expectations in matters regarding senior roles or higher salaries.

Tips for an effective self evaluation

The following are some of the tips you can use to make sure the process is effective:

Prepare beforehand

It’s important to plan your thoughts beforehand so that you can offer clear and concise feedback. Part of your preparation can include reminding yourself of all the important details about each of your team members. You should re-check their specific roles, their duties and how their overall performance matches up to their expected deliverables. You can have a ready itinerary that includes a full set of open ended questions fitting each employee so that you can efficiently drive the conversation. Ensure to also inform your team beforehand and give them plenty of time to prepare as well.

Make it a conversation

While you certainly need to control the talking points, you should allow each of your employees enough time to talk. Avoid making it appear as a criticism session and instead allow the employees to feel like they are having a pleasant formal conversation with you. Part of allowing the employees to have more freedom when answering your queries includes ensuring that questions don’t dominate the discussion. This will allow your team members to have more courage to discuss their strengths and weaknesses in the context of the accomplishments they have had during the review period.

Confront your employees to motivate them

Positive reinforcement is essential to keep your employees motivated to talk about their strengths and weaknesses but you should know when to limit it. Not every employee who attends the self evaluation meeting will have stellar achievements throughout the review period and you need to address their shortcomings.

Being confrontational when it is necessary will help you gauge whether there are serious issues that need to be sorted to enhance the productivity of your team members. This includes asking appropriate questions and criticising behaviour that might be holding an employee back. Format your questions and critiques in a manner that leads to practical lessons for your team members rather than appearing as accusations.

Offer a takeaway

There is a risk of employees not understanding the purpose of self evaluation if you do not guide them properly. Employees can view them as just other admin heavy tasks that they need to get done with while wasting valuable time they could have, otherwise, spent working. Remember that as professionals, your team members could already be wasting a lot of time in other types of unnecessary meetings they attend for formal purposes. This is why you need to ensure that they always have something to learn during each performance review.

There are no perfect employees and everyone can learn something new or improve on some of their old skills. There could also be things they need to change and you should be open about such lessons to improve their productivity and make the self evaluations more impactful. Build your performance reviews around key takeaways to make employees more eager to attend each time.

Change the direction

Everyone has their own way of understanding themselves and learning from their strengths and weaknesses. Adjust the self evaluation process as soon as you can to make it appropriate depending on your employees’ learning styles.

The following are some employee categories you should take into account as you think about changing how you approach performance reviews:

• Performance-prove goal-oriented. These are the employees who want to prove a particular point by performing at their best.
• Learning goal-oriented. Such employees love to learn just to obtain new knowledge and overcome challenges.
• Performance-avoid goal-oriented. Such employees fear or hate criticism and cannot take it well as they never like to appear foolish.

Lay a foundation for progress

The reason why most performance reviews have undesired results is that many managers view them as nothing more than formalities. This carries the risk of just letting the meeting proceed without a plan for offering productive feedback. Avoid cliches and vague statements like “good job“ which do not offer specific information. You should rather focus on key areas of improvement or growth and use the knowledge to motivate the employees to do better.

Self evaluation examples

The following are of examples some of the ways your employees can review themselves:

Example 1: Marketing Manager

“When I started working in the position of Marketing Manager for JJ’s Automotive, my goals were to expand our thought leadership, increase our exposure in the industry and help JJ’s get a spot amongst the industry leaders. I have worked on three goals throughout the year with my team: increasing JJ’s presence at trade shows and industry conventions, improving JJ’s visibility during industry conferences and offering improved support for our account based marketing strategy by producing research reports and personalised white papers that focus on our most-essential target accounts.

Finally, our team developed 41 research reports and white papers for our annual target accounts. The reports helped to improve our sales team’s closing rate by 20% as compared to generic sales messages. That contributed to a 41% rise in revenue generated per sale. The company’s total inbound volume, as a result of the above three strategies, has risen by 88% as compared to this time the previous year.“

Example 2: Customer Service Representative

“I successfully managed to offer fast and efficient customer service within the past year that I have been employed at JJ’s automotive company. However, I was not able to attain my targeted sales numbers and this offers me an opportunity to improve my upselling for the coming year. With a goal of continuous professional development, this year I aim to:

• Raise my up-selling rate from 5% to 7%
• Complete a sales training course
• Reach a first-call resolution rate of at least 96%
• Obtain a 96% customer satisfaction score by offering stellar services
• Finish a technical training course based on our business/products

The thing I enjoy most as a Customer Service Representative for JJ’s Automotive is connecting with clients and assisting them to my level best. The genuine passion I have gained for our products and brand has helped me become more proud of representing the company each time I pick up the phone to talk to a client. It’s my goal to build up my experience for a managerial role and better share the passion I have for JJ’s products and help to grow a world class customer care team.”