Self Assessment

What self assessment is

Self assessment, also called self appraisal or self evaluation, is the employee’s appraisal of their own performance, carried out before the manager’s appraisal or alongside it, as part of the performance appraisal cycle. Its purpose is to make the employee a party to the conversation about their performance, and not only the subject of that conversation: the employee brings an account of the same year into the discussion, instead of only hearing a judgement about it and responding.

What self assessment actually adds

Self assessment adds three things to the appraisal cycle:

• Information the manager does not have. It covers obstacles that the employee dealt with quietly, and work that appeared in no report. An obstacle resolved without being raised leaves nothing for the manager to see: the problem never reached the manager, and so the solution did not reach them either. Work that was done but never appeared in a report is invisible in the same way. Self assessment is the point in the cycle at which the employee can put that information on the record.
• Disclosure of the perception gap. It brings to light the gap between how the employee sees their own performance and how their manager sees it. The gap cannot be seen from either side alone. The manager knows their own view and the employee knows theirs, and only when the two accounts of the same year are placed next to each other does the distance between them appear. When that gap is wide, uncovering it is in itself a significant result of the cycle.
• Preparation for the conversation. It readies the employee for the appraisal conversation, so that they come into it with a written position and not with a reaction formed in the moment. An employee who first hears the manager’s appraisal in the meeting can only answer what is said as it is said. An employee who has already written down an appraisal of their own year arrives having thought it through, with a position they can refer to and explain.

The structural flaw in self assessment

Self assessment carries a flaw in its structure. It is requested from the employee in the very setting on which their pay and their promotion depend. The employee is therefore asked to describe their performance in a document that may affect what they are paid and whether they are promoted, and that setting shapes the answer.

For an employee who understands the game, the setting can push the self assessment towards exaggeration: the year is presented in the strongest light available, because a stronger account may lead to a better outcome. For an employee who does not understand the game, the setting can push the other way, towards modesty: the year is described plainly or understated.

So self assessment comes close to being a measure of writing style more than a measure of performance. Two employees whose performance was the same can hand in two very different self assessments, and the difference between them then reflects how each one writes about their work and how well each one reads the setting, more than what each one did.

For that reason the safer course is not to count self assessment as an arithmetic input to the final rating, and to use it instead as an input to the conversation. Counted in the final rating, the difference in writing style passes straight into the result. Used as an input to the conversation, what the employee wrote is discussed, questioned and set against the manager’s view before anything is decided.

What makes self assessment useful

Four conditions make self assessment useful:

• Questions about facts, not about ratings. The question is “What did you achieve that did not show?”, not “Rate yourself out of five”, which asks for a position on a numbered scale of the kind a graphic rating scale uses. A question about facts asks the employee for the information the manager does not have. A request for a rating asks the employee to put a figure on their own performance, which is where the pull towards exaggeration or modesty acts.
• Submission before the manager’s appraisal. Submitting the self assessment after the manager’s appraisal turns it into a comment on a judgement that has already been given. Submitted first, it is a separate account of the year, and setting it beside the manager’s appraisal shows the perception gap. Submitted afterwards, it is written with the manager’s judgement already in front of the employee, and what they write becomes a reply to that judgement.
• A question about what the employee needs. Alongside what the employee achieved, the self assessment asks what they need, so that the conversation runs in both directions. Questions about achievement look at what the employee delivered. A question about need asks what the employee requires in order to deliver, and so the conversation does not travel from the manager to the employee alone.
• Not requested in a vacuum. An employee who has received no feedback during the whole year has nothing against which to measure their performance. A self assessment asks the employee for a judgement, and a judgement needs something to measure against. Without any feedback over the year, the employee comes to the self assessment with only their own view, and with nothing to set it against.

Where self assessment sits in the appraisal cycle

Self assessment is one part of a wider cycle that includes the manager’s appraisal and, where it is used, 360 degree appraisal, which also gathers views on the employee from colleagues through peer appraisal and, where there are any, from the people the employee supervises through subordinate appraisal.

Within that cycle, self assessment carries less weight than the other parts as a measurement, but more weight than they do as an input to the conversation. Putting it in the wrong place, as a score that is counted, is what makes self assessment lose credibility within the cycle.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.

Related terms

• Competencies
• Performance Calibration
• Central Tendency Error
• Performance Standards
• Peer Appraisal