annual assessment

Three Months of Blogging – Wow!

Courtesy of http://free-extras.com/images/happy_anniversary-1532.htmIt’s been a little over three months since I published my first post.  I’m shocked the time has gone by so quickly, it’s been great!

In honor of my three month anniversary, I thought I would post links to the top five posts I’ve written (per Google Analytics)  and list a few others you might have missed.

Enjoy!

1. New Social Media Site - In this post I talk about ifft.com,  a niffty little site where you can integrate and pull in all your social media pages. I’m surprised this is my most popular post as my blog is supposed to be about Human Resources. Maybe it was my lack of social media knowledge in general that charmed people?  Still trying to decide how useful ifft.com is but I still like it and use it

2. Getting HR On the Offense - One of my favorite posts as well,  this was inspired by a blog post at forbes.com about proactive HR.  One of my biggest critiques of HR is that we don’t spend enough time on offense, it’s all defense: policies, rules,  etc;

3. Technology- Learn It- Love It – Embrace It !  - I like this post but I don’t love it.  It was inspired by a negative experience I had with someone but I took that part out because I was too “hot” when I wrote it.  I may take another stab at this with a different angle.

4. A Job Search is a lot like Dating - Love this post – not much else to say on that.

5. Don’t Idolize Steve Jobs - Probably my all time favorite post and earned me my first reader comment (thank you @karenkits!).

A couple other posts I liked that you may have missed:

Did I miss a post you’ve read and enjoyed? Let me know  in the comments section!

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Melissa Fairman in blogging 4 Comments

Writing Your Self-Assessment?

Or How to Help Yourself at Work Part 3 

Image courtesy of CubicleShirts.com via www.cafepress.com

As you may be aware of based on my previous post, I strongly believe that feedback should be offered and sought after on a regular basis. I understand why the modern performance appraisal is liked and hated but I don’t think anyone has a great solution yet to completely replace the current model.

With that said I want to offer you some practical,  realistic advice on a portion of the year end review that you may or may not have to partake in: the self-assessment.

For those of you who do not have the joy of assessing your own performance let me start off with a quick definition: this is typically where you sit down with your company’s form (either on paper or on a website/program) and assess your performance for the last year.  Companies have many different variations of it:

  • Rating yourself on your job description
  • Rating yourself based on company or department metrics and/or competencies
  • Free form where you list your achievements the prior year

Self-assessments are fraught with landmines:

  • How honest should you be?
  • Can you really be honest with yourself?
  • Will your manager even care or read what you wrote down?

I’m here to help you with some basic tips for writing up one of these on yourself.  Please note,  this is not an endorsement,  it’s only a few helpful tips:

  1. Provide details – but not to many.  If you keep getting an error message that you are exceeding the character limit of the form or if your Word document is running 10+ pages – cut it short! Remember: brief and succinct is a virtue!
  2. You are NOT excellent in every category,  job description bullet point or on every project you worked on.  I’m sorry but your really aren’t .
  3. Conversely,  don’t be too negative.  Be proud of your achievements, list them,  applaud yourself,  rank yourself high on these achievements.  It doesn’t do you any good to be to hard on yourself…you may have a manager who just copies and pastes what you say into their appraisal.
  4. Don’t wait till the last minute to write it up – enough said. Most people think they do good work under pressure – they don’t!
  5. Make sure you attach/append/reference or somehow provide kudos you’ve received, examples of stellar work and anything else that shows what a great worker you are. Please don’t tell me you aren’t keeping these in an easy to find place…if these are scattered or you can’t find them, get to work on this NOW!

I know some of you in the audience are asking “Why do I need you to tell me how to game the system?”  or maybe you are asking “Why do I even have to do this?”  These are great questions!  Sometimes you don’t have the power to change the system today,   I’m not advocating the current system, nor am I advocating you “game” the system or fake it.   I’m trying to help you work within it.  It’s called building credibility.  If you want to change the system start with working within in the system…then explain why it doesn’t work.

If you need some back up documentation check out these links to  some of my favorite opinions on self-assessments and on the performance process in general:

What are your thoughts? Do you have any suggestions?

 

 

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Melissa Fairman in Performance Management Leave a comment

Manage Your Performance

Ah the smell of fall is in the air! Crisp days, leaves turning, the September issue of Vogue is out (aka, the  bible), the kids are back in school and the NFL is back!  Around this time you start getting those “friendly” reminders from HR that you have  your own and/or your team’s performance appraisal to draft.

Now things  at work start to get really busy, suddenly projects and initiatives long thought dead are being revitalized, anything that can be wrapped up is being pushed forward to get it on the year end appraisal.

I know this isn’t the scenario at every company,  but I’m pretty sure this happens at a lot of companies where the emphasis is incorrectly placed on pushing employee’s through the process so we can check off that Manager Dan has completed Employee Sally’s year end assessment and finds that she is average,  met expectations, or achieved all objectives.

Have you been through this kind of assessment meeting? Do you have a sinking feeling that many year end assessments go something like this?

All joking aside,  there are plenty of problems with the modern performance appraisal process (a quick summary of fifty problems can be found here). Confirming what we already know is wrong doesn’t help right now as you are looking down the barrel of honestly assessing yourself in the worst economy in decades.

Instead I want to offer you some simple advice: Manage Your Performance!

Take your brain off auto-pilot,  stop playing Farmville and start think critically about your job,  and your role in the organization.

Stop looking to others for all the answers,  others  can help and guide you but only you know what  you want.  This is your  life! Your career!

How do you get started? Start asking for feedback on a regular basis  (not just the times when you know you hit a home run), join a local networking group or a social media professional group (you can find lots of these on LinkedIn),  take a class or a seminar in your field to refresh your knowledge.

The bottom line: no one cares about your performance or your career more then you do, get out there and work on yourself.  It may not make the headline of your annual review but it will serve you better in the long run!

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Melissa Fairman in Career 2 Comments