Self-Appraisal: What is it, Importance & How to Write.

Introduction

“Man know thy self”. This is a popular phrase by Socrates, one of the greatest philosophers that ever lived. Socrates’ statement is a clarion call for self-knowledge as the bedrock for a clear understanding of one’s self, as an effective tool for self-development and the benefit of the larger society at large.

It is on this basis the concept of self-appraisal comes to play. This concept describes the action where an individual or employee evaluates their actions or performance as it relates to work or their personal life.

In the workplace, self-appraisals are when employees are allowed to gauge their performance, strengths, or weakness against certain agreed and already communicated benchmarks provided by their employers.

Self-appraisals are usually, part of an employee’s performance evaluation conducted by employers. If you are tasked with carrying out performance appraisals or self-performance reviews, this article would show you the importance of a self-appraisal and how to write one, with valid examples.

What is Self-Appraisal?

Simply put, self-appraisal is the ability to check yourself, usually against certain parameters you have set for yourself to see how much progress you have made. It entails you monitoring your strengths and weaknesses to identify areas where you need improvement, in a bid to put you in charge of your development.

In the workplace, a self-appraisal focuses on showing your work performance over a certain period and is usually included in the annual performance evaluation of annual performance evaluation.

The essence of this is to effectively help you focus on your career goals in sync with your employer’s goal and mission. Being honest and objective about it would help you improve effectively in your chosen career path.

During your self-appraisal, you would write down your accomplishments, and key performance indicators highlighting the success levels of each one. You would show how you overcame obstacles or challenges encountered, how your contribution benefited your organization and areas where your employers help you grow.

Importance of Self-Appraisal

Most employees perceive the self-appraisal exercise as an unnecessary and cumber exercise, mostly because they do not understand the aim and objectives, so it is mostly perceived as a witch-hunting exercise.

However, this is not true because it is one of the effective processes that can drive you towards achieving your goals effectively. The self-appraisal process is vital for the following reasons:

Instills Ownership Culture

Self-appraisal moves an employee from the role of the audience to a player in the scheme of things. This sense of ownership invokes the self-appraisal process and makes them more deliberate in their actions as a result.

Creates Clarity Between the Employers and Employees

The major cause of friction between line managers and employees is a lack of understanding. Most times, a manager is saying one thing and the employee is hearing a different thing. Even managers who work closely with their team have difficulty understanding the employee’s perspectives.

These conflicting views are usually evident when there is a performance review meeting. Self-appraisals help to create clarity and eliminate any ambiguity in lines of communication.

It shows an employee’s strong points and weaknesses and this would help you to understand their actions clearly and treat them more favorably as you now have a better understanding of their perspective.

It Drives Employee Motivation

Employee motivation is triggered when employees are empowered to evaluate their actions/performance. This shows them that their perspectives are important what they think and feel truly matters as it requires mindful engagement from every employee.

It is also a way to gain insight into the personal drive and standards employees have set for themselves.

Read – Employee Happiness: Definition, Measurements & Optimization

It Opens The Lines of Communication

Communication between line managers and subordinates is improved with self-appraisals because it’s no longer one-way communication but a two-way interaction. The self-appraisal process creates a two-way conversation between an employer and employee and enhances the overall performance of the workforce while illuminating the employee’s areas of strength and weaknesses.

This interaction is essential to an effective performance management process and self-appraisals are one of the major drivers for this kind of work relationship.

Fosters a Healthy Employer-Employee Relationship

Self-appraisals improve the working relationship between employers and employees. It promotes active communication and a healthy friction-free interaction between both parties. This encourages positive energy and synergy that allows for better teamwork and collaboration in the workplace.

Career Development

The road map for an employee’s career path is illuminated by the self-appraisal process. Employees actively recognize their areas of strength and weaknesses without any resistance compared to when someone else points them out.

Areas, where they need further training, are made clear to them, they can understand areas where they would thrive the most, and identify areas where they struggle. This can allow their line managers to place them in roles where they will flourish with ease and help their professional and career development trajectory within an organization. An employee’s self-appraisal is an opportunity to discuss with their manager’s accomplishments, the challenges they are currently experiencing, and what they need from the management to perform better.

Self-appraisals can undoubtedly help an employee progress in their chosen career path.

Benefits of Self-Appraisal

Self-appraisal is beneficial to employees, employers, and generally individuals.

For employees, self-appraisals can help them achieve the following:

Glean insights into their innate strength and character’s flaws or weaknesses
Be actively engaged in the appraisal process
The illumination provided by the self-appraisal builds their confidence and increases their feeling of self-worth
Identify training needs required to help them achieve their goals
Be more accountable and responsible for their growth
Be motivated to learn new skills.

When employees are heard and acknowledged through the self-appraisal process, they are more likely to be open to feedback and constructive criticism without being defensive.

Alongside this, it gives the employee freedom to express themselves which invariably eliminates micromanagement from line managers. Employees who take part in self-appraisals are free to decide how they structure their responsibilities, which makes them more committed, loyal, and productive.

Benefits of self-evaluation and assessment in the workplace for managers:

On the part of the managers, self-appraisal creates insight into an employee’s perception of their work and their place in the team. It clears the air on any misunderstanding and they learn what motivates their employees. This is a great tool for managing employees productively, as knowledge of what drives them makes it easy to lead them.

With this insight, managers can incentivize employees based on their unique drivers or triggers into better performance and also create or assign employees to tasks where they will thrive effortlessly. An atmosphere of trust and effective employee engagement is created in the workplace through self-appraisal, and this is the bedrock of success for any organization.

Self-appraisal is a regular occurrence in our everyday life, whether consciously or unconsciously. When practiced intentionally and consistently, it becomes an effective tool for learning and growth.

This practice gives you insight into your behavior, and actions and helps you understand areas, where you are at your best effortlessly, and also, helps your personal growth.

This is also in line with the saying by American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John Dewey, “We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.”

How Are Self-Appraisal Goals Filled?

To carry out your self-appraisal process effectively, it is important to set self-performance goals. The best way to do this is to use the SMART method. This technique makes it easy to monitor and measure your progress.

The smart method helps you create goals that are:

Specific: Your goals should be specific, and easy to understand. Including key details in your goal will make it specific.
Measurable: Goals should include clear and measurable metrics that make it easy to gauge progress levels. This can help you know when a goal is successful.
Attainable: Goals must be realistic and attainable to help you stay motivated. Moreso, these goals should be easy to accomplish using existing resources.
Relevant: Your goals should be relevant, and align with your personal and professional goals and the goals of your company.
Time-based: Goals should be time-based and have a specific timeline for completion that you can work towards.

You can use the SMART method to set goals based on the various areas of your work, like productivity, soft and hard skills, training, education, and more.

You should also set goals that address any weaknesses you documented in your self-appraisal review. This lets your employer see how much you are and that you’re committed to becoming better at your job and contributing to your organization’s development.

Now that we have addressed the methods, the next step is to itemize the goals. Some of the goals you decide on can include:

Productivity Goals

These are tasks and results you want to accomplish at your job. Try to think of productivity goals that can amplify your efforts and impact your work positively.

Skill Goals

You can also set new skills and goals relevant to the responsibility that you want to acquire. These skills could include problem-solving, communication, public speaking, analytical skills, and more.

Learning and Development Goals

You can also set goals to enroll in beneficial training or educational programs. These learning programs can include visionary leadership or in-house training programs specific to your company.

Achievement-Based Goals

You can also set goals based on key achievements recognized in the organization you work for. To set these types of goals, select a company achievement that you want to earn and outline tasks you can complete to earn it.

The benefits of setting these goals are many and they include the following:

Keeping you motivated
Helping you to be accountable
Displaying your passion or drive for self-improvement.

Steps to Writing a Self-Appraisal

You can use corporate rules to structure your self-appraisal and focus on your achievements instead of your shortfalls. Consider these shortfalls and opportunities for improvement and request training that can help you overcome them.

You can adopt the following suggestions when writing your self-appraisal:

1. Find out the purpose of the appraisal by asking your manager.

The knowledge of what it would be used for on completion is important before you begin.

Will this appraisal have a significant impact on your performance review?
Will it be a parameter for deciding whether you get a raise or a promotion?
Will it be shown to other executives and managers to see?

2. Share your accomplishments.

Sharing your accomplishments would help, however, strike a balance by not focusing too much or too little on your accomplishments. While you are doing this, take note of the goals you set and the effectiveness with which you achieved them, and don’t hesitate to use concrete examples.

3. Acknowledge your shortcomings.

Recognize your flaws and take responsibility by apologizing for them. Use words like “I would like to develop more in….” so as not to hang yourself.

4. Get their attention.

This can be done by describing your role, the requirements to fill this role that you already possess, ways in which you achieved your goals, and the steps you would take to meet or exceed your goals subsequently.

5. Be professional.

Don’t exaggerate your success or use bogus words, make sure you go straight to the point and your document is scanned for grammatical errors or typos before submission.

6. Request what you need to help you attain new heights.

Inform your employers of the requirements they would need to provide to aid you to attain new levels of success. If you want to switch roles, ask for responsibilities in those areas specifically.

If there are aspects of your career that you are more interested in, ask how you may participate in those responsibilities more in the upcoming year. Don’t mince words, if you need funds to pay for a course that would be relevant to the business ask for it politely.

Conducting a self-appraisal and implementation survey might not always be easy to accomplish. This is where Formplus can help. We offer a free complete employee satisfaction survey template that will help you and your employees learn what is and isn’t working in your workplace.

Our on-demand customizable survey templates can be tweaked to include any aspect you want to include and you can use the data from this survey to garner insights into any challenges your employees might be facing and encourage self-reflective practices.

With premium features like private forms, storage integrations, analytics, and workflows, you can do so much more with Formplus online forms.

Here are some self-appraisal templates from Formplus that you can download for free and tweak to suit your unique needs:

With these templates, you and your employees will be able to prepare effortlessly and adequately for your performance review – with the extra benefit of consistency in the style and form of your self-appraisal templates.

If you do have any additional questions that you would like to include in the template, you are of course more than welcome to modify it.

Self-Appraisal Examples

In designing self-appraisal forms, you can split the questions into categories for clarity.

For example:

Job description

How would you describe your responsibilities?
Have your responsibilities evolved over time
Do you take on other tasks, and if so, which?
Is there anything in your role that you would like to change, and if so, how would you do it?
What can your line manager do to help you be better in your job?
What areas does your department need improvement in?

Performance vs achievements

What steps have you taken to fulfill your responsibilities?
Can you say that you have been successful during this period?
What do you feel you could have done better?
In what ways do you believe you have contributed to our department during this period?
What are your core strengths?
In which areas do need improvement?

Objectives

What objectives have you achieved during this period?
Which areas did you fall short and why?
What objectives would you suggest or include for the next period?
Do you think you require help or extra resources to attain these objectives?

Professional development

What training programs have you participated in?
Are there any areas you would like to develop?
Do you require extra resources or training to do your job?
What could your line manager do to assist you in meeting your professional development goals?

Conclusion

Self-appraisal is an effective tool for evaluating your abilities in other to further hone them to achieve your personal and organizational goals. To do this successfully you must set SMART objectives and goals.

Creating a self-appraisal form can be a lot of work and to help with the next self-appraisal, sign up with Formplus for free to create your preferred survey form with our easy drag-and-drop form builder.