You are your harshest critic, but can you really appraise yourself the right way? Here's how you thoroughly aid a good and just self-appraisal.
Self-appraisal or self-evaluation mostly forms the first step in a performance management program. While this offers a great opportunity to an employee to accurately evaluate their own performance, elaborate on their achievements and areas of improvements, most of us do not do complete justice to this step. As a result, we land up misrepresenting our work by either overestimating or underestimating our efforts.
To do complete justice to oneself, an employee needs to use the art of writing with science of data. If done correctly, this exercise can provide meaningful data that can help in rewarding right attributes, plan training interventions, re assess the need for realignment with organization objectives at regular intervals and help employees in their daily and long term performance projects.
Here you will find 50 self evaluation phrases that will help you in writing a performance review for yourself.
While self-appraisals are meant to be our best friend and help us in getting a crisp clear understanding of our own work and learning, it somehow does not come on our priority at all. This could be because of
Influence of others and pre set notions such as whatever we write, managers will anyways give the score they want OR let me write only good things about me as the manager will anyways criticise OR as I am aspiring for promotion or good hike let me only write thoughts that show me in good light can also hinder the objectivity of this exercise.
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For an organization to continue succeeding it is important that all its employees precisely know what they are doing. At all times, there must be an alignment of individual efforts towards the organization objective. At each individual level there must be a sense of accountability, a will to introspect and learn and a sense of accomplishment. It is hence imperative for an employee to assess themselves correctly with supporting data points.
As an individual, it is every employee’s responsibility to do justice to the work they have done, the contributions they have made by presenting it in the best possible manner they can. We do also hear that the managers didn’t provide right or constructive feedback, didn’t gauge an employee’s efforts correctly or for that matter were not fair in their scoring – well it may be impractical to expect the managers to remember all your accomplishments and then score you. The foundation for a great review starts with writing a performance review for yourself.
As per a TriNet Survey of Millennials –
Here are the steps following which can teach you how to write self appraisal and can also help in writing a performance review for yourself.
Get in a regular habit of making your notes. You surely would not remember it all when you get down to writing your self-appraisal. Keep track of your improvements from the last feedback, the contributions you made, training you did and challenges you faced. In an ideal scenario, it would be a good practice to start maintaining a performance document in the beginning of an assessment period and record your performance under the following categories month on month.
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Do not be in a hurry to click on the ‘Submit’ button in your self-appraisal form. Working in the draft mode will allow you to read, review, amend your inputs and refer to data points. Remember presentation matters! Be sure to check on grammar, sentence formation and overall presentation of your thoughts.
Normally the tendency is to start working on self evaluation when the HR starts sending reminders. The priority then is to complete the exercise and, in an attempt, to meet the timelines – the quality of content is compromised to a great extent. The 1st two points can come handy if you are crunched on time. If you do not follow this practice, then it surely will be good to start early so that you have ample time to refer to historic data and prepare your write up.
We often don't understand how to do self appraisal assessment. There is always a dilemma while working on self-appraisals – how much self-praise is a lot? Would it look better if I am more critical of myself? Will it be considered arrogance if I write about every single achievement of mine – big or small? Well, the whole intent of self-appraisal is to provide an avenue to an employee to express and share their inputs. Utilize it to the best.
What you can probably consider is the style of writing – see what works best – paragraphs or bullet points. Would you want to make a list of small ones and describe the big achievements? Find out ways of making your data crisp yet covering all the details you want to present.
Do not under or overestimate yourself. Be realistic about scoring your work. Remember you are doing this exercise to benefiting your learning and intellectual growth first. There is no fun in over rating yourself and then having an unpleasant discussion during review stages and getting demotivated about your final rating.
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With data in place and time set aside to write self-appraisal, it is time to get creative in writing the review. You may have the best of work to write about but if you are unable to articulate your thoughts and express them in a crisp, engaging and data based manner you may see repetition of content and an excessively lengthy yet less impactful self-review.
Here we will take some commonly known functional and/or additional skills and suggest fifty self-appraisal phrases for your reference which can be used in conjunction with your project details to describe your work. Do note that these phrases will be meaningful when used along with crisp data points / supporting instances. Let us now look at a couple of self appraisal examples that can help in self evaluation for performance review.
Also Read: Effective Communication: Unlock the true power of Engagement!
Self-evaluation can be an overwhelming experience as we normally do not know how to do self appraisal assessment. You can opt for taking help of some self-help books, contact your training department for assistance and until then try this technique of looking and evaluating yourself as a third person.
But the key for this technique to work will be that you stay honest in capturing the accomplishments and improvements correctly. Taking periodic feedback from your stakeholders will also help you gather right data and aid in a constructive self-appraisal.
Remember, if you articulate and present the data in a correct, precise, and accurate manner, you will be able to do justice to your work and carve a learning and upskilling path for future growth.