The purpose of employee self-evaluation answers

Not all companies use employee self-evaluations, but as a small business owner, implementing the practice can have a positive impact on your operations and your employees. Employee self-evaluations are easy to do; simply design an online questionnaire, or hand out a hard copy of the evaluation to workers, and have them complete it honestly. Once it’s returned to you, you’ll be able to see how the employees view themselves, their strengths and weaknesses and where they might have untapped potential to take on different tasks outside their current role.

Doing employee self-evaluations also gives your staff a chance to reflect on their accomplishments and set goals for the future. It can be a helpful activity for everyone involved by providing insight for you as the employer and a chance for employees to voice their thoughts. Self-evaluations can increase employee engagement and improve the transparency between managers and their team members.

How often should you conduct employee self-evaluations?

While some businesses might conduct self-evaluations annually, it’s more beneficial for everyone involved to take part in self-evaluations twice per year. Performing evaluations once in January and again in July enables workers to see their progress throughout the year, and it ensures that any issues or employee concerns aren’t left unvoiced.

What to look for when reading self-evaluation comments

When you receive your employees’ completed self-evaluation answers, you need to know what to look for to interpret the content in a way that’s useful to your team and company. Here are some key elements to watch for in employee self-evaluation answers:

1. Progress on a specific goal

Employees who set goals in their self-evaluations are typically your self-starters and hardest workers. These individuals understand that there are targets to hit, and they’re striving to better themselves rather than becoming comfortable or complacent in their role. When workers mention a specific goal that they had in the past and how they have taken steps to achieve it, don’t let that go unnoticed.

If you weren’t aware this was a personal goal for the employee but you can now see how they’ve improved in that area, you can increase employee satisfaction by offering them positive feedback on this progress. Supporting employee’s goals can also help to reduce your rate of turnover.

2. Real evidence of achievements

Don’t get caught up in employees citing their own positive attributes if there’s no evidence to back it up. Some workers are overconfident in their performance while others are not confident enough. As a manager, you need to identify where employees fall on this spectrum and nurture their esteem to help them excel. You might also need to offer critical feedback on where they should be improving to meet these goals.

If employees are listing achievements they’ve made in the past six months, look for legitimate evidence of meeting those goals. Did their sales increase? Did they submit more work? Were they able to increase their efficiency in a particular task without sacrificing quality? Hard data on improvement is necessary for recognizing many achievements.

3. Knowledge of the company’s goals

The mark of a valuable employee is someone who understands not just their own goals but those of the business and how they can contribute to achieving them. In self-evaluations, you can look for awareness, or a lack thereof, regarding company targets, long-term goals and actions taken to help meet them. If workers don’t demonstrate this awareness, it might be time to discuss it with them to help them understand how their personal development contributes to the bigger picture.

4. Comparisons to other employees

An employee’s self-evaluation should strictly focus on their own development and how they’ve progressed from where they were six months ago. This means that workers should only compare their past and current performance.

If an employee is mentioning another worker in their evaluation, this is a red flag. Notice if employees compare themselves to someone else as a way to suggest they need to improve their own work to match that person or if they’re degrading another person’s performance to make their own work shine. Either way, you need to have a discussion with the worker if this comes up in their self-evaluation answers. Be sure to make it clear that everyone else’s performance is irrelevant to their own.

When an employee is speaking negatively about someone else in their evaluation, it could indicate a larger issue that you were unaware of. Speak to the employee about it, and if necessary, bring in the other employee for their side of the story as well. This is an opportunity to address and resolve conflict.

5. Requests

Some employees may use their self-evaluation to demonstrate their success and make requests for a raise or promotion. Be on the lookout for employees expressing these desires so that you can address them appropriately. Perhaps you didn’t realize that the individual was interested in moving into another role, but their performance suggests that they might excel in that area.

Remember that it takes courage for an employee to ask for what they want. If you receive a request in the comments of a self-evaluation, don’t ignore it. Do the employee the courtesy of having a meeting to discuss whether you think the request is reasonable and how you can provide them with what they want or need.

6. Feedback about the workplace

Some questions on a self-evaluation provide insight into whether your company culture is making employees happy or if they feel dissatisfied. Questions like “I enjoy most aspects of my job” are very telling in how workers respond. Use the feedback from self-evaluations to make necessary changes in areas where workers are unhappy or to focus on continuing practices that are working well.

Tips for creating employee self-evaluations

When you create your employee self-evaluations, you need to ensure that they allow employees to provide answers that you can interpret and use to better the company. There are two main types of questions that you should include on evaluation forms.

Sliding-scale questions

Sliding-scale questions are extremely common in self-evaluations and are useful for gauging employee satisfaction. You might include a statement, such as “I have particular skills that I excel at,” and then provide numbers one through five for employees to rate how true the statement is.

Open-ended questions

You’ll want to include questions that allow employees to go more in-depth with their comments to get a true sense of how they see themselves and their role at the company. These questions prompt workers to elaborate on certain areas and don’t sway them to answer in a certain way. Examples include:

• What aspects of your job do you enjoy the most?
• What are your goals for the next six months?

These questions allow workers to express themselves clearly and reflect on their performance.