Why use an self-assessment template?
Struggling to know where to begin with your questions? Up against it in terms of the time you have available to you?
It can be pretty challenging when you’re trying to plan an employee performance review and need to weigh up the value of using other tools such as self-assessment surveys to better understand your workforce, particularly when you’re hard pressed for time.
That’s why we’ve created our employee self-assessment template to help you. Similar to our other HR survey templates, this can be used as it is or easily customised to suit your needs.
What is employee self-assessment?
The idea behind employee self-assessment is to get staff to analyse their own roles and working styles, often included but not limited to their individual strengths and weaknesses, while also considering what they think is going well and not so well.
Viewed as a more engaging way of carrying out a staff appraisal, the employee self-assessment template is seen as an ideal way of getting staff more involved in the process of looking at their own performance and in the setting of their job and career goals.
By helping to expand the amount of information covered in a traditional performance review, the employee self-assessment is also a perfect way of giving managers insight into details they might not have known or gain visibility into a project or staff achievement that they may not have considered as important, but their employee does.
Along with other tools in the employee survey mix, the self-assessment template should be considered as another valuable way of helping to keep your staff happy, engaged and motivated during their employment journey with your organisation.
Benefits of employee self-assessment
There are a number of key benefits to be gained from incorporating employee self-assessment into your staff appraisal process.
It can help employees to recognise their own strengths and weaknesses
As well as providing the opportunity to give their ‘side of the story’ the employee self-assessment is useful for staff, as the process of reviewing their own performance before their main appraisal enables individuals to better identify their own individual strengths and weaknesses.
It’s more engaging for your workforce
Rather than simply being the “recipient” of feedback from their manager, incorporating staff self-assessment into the mix helps give employees a greater voice, and can help them to become more active and engaged in the future direction of their role.
It can flag up any differences before the main review meeting
It’s inevitable in some cases that a manager and an employee may have different impressions about an employee’s performance.
Subsequently, an employee self-appraisal can help highlight differences in perception that might not otherwise have surfaced, allowing managers to prepare appropriately for the work review meeting and ensure a fairer and more fruitful discussion as a result.
It can help engender a better manager/employee relationship
Although managers and employees may have different opinions about the value of contribution they believe is being made, by acknowledging these different perceptions, steps can be made to ensure a better working relationship and more understanding between the two parties.
How to use employee self-assessment
As an employer, if you’re to get the greatest value from running an employee self-assessment program, you need to think about how you will implement it, as well as how to best use the insight you will gain.
Implementing self-assessment
Besides the self-assessment and appraisal questions that you will asking as part of your overall employee appraisal, it’s essential that you give employees clear guidelines, so they have time to prepare and get together the necessary information, particularly for the self-assessment part.
Here are six things you can ask your staff to think about before they complete their self-assessment.
Be specific
Your employees need to be as precise as they can be in their feedback, as opposed to vague statements such as: “I always provide a great customer experience” or “I met my sales quota”. For example, a statement such as: “On average I consistently exceeded my sales quota by an average of 18%” – is much more valuable.
Give them advance notice to set aside enough time
Employers and managers should give their employees a due date and parameters for their self-evaluation several weeks in advance. If this is followed, it should give team members sufficient time to review their work and gather all the necessary data and examples that they need.
Look at their job description
If your staff are a bit unsure about what they should be evaluating you need to refer them back to their job description. By looking at this they should be able to identify those duties they’ve excelled in, skills they’ve enhanced and job functions they could perform better in. This could also be beneficial in enabling them to think about how such improvements could help them develop further in their roles.
How their efforts contribute to organisational goals
If employees are to communicate their value, they need to be able to demonstrate how their efforts and achievements contribute towards company objectives.
Employ the STAR method
Encourage your employees to use the STAR method when writing their self-evaluations to help demonstrate the impact of their work. Using this approach, employees briefly describe the Situation or Task, the Action they took to accomplish it and the Results they achieved. This simple way of structuring a self-assessment is useful as it highlights the specific actions the employee took (not the team as a whole) and what the final outcome of their contribution was.
Identify next steps
While a large part of a self-performance review focuses on looking backwards and reflecting on the best achievements, it’s also a great opportunity to set goals and intentions for the future. Employees should finish their evaluation by sharing how they’ll apply their strengths to improving outcomes, while also identifying how they’ll improve on their weaknesses through skill-building, education and adopting better habits.
How to use the insights gained
When it comes to the subject of insights and how you will use them, you need to think about some of the related activities you could be running alongside from 360 feedback surveys to your employee appraisal interviews, and how this could benefit your overall staff review process.
For example, when combined with feedback from 360 surveys and employee appraisals, the insights you gain from through self-assessment could help you to better evaluate your overall personnel review processes and lead to improvements across any number of areas. This could include anything from to ensuring better training and support for staff to introducing new processes that will give staff a clearer development and career pathway within their organisation.
Similarly, you could also think about how it applies to an employee’s wider employment journey with you, from their initial onboarding and training to their ongoing performance, retention and exit from your organisation. In this scenario, feedback from employee self-assessment alongside the insight gained from other staff surveys could result in internal changes brought in to help improve overall employee engagement, motivation and contentment levels throughout the business.
