7
min read
Manager effectiveness has a direct impact on organizational success. Explore the best practices to measure, promote and improve manager effectiveness.
7
min read
“People leave managers, not companies”,
you must have come across this famous quote by Marcus Buckingham at least once in your professional life. Even a study by Gallup corroborates the idea that 50% of employees cite a bad manager as the top reason to quit their jobs. This clearly indicates that managers play a pivotal role in ensuring a positive employee experience resulting in better performance and productivity. Invariably, promoting manager effectiveness at work has become a top priority for all organizations. Through the course of this article, we will answer all questions you might have about manager effectiveness, the best practices, common pitfalls and much more.
Table of Contents
You can understand manager effectiveness as a term that is dynamic and can have different connotations for different professionals. Put simply, manager effectiveness entails the ability of a manager to successfully achieve organizational goals while balancing employee expectations. The concept goes beyond manager efficiency, where only the inputs and outputs are concerned. Rather its importance lies in ensuring that in addition to the work being done efficiently, there is progress for both the individual and the organization at large. Effective managers are able to better lead their teams, add efficiency to the work and drive organizations to create impact.
Before jumping on to the ways to gauge and subsequently improve manager effectiveness, let’s quickly reflect on the top reasons why manager effectiveness is essential for organizational success.
Effective managers have the potential to motivate, engage and inspire their team members in a way that augments their performance. According to a study by Gallup, managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. Therefore, effective managers facilitate employee experience leading to attracting and retaining the best talent.
Managers act as a channel between the senior leadership and the employees at any organization. Effective managers play an important role in ensuring that all organizational goals are met and at the same time while promoting employee wellbeing and growth. They are better able to align organizational and employee goals to create a win-win situation.
In the VUCA world, manager effectiveness is important to adapt to the fast-changing world. Effective managers are resilient and agile in their decision making to ensure business continuity, even in the face of uncertainty.
While the importance of manager effectiveness has been established, what an effective manager should be like is still a topic of debate. Almost everyone has their own version of manager effectiveness, but there are certain traits that all effective managers share. Invariably, these should be considered as the starting point for every manager seeking to lead and influence a team to drive results. For the ease of understanding, you can consider an effective manager as someone who is:
Right from a transparent delegation of tasks to facilitating seamless coordination and collaboration between everyone, manager effectiveness involves ensuring the team works like a well-oiled machine. However, according to a survey by The Predictive Index, 30% of employees believe their manager lacks team-building skills.
Effective managers help teams achieve their goals and reach the pinnacle with adequate mentoring and coaching to facilitate subtle behavioral nudges for growth and development.
Highly effective managers have clarity of thought and expectations and are able to put them into words clearly. Communication is vital both within one’s team and when interacting externally.
Effective managers are open to listening to their team members on feedback as well as opinions on the overall culture. It could be through 1-o-1 conversations, group discussions, performance reviews, or personal interactions..
This involves acknowledging the hard work they put in, even if the results are not exactly what you expected. Additionally, recognizing, appreciating, and rewarding good work is a key trait of an effective manager.
A manager is essentially the one who shows everyone else the direction to sail in. At times, the decisions are hard and might not be ideal for some. However, effective managers are confident of their capabilities, experience, and, thus, their decisions.
Manager effectiveness requires a high-reliability quotient. This involves not only supporting and championing your team whenever they need it but also setting a good example for the organization and for others to follow.
If you are striving for success across your managerial talent, you must have a standard manager effectiveness index in place. This involves a comprehensive approach on how to measure manager effectiveness. Thus, you need to explore some key manager effectiveness metrics. Here is a list of top 5 manager effectiveness metrics that you can rely upon while building their manager effectiveness index:
You must gauge the employee engagement scores as a part of the manager effectiveness metrics. Measuring employee engagement via pulse surveys to gauge manager effectiveness is important because lower levels of engagement are the root cause of absenteeism and turnover. Even if employees stick around, unless they are completely engaged, expecting them to deliver 100% productivity might be an over expectation.
The turnover vs retention rate is an important parameter for the manager effectiveness index. The idea is to gauge the reason for leaving for every outgoing employee. A sub-metric that deserves measurement for manager effectiveness is the rate of high performer turnover. This is the turnover rate of high performers vs the turnover rate of others as a whole. Retaining high performers signals manager effectiveness while higher turnover points to the opposite. If you look closely, effective managers create an empowering work environment in which employees look forward to growing in, resulting in high retention rates.
Manager effectiveness is linked to promotions and succession planning in two ways. Firstly, you must map the rate of promotions for a particular manager with the average rate of promotions. Effective managers are likely to have greater promotion rates in an organization as great leaders nurture more leaders. Secondly, effective managers also invest their time and effort in succession planning. Thus, measuring if a manager is able to create an environment that promotes growth and nurtures a pipeline of leaders for the future is important.
How to measure manager effectiveness requires measuring employee absenteeism, i.e. the number of days employees take off from a particular team, and a comparison with the general organizational trend. In addition to quantification of absent days, the reasons for absenteeism must be explored. Effective managers breed a culture of positive mental health, wellbeing and prosperity, and promote lower absenteeism. Measuring employee absenteeism signals a manager’s ability to ensure that workload is optimized and employees feel secure and happy at the workplace.
The manager effectiveness index involves understanding how well a manager is able to recruit new employees. Recruitment score is generally calculated on the basis of surveys and opinions of candidates who participate in the interview for a particular role. It will help you gauge a manager’s ability to bring in the best talent and result in organizational success.
SUPER TIP: To learn about 5 more metrics to measure manager effectiveness, check out detailed article on how to measure manager effectiveness
As mentioned above, employees and team members are the best resources to measure manager effectiveness and gauge your position on the manager effectiveness index. While the above section states different manager effectiveness metrics, below is a list of manager effectiveness survey questions, that you must ask you employees for , a comprehensive picture:
The following section will focus on decoding the top practices that you can implement and encourage the adoption of for improving manager effectiveness at work. The list reflects the best practices that have been tried and tested across industries and can serve as competent benchmarks:
Your managers and leaders must adopt a personalized approach to management, especially in the new normal, post-Covid. Manager effectiveness is about leaving behind the cookie-cutter approach of having a similar way of dealing with all employees and delegating work. Rather, the focus needs to be on different personalities and play on the strengths each employee brings to the table. A personality-based approach to team management can help in offering the right nudges to employees with tools like the SuperBeings platform.
According to research by MDA Training, 58% of managers claim to have not received any leadership training. Conventionally, most managers watch and learn from their bosses, especially about team management practices. However, in the new normal, it is important that you invest in manager training. The focus should be on developing important aspects of manager effectiveness like emotional quotient, empathy, etc. to offer the right mentoring and coaching to boost employee morale and engagement.
Improving manager effectiveness requires managers to widen their horizon by accepting and appreciating employee feedback. Managers must actively seek feedback on what is working and what is not to provide a pleasant employee experience. For instance, managers need to continuously gauge employee pulse on whether one-on-ones work better or team meetings. Alternatively, what is the correct ratio for the two. You must encourage your managers to accept that sometimes they might not know the best and honest employee feedback can be a great corrective measure for improving manager effectiveness.
SUPER TIP: Answers to all your queries about continuous feedback in the workplace is just one click away.
Manager effectiveness requires leaders to celebrate small wins and milestones achieved by the team. Constant recognition and appreciation alongside feedback is a great motivator for team members to put their best foot forward, without pressure and entails better performance. According to global studies, 79% of employees who quit their jobs cite a lack of appreciation as a key reason for leaving.
SUPER TIP: Timely recognition is the secret to driving employee engagement and retaining top talent.
Finally, with mental health and wellness becoming a priority, manager effectiveness involves investing in coaching and other practices. Managers need to go the extra mile to showcase their care and empathy towards the employees. Coaching platforms and wellness tools can be effective solutions. Coaching is mostly used to assist employees in clarifying their long-term objectives and integrating them with their professional goals and performance. They can help employees navigate the new challenges that come along the way with customized practices. This would be a boon for leaders when it comes to team management practices.
SUPER TIP: Maintaining employee wellness in your workplace is extremely essential to boost your employee engagement.
The above practices are beneficial for managers who have been in their role for some time and are looking to augment their effectiveness and performance. However, you must be having another set of managers who have recently transitioned into leadership roles. According to a study, 44% of first-time managers claimed they were unprepared for the new role. At the same time, 87% reported that they did not receive any training for a new managerial position.
Here are some tips for new managers to accelerate their professional journey and make an impact:
For most professionals, till they reach a specific position on the leadership ladder, they only have to focus on outperforming themselves. However, as a manager, one must change their outlook towards their team and its collective growth. First-time managers must adopt a growth mindset to help their team members develop as professionals to promote manager effectiveness. This requires focusing on the strengths that everyone brings to the table and making an effort to leverage the same. For instance, you must encourage them to build a team with complementary rather than similar skills.
An effective manager builds healthy relationships with everyone in their team, as well as those above and below them. Here, it is vital that first-time managers pay heed to the opinions and perspectives of everyone around. On one hand, this will help create an image that they take everybody along. On the other hand, building a rapport will facilitate collaboration which is crucial to managerial success. You can help your new managers to achieve this by enabling them to get to know team members and others beyond work. Encourage them to try to learn about their personal life (with their consent), learn about what they wish to do beyond work, etc.
Motivation and mentoring can take many forms. The objective is to ensure that each team member is able to reach the pinnacle of success and stretch beyond their comfort zone. You must encourage your first-time manager to create appropriate conditions to promote the personal and professional development of all team members. Setting up formal mentoring and coaching programs can be the first step. Inspire them to learn the aspirations of team members and make a conscious effort to give them assignments that can aid in their professional success.
SUPER TIP: Here is the best guide to conduct effective 1:1 meeting for the managers.
Emotional intelligence is likely to help new managers look at things from the perspective of the team members and others and ensure that they become empathetic leaders. At the same time, it is crucial to develop communication skills especially focused on active listening. Leading the people's practices, you must invest in tools that offer regular behavioral nudges for development as emotional intelligence and communication skills cannot be developed overnight and require a constant monitoring system.
Effective managers provide their teams with the right resources and tools and guide them to get things done, rather than getting into the details of every task. This creates a team that is efficient and responsible enough to take care of the operational work. This allows the manager to focus on high-order tasks and decision-making to attain scalability and success, which is critical to promoting manager effectiveness at work. Understanding team needs and providing the right resources is important. For instance, if the team is working remotely, investing in collaboration and communication tools like Slack, video conferencing tools like zoom, etc. makes sense.
Till now we have focused on different ways to gauge, promote and improve manager effectiveness as well as explored practices for how to become an effective manager or leader. It is now time to focus on one of the most common pitfalls that come in the way of manager effectiveness. Often, in the process of effectively managing a team and guiding them towards success, professionals tend to lose balance and incline towards micromanagement. Put simply, micromanagement is a practice where a manager or a person in a senior position closely observes and monitors the subordinates with excessive control.
According to a study, 69% of professionals said they considered changing jobs because of micromanagement and another 36% actually changed jobs. While micromanagement negatively impacts retention of quality talent, it affects other parameters of performance too. 71% said being micromanaged interfered with their job performance while 85% said their morale was negatively impacted.
Therefore, you must focus on denouncing a culture of micromanagement. Here are a few tips to ensure the same:
Micromanagement often stems from an obsession with perfectionism and the need to ensure that their team delivers the best execution possible. While it is good to aspire for perfectionism, it is important to acknowledge that sometimes good is good enough. Interfering in everything in the name of perfectionism should be kept under check. This doesn’t mean compromising and delivering below-average quality work. Encourage your managers to not go overboard in an attempt to achieve utopian perfectionism.
One of the major reasons managers and leaders find themselves micromanaging is because they do not delegate and distribute responsibility. The best approach is to find the right people who have a fair balance of attitude and aptitude. The more responsibility you delegate, the less you will find yourself micromanaging. Put simply, if you are responsible for everything that goes on in your team, you will closely monitor them and try to impinge your way of working on them. However, when you delegate, you loosen your grip and make room for others to take charge, which is essentially required to avoid micromanaging and promote manager effectiveness.
Managers should be inclusive while making decisions that impact the whole team. When different opinions are taken into consideration, the delegation also becomes easier. At the same time, feedback is critical to letting go of micromanagement. Taking control because you feel your team isn’t competent enough is not wise. Rather, offer constructive feedback on what went wrong and illustrate areas of improvement. This will encourage the team to step up and work on their weaknesses. Invariably, this will result in better performances, allowing leaders to take a step back and avoid micromanaging.
Managers cannot expect to step away from micromanagement within a single day. The best approach is to let go of one thing at a time and build trust gradually. When one gives away the responsibility of one task to the team and they carry it out well, trust and faith build in their capabilities. This nurtures the confidence to take another step back. The idea is to not boil the ocean all at once, rather, step back from micromanagement one task at a time.
Managers often claim that they micromanage because their team members shirk away from responsibilities. However, the challenge here might be a two-way street. It is very important for manager effectiveness to set clear expectations right from the very beginning. This means that all team members must be made aware of the responsibility they are supposed to take and what is expected out of them over the course of their tenure along with a roadmap to maximize their performance which doesn’t require micromanagement.
By micromanaging, managers reduce their value and impact on the organization. At times, some operational or administrative task is likely to take over other important and high-value work. Therefore, managers must put time into tasks and work that only they can accomplish. The focus should be on facilitating others to do the work by providing the right resources, guidance, and mentoring, rather than getting their hands dirty all the time. Having a priority list of all the work that needs to be done and focus should only be on those that cannot be done by anyone else. For the rest, effective managers only oversee execution.
It is vital that managers and leaders utilize their time and effort in creating and managing a positive work culture rather than managing every task at hand. Nurturing a culture of responsibility, transparency, and accountability is imperative for managers looking to take a step back for indulging in every task that comes to their team. Managers and leaders ought to focus on promoting intrapreneurship within the team where all members stick out their hands to take ownership and come up with the best solutions to optimize productivity and performance. With such a culture in place, manager effectiveness is bound to improve by leaps and bounds.
Improving manager effectiveness in an organization is not a task for a single day. It requires constant efforts on the part of the senior leadership, employees as well as the manager themselves. If one looks closely, scoring high on the manager effectiveness index requires promoting subtle behavioral changes in the managers based on real-time insights and data. Here, collaborating with platforms like SuperBeings can be effective. It empowers organizational managers with the right tools, insights, and recommendations to become an effective leader and manager.
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If you are trying to design a continuous and comprehensive performance management system, you would know the importance of conducting a 360 degree feedback. However, to make this exercise most effective, you need to go beyond simply involving everyone in the process to getting the process right — most importantly asking the right feedback questions to each stakeholder. This article will focus on how to write 360 feedback questions that create maximum organizational impact.
Let us quickly start by understanding what you must include in your 360 feedback questions to make it more effective.
Read: How and when to conduct 360 degree feedback
Without wasting any time, let’s dive into the 10 tips that can help you in writing excellent and effective 360 feedback questions.
Keep the language easy to understand and avoid using technical jargon. Make sure everyone is able to gauge the same meaning of the question and the focus is not lost in translation.
Keep adding the questions list for your next 360 degree feedback to your records throughout the year.
Since 360 feedback should focus on all aspects of an employee, if you add questions at different times, they will be more relevant
Ensure that the questions don’t have an inherent bias or don’t push or influence the respondent to answer in a specific manner. Make sure that the questions can have varied options as answers and not a singular focus because that’s what you want as a result. Furthermore, the questions should not create a bias in the mind of the reader of any kind.
Focus on one specific attribute or competency for each question. Don’t try to include everything in a single question to keep the number of 360 feedback questions low. You will end up receiving responses for only a part of the question and it will confuse the respondent too. For instance, if you want to talk about collaboration, do not couple it with factors like leadership skills or problem solving.
Before you start framing the questions, identify the key competencies that are most important for your organization as well as the role. Competencies could include communication, innovation, strategic thinking, etc.
Make sure that as a whole, all the questions cover all aspects you want to gauge the employee on from an organizational and functional role perspective. However, don’t overstuff too many competencies, keep them relevant to the employee in question. For instance, a person in sales may not need a question on technology knowledge as a part of 360 feedback questions.
In addition to being specific, be clear on what you wish to gauge or understand with every question you ask. For instance, a question on whether or not the employee pays heed to the opinion of others can help understand the level of active listening and a spirit of inclusion.
You need to have a fair balance between open ended and close ended questions.
A very long or complicated process is likely to reduce participation and defeat the purpose. Therefore, keep the count of 360 feedback questions to a maximum of 30-40 and make it very easy to participate and complete the same. Preferably, disseminate it through your existing communication/ collaboration tools.
Finally, make sure that the questions are framed in a way that is simple to evaluate. Too complex evaluations might take too much time and delay the action and execution, leading to reduced faith and impact on 360 degree feedback.
To ensure that your questions are relevant and specific, you can start with writing 360 feedback questions for different situations and contexts. Put simply, in this section, we will focus on what you should be asking and when. It will also help you in picking the right questions for the right employees, instead of bombarding everyone with the same questions.
These questions will help you understand what your team members think about the overall management at your organization and the effectiveness of specific team leadership.
These questions can help you understand the level of communication efficiency in your organization to ensure there is no gap between intention and execution.
Use these questions to identify and nurture employees that show leadership potential to build an effective succession pipeline.
These questions can help you understand how committed your employees are towards the organization, which will impact their level of engagement and quality of work.
You can leverage these questions when you wish to understand which employees are quick to think on their feet and will be able to address problems/ challenges that might come their way.
These questions can help you gauge the level of alignment between what your organization stands for and the core values/ beliefs of your employees.
Read: Strategic goal alignment: How to align team and organizational goals
Focus on these questions when you want to understand how well your employees are able to connect with their peers and other stakeholders.
These final set of questions can help you gauge how efficiently the employees are able to get work done. This points to the presence of the right skills to utilize resources in the best way possible.
To keep the entire survey with 360 degree feedback questions interesting and engaging, you can experiment with different question formats and templates. While some of your questions can have simple Yes/No answers, some can have multiple choices along with room for providing open ended answers as well. Here is an easy to follow template you can leverage.
Key competency: Strategic decision making
Top line: The employee/ subject name is able to
Attributes:
Spectrum
Open ended questions
Once you roll out the survey with your 360 feedback questions and receive the answers, you need to analyze the responses to come up with a final report and plan of action. However, any response analysis is subject to biases and other factors which might put the validity and reliability of the report into question. Fortunately, you can leverage these following practices to eliminate such instances:
Before concluding this article, we would like to discuss the top 8 questions that most managers have when it comes to 360 degree feedback, highlighting concerns they may be having.
Highlight how the performance and feedback on the performance of others is likely to have an impact on their performance too. Make them believe they can be an integral part of the growth journey for their team members.
Make the feedback anonymous to prevent sugar coating. At the same time, do not rely upon a single review as the ultimate feedback for any employee. Analyze at least 2-3 feedback responses for each employee to get the real picture.
3. How to make the process time effective?
Leverage technology platforms to roll out the surveys and collect responses. Furthermore, you can rely on the NLP sentiment analysis to gauge insights from open ended questions in addition to trend generation based on quantitative questions.
Check out how SuperBeings can help you conduct seamless 360 degree feedback. Book a free demo today
Highlight the positive impact of participation as a whole. Make it an interesting part of the employee lifecycle. Provide employees designated time within their work schedule to provide feedback. Do not make it an added burden. Additionally, keep the process simple with not a lot of questions at once.
Depending on the nature of the organization you can decide on the level of anonymity. Facilitate anonymity will help you fetch greater and more authentic responses. However, sometimes, you might struggle with context in this case. Therefore, you should adopt an approach of flexible/ partial anonymity.
Create a business case for 360 degree feedback. Illustrate how it can lead to a better employee experience, strategic learning and development, greater employee retention and other aspects which can lead to better performance and productivity.
Ensure that your questions are neutral and don’t lead to a specific sentiment or response. For instance, if you want to gauge punctuality for an employee, don’t use statements like do you think the employee is always late to work, rather focus on how would you rate the punctuality and sense of time for the employee?
Try to conduct 360 feedback on a regular basis and not wait for the end of the year to ask all the questions. Maintain a cadence to gauge responses.
As we end this discussion, it is clear that if you want to write 360 feedback questions in an effective way — you need to adopt an all encompassing approach, taking into account the different aspects of employee attributes, performance, personality and behavior.
It is, therefore, ideal to leverage platforms like SuperBeings to help you roll out, gather and analyze the responses using NLP and automation for best results. You can leverage our best practices to not only get the questions right but to also enable your managers to facilitate employee development at the end of the process.
If interested, feel free to book a demo today. No initial commitment required.
How and when to conduct 360 degree feedback
In the recent years, there has been a lot of attention that is being given to employee feedback, performance reviews and evaluation as a part of the whole performance management system.
While a major focus has been to prepare managers to give feedback in a constructive and effective manner, paying attention to employee self evaluation is equally important. Knowing what self appraisal comments to use can play a major role in helping employees to effectively reflect and evaluate their performance and convey it effectively to the rest of the team.
The purposes of employee evaluation and performance review in general have been talked about time and again. However, self appraisal takes the process of evaluation at a very personal and individual level, leading to a more pronounced understanding of an employee’s performance. Some of the top benefits of employee self assessment include:
Read: Employee self assessment: How to write a great one
In the section above, we have talked about the purpose or the need of self evaluation mostly from the perspective of the employee. However, self appraisal, when done correctly, has equally compelling benefits for the team as well as managers. A quick snapshot is captured below:
With self appraisal, employees become active participants in their review and appraisal process, rather than simply being passive recipients. Consequently, they feel valued, motivated and the level of engagement increases. Furthermore, with greater engagement, levels of commitment, retention and productivity go up.
When employees take a step back to reflect on their performance with self appraisal, they become more receptive to diverse ideas. Put simply, in the absence of self reflection, they will have a hard time gauging where they need to improve. Consequently, they will be defensive when a manager or the team gives them feedback on the same. However, self evaluation will help them accept the gaps and be open to learning and growing.
When employees reflect on their performance and identify the development areas, they will don a problem solving hat on to accelerate their professional journey. Through the course of time, this problem solving attribute will become a part of their skill set which will benefit the team and the manager greatly.
As a result of greater alignment due to self reflection on the strengths and areas of development, teams will see a greater sense of accountability to bridge the gaps identified. Under conventional circumstances, performance improvement might be seen as just a tick in the box by employees. However, after self appraisal, employees truly acknowledge and accept the need to bridge those gaps and take greater ownership and accountability.
Now that you have an understanding of why self appraisal matters, let’s quickly look at how to make it most effective. If you are experimenting with self evaluation for the first time, it can be an overwhelming activity for your employees. It is human nature to feel uneasy when you’re expected to evaluate your own performance. However, if you provide your employees with some comments they can use for self evaluation as a starting point, you can make the journey easier for them.
Put simply, self appraisal comments are common statements that can be customized by your employees during the self evaluation process, especially, if they find themselves at a loss of words to describe their performance
These phrases are available for both strengths and areas of development to help employees paint a realistic picture of their performance. Here are the top 100 self appraisal phrases that you can use for different performance parameters.
Use these self phrases to reflect on your clarity of communication, willingness to listen to others, etc.
These self evaluation phrases reflect how reliable or dependable you are for your team members, especially under special circumstances.
Using these self appraisal phrases can help indicate how invested or engaged you are in taking ownership of work without being asked to at times.
Similar Read: 150+ performance review phrases for managers
The following self appraisal comments are important to help review your performance on the basis of how punctual and attentive you are.
Use these self evaluation phrases when you want to highlight your strengths/ areas of improvement of working with the team, your collaboration skills, etc.
Creativity self appraisal comments can help you in reflecting on how effectively you are able to come up with novel and innovative solutions to challenges and new ideas to augment the impact and value created.
The following phrase can create a picture of your quality of work and how much attention you pay while undertaking a particular task during your self reflection process.
You can use these self appraisal comments to illustrate how well you understand what is expected out of you and how well you are able to deliver on the same.
Customer satisfaction self evaluation performance phrases help gauge how effectively you are able to address customer requests or complaints that leads to a higher Net Promoter Score, brand credibility, etc.
Finally, these self-appraisal comments can help you highlight your growth plans towards your professional development and impact on the organization.
With a broad understanding of the more than 100+ self appraisal comments that you can use as a part of your self evaluation process, let’s move to this concluding section. Here, we will focus on sharing a few templates that employees can use to articulate their performance in an effective manner.
The self evaluation phrases mentioned above can be added at the right places in these templates to give a holistic picture of one’s performance. A few things to focus on include:
In the last <performance period>, I have successfully <activity/ initiative undertaken> which led to <tangible impact (metrics)> for the organization.
My focus was on <a detailed view of everything that was done> which resulted in <accomplishments>.
Overall, I believe that I have been able to create an impact by achieving <top 3 achievements> and seek to amplify the same in the future.
I believe that the last <performance period> has been full of learning and development for me.
While I was able to <quick snapshot of achievements>, I acknowledge that I need to pay attention to <areas of improvement>.
I believe that this focus will help me <intended outcome for improvement>.
Towards this, I will ensure that I consistently work towards <improvement plan (courses, behavioral changes)> to achieve <SMART goal>.
That said, self appraisal is an extremely crucial step of performance review. As a manager you must encourage your team members to provide honest reflection on their performance without being afraid of any negative consequences. Apart from providing the self appraisal comments mentioned above, you can also use assessment tools to make self appraisal a common practice within the organization.
Custom Pulse Surveys by SuperBeings can help you with understanding their needs and help you support them better. If interested, book a free demo today.
Employee Self Assessment: How to write a great one
150+ performance review phrases for managers
How to use custom pulse surveys to enhance employee experience
Holistic performance reviews are integral for any organization that seeks to create a high performance culture. However, the nature of performance appraisals has undergone significant transformation with a focus on 360 feedback and review.
One of the key pillars for the same is employee self assessment and self appraisal. Through the course of this article, we will share with you why self assessment is important and how you, as a manager, can help your employees get it right to facilitate maximum impact.
As the name suggests, employee self assessment or self reflection is the practice or process where employees reflect on and assess their performance over a period of time to identify accomplishments, development areas and other performance aspects
The aim of self assessment is to get the employees’ view of their performance and add the information and data to manager and peer feedback. This can enable organizations to get a holistic understanding of the employee performance and gauge the overall contribution, some of which might be invisible from a macro view. Here are a few reasons why employee self assessment as a tool for performance review makes sense for growing organization:
With the rise of continuous performance management and regular review and appraisal, your self assessment process should follow a similar approach.
Instead of pushing employees to assess and reflect on their performance at the end of the year, you should encourage them to conduct regular self assessment
On one hand, regular and continuous performance linked self appraisal by employees will ensure that no part of their performance goes unnoticed. On the other hand, it will constantly give them a chance to reflect on their performance and improve on the development areas on the go, instead of waiting for the year end. Invariably, they will embark on the path of development and improvement at an accelerated pace.
Here, if you leverage employee pulse surveys which are short and frequent in nature, you can ensure consistent and continuous self reflection from employees. With as frequent as one question a day, you can encourage your employees to build a culture of performance-oriented self assessment.
With self assessment and reflection being a fairly new practice to performance management, many organizations and employees struggle with getting it right.
While some believe that employees might see it as a chance to explain their bad performance, others believe that it might end up biasing the manager’s perspective.
However, when done right, employee self assessment can be an extremely powerful tool to facilitate a high performance culture. Here are a few tips to get your employees conduct performance self assessment the right way:
Encourage your employees to be open and honest. Employees must not see self assessment as a place for self aggrandizing in the hope of a better rating, rather an honest assessment of one’s performance.
For self evaluation to be effective, your employees need to reflect on their performance without the worry of being penalized for identifying areas of development and improvement
It is important to not see self assessment as the sole foundation for promotions and appraisals, but rather as a journey towards growth.
Next, persuade your employees to reflect on their OKR performance. The idea is not only to assess what has been achieved with OKR grading. It should also include reflections from OKRs about the possible enablers and blockers to further refine them for the next performance period. The employee must be guided to reflect on what helped achieve the OKRs and what other support is required as well as what he or she would personally like to work towards.
Download: Free OKR grading template
Third, when self assessing for performance review, employees must incorporate feedback from their conversations with managers and peers. If your organization has a culture of regular 1:1s, this will be very easy for your workforce. The idea here is to motivate your employees to reflect on what feedback they have been able to gauge and whether or not according to them their performance is a reflection of the same. 360 degree feedback can also be a helpful tool for employees to understand all aspects of their performance.
Factors like what did the manager praise about their performance or what did a coworker thank them for are very important for self assessment.
Read: Top 50 1:1 meeting questions for great managers
Finally, as a part of performance review self assessment, employees need to reflect on the challenges and opportunities, both internal and external. Internally, they need to assess their attributes, skill sets and aspirations and align them with the expectations to gauge their level of performance. Similarly, external factors like resources, team support and their impact on performance needs to be documented.
When you share these above mentioned tips with your team members, they are bound to ask questions about the best practices for writing or filling up self assessment surveys in the most effective way. We have you covered for that as well. Here are a few quick tips to help your employees write effective self assessment:
Read: How to go from performance management to employee development
If you look at these best practices closely, you will realize that the key to writing effective self assessment also lies in the questions that you ask.
Simply asking an open ended question like reflecting on your performance will seldom yield any substantial responses, mainly because your team members will struggle with starting their answers
Therefore, we have compiled a list of questions and potential answer prompts/ templates to help you make self assessment a part of your performance review process effectively.
Also read: 150+ useful performance review phrases to start using today
Ensuring impact with self assessment is not only dependent on your team members. There are several ways in which managers of an organization can help build a culture of effective self evaluation.
Create an open culture where employee self reflection does not become the sole tool to penalize or promote employees, see it as an extended glimpse of performance
As we come to an end, it is clear that employee self assessments are an integral part of performance reviews and if conducted in the right manner have the potential to drive a high performing culture. However, we understand that administering and facilitating participation for self assessment can be daunting, especially for a growing organization.
Fortunately, custom pulse surveys by SuperBeings with automated sending and reminders, along with NLP based sentiment analysis can take care of the same for you. If interested, book a free demo today to learn more.
How to use custom pulse surveys to enhance employee experience