Performance Review Self-Assessment — Be Effective
The self-assessment is part of the official performance review where you fill in your evaluation of your own performance, which is later compared and discussed when the manager delivers their review.
Whether your manager follows the guidance for an amazing performance review or not, you’d still need to fill out your own self-assessment.
Why self-assessment?
- Companies request it to compare the manager’s evaluation with the direct’s. It encourages more future alignment and a clearer message for the direct in case of differences
- Reflect on your own challenges, failures, growth, accomplishments and overall impact
- Update your resume as a byproduct
Does the self-assessment matter?
Not all companies use this practice. Some only let managers evaluate their direct reports and some request the self-assessment without any guidance on what to do with them, as if they are merely copy-catting other companies.
In others, the manager does consider the self-assessment before writing their own, which is a great opportunity to share as much information as possible about your output and outcome, because they can lead to more responsibility, new learnings, higher compensation or promotion. Even if the manager does not read it beforehand, the discussion during the “delivery meeting” may make a difference on the outcome.
How to do the self-assessment
Start early, 10 weeks in advance, and spend about 30 minutes per week. Take notes on each topic and in the end distill the self-assessment into the company’s form.
Starting early also gives plenty of time to noticeably improve performance.
10. Previous performance review
Don’t be surprised by what was said last time, the things you needed to work on and might have forgotten all about, whether it’s the same manager or a new one.
- What you did well and not so well — will your achievements from the last time be enough this time? Did you improve on things you had to?
- Ratings you got on each section — did you improve already, or can you still improve?
- Now that you know the manager much better, does it make things from last time clearer? New angles?
- Specific objectives and goals you were supposed to achieve?
- IDP progress
9. Job description
Not every company has one and not every role.
If you do have one or if a very similar role has one, it’s easier for you to take notes and it’s likely that your manager is also using it to evaluate your performance.
- Compare its content to your tasks, responsibilities and expected behaviors, see where you stand
- If it diverged from reality, it’s an opportunity to update it
8. Resume
- Update your resume (usually people do this only when in pressing need)
- Exactly as you would tell a potential new employer about your achievements in the current job, do the same to your current employer
7. 1:1 notes
- Go over your shared or private 1:1 notes with your manager. Look for failures and what you learned, challenges you overcame, successes, remarks from the manager, and feedback given
6. Team 1:1 notes
If you’re a manager yourself, you’re responsible for the failures and successes of your entire team. You have the 1:1s with the direct reports and your general notes about the team.
- Projects the team worked on — successes, challenges and failures. For the latter prepare why they happened and how you improved and grew from them
- Directs’ failures and how your mitigated, challenges overcame, successes
- Direct’s’ growth — present how your directs grew and improved, for example from their IDP
5. Financials
- Look at the team’s budget — increased or decreased and why
- Cost reduction efforts made and the outcome
- More revenue flowing in, like unlocked deals, new features that increased revenue
4. Documents
Go over produced documents and explain their impact, for example:
- onboarding — reduced time-to-value for new hires, less effort from existing members
- reports — about usage, adoption, expenses, safety, etc.
- announcements — sharing big and small victories, encouraging positive behavior for other teams as well
- documentation, internal and external manuals — reduced support work and tickets
- “how to”s — repeatable guides for common operational issues that were not automated
- runbooks — reduced the time to repair upon incidents
- plans — how they panned out
- newsletters — communication with external and internal customers that drove new behaviors
- presentations — knowledge sharing with stakeholders
3. Email and Slack
- Almost all communication is findable in both. This includes planned and unplanned ones
- Having many direct reports, it may be easier to do per person rather than keeping all the threads in the head while going over them
- Both internal and external communications, private with you and public in channels and external parties
2. Team goals/OKRs, impact and health metrics
Here we examine output and outcome. While OKRs are often not part of the review, you can brag about having great contributions there.
- If there were measurable and time-bound goals in any framework, look at the progress
- Speed and quality metrics (e.g. DORA) and how they evolved
- Time distribution, e.g. more time for planned work, time spent on bugs
- Retention, eNPS (employee satisfaction), alerts after working hours, DevEx
- Productivity metrics such as the SPACE framework
- Alerts after working hours
- Number of severe incidents
1. Update previous steps
In case any of the topics from the previous had a significant change, update your notes.
Writing the self-assessment
Now that you have a big pile of data, you need to crunch it and adapt it to the form your company is using.
Write each item you want to mention similarly to how you’d write for your directs, without a key message. 2 sentences, a summary and an example.
- “I’ve successfully met the objective from the previous review about feedback. I gave each direct at least 1 feedback per week.”
- “I was a leading force in cost reduction. The team spends 30% less per month”
- “I retained my directs during the mass resignation period. Only 1 out of 17 left”
- “I reduced the mean time to repair from 17 hours to 2 by creating runbooks”
Bonus
- Because you’re done early, we can submit on the first day to your manager and impress them, freeing you up to other topics, while others only start
- You started early, so you could improve on things that you might have otherwise forgotten about
- You can update your resume as a result
Further details
High-resolution guidance can be found on the Manager Tools ‘ podcast.
