employee performance review

8 Ways to Prepare for your Performance Appraisal Process

Performance reviews can be dreadful at times. It causes some amount of anxiety for the employees as well as the manager. employee performance appraisal used to be a tedious process because it involved a lot of paperwork and boring excel sheets. But what you can do is, prepare yourself actively for the performance review.

Nowadays, there is a performance management software in every organization that minimizes the workload for the employees, so that you don’t have to worry about it anymore. There was a time when even your managers would face some constraints while giving you appraisals. Now that organizations have an employee performance appraisal software in place, they can save a lot of their time and resources to conduct performance reviews. 

For instance, Wells Fargo had a difficult time managing their employees’ performance. It was observed that there was a significant decrease in the quality of the sales that were produced by the employees. In the year 2017, they came up with a new performance appraisal process where they clearly laid down their mission, core values, creating an engaging work setting, delivering exceptional services to the customers, maintaining integrity. This facilitated better employee engagement, leadership, and team development. 

Now, where do you fit in exactly? Your job is to be prepared as Lord Baden Powell has once said. You always need to be ready and do your job properly. So how are you going to do this? All you need to do is ‘review’. Throughout the article, you are going to come across this word several times. Here are some techniques on how you can ‘review’ your performance: 

Review your job role and responsibilities 

In this section, all you need to do is review your roles and responsibilities in your previous performance appraisal process. Review the goals that had been set for you previously. Go through your competencies and the developmental plans that were given to you. Use these as a starting point for preparing yourself for the next or upcoming employee performance appraisal.  

Keep a thorough record of all your achievements, review your strengths and weaknesses and areas you need to work on. You can show it to the manager when you have one on one discussions and he will get an idea about your performance and career goals. This will serve him as a foundation for writing your performance review. 

Review your previous performance reviews  

Collect all your previous reports, weekly or monthly, and review your performance. Write down your tasks, the challenges that you faced, focus areas, skills that you acquired, and the projects that you worked on. Notice if there is a performance trend that is recurring. This is just to give you a perspective on how well you have grown in the past few years and the milestones that you have achieved. 

It is important that you gather all this data because it will give your manager a wider perspective for evaluating your performance. You will be well prepared for your upcoming performance reviews. 

Review your Achievements and Rewards  

Review your past achievements and rewards and make a list of all those achievements in a notebook if that helps. Why are we focusing on achievements particularly? This is because, when you review your achievements, it will give you an idea about how you achieved them. You need to understand how your achievements are in tandem with the objectives of the organization.  

You will understand the challenges that you faced while getting those achievements. So, when you have a record of all these facts, you can discuss it with your manager when you have one on one meetings with him. He can review these and prepare himself well for giving you a performance review. 

Review the feedback received by others 

Feedback is an important aspect of employee performance appraisal. These days, it has become easier for an employee to review his performance because there is an interesting feedback mechanism in the organization. An employee can do self-evaluation, and then other employees, managers, and customers can give direct feedback to them. 

There is a continuous feedback mechanism where employees can acknowledge and appreciate the achievements of the employees on a digital portal. On top of that, employers can give confidential notes to their employees through mobile applications. With this kind of ongoing feedback, it is easier for the organization top foster collaboration. 

As an employee, it is important that you review the feedback that you have received in the past and check your performance. The organization may give you a self-evaluating employee performance appraisal form so that the employee can rate their performance for the performance review.  

Review the scope for further improvement 

While you do a thorough review of your achievements and your performance, it is important to keep a record of the challenges and the limitations you faced as an employee. Often there are times when an employee faces a crisis while doing his tasks. It may be in the form of skills that he is lacking and the lack of resources to learn those skills.  

Therefore, identify these problem areas in your performance, take the relevant courses or training that is required to fulfill the areas where your performance lacked. This will help you to understand your weaknesses and take a constructive measure to address those weaknesses. This will increase your performance. 

Review your Goals 

Goals are very important for an employee as they instruct the employee to adhere to the objectives of the organization. An employee can set his goals on his own although there are organizations where the managers set the goals for the employees. As an employee, you don’t have to wait for your manager to spoon-feed the goals to you.  

You can either set short term or long-term goals according to the objectives of the organization. While you set your goals, make sure that you explore the various possibilities of expanding your skills and abilities. You can always review and realign your goals according to what helps you to boost your performance. 

Review your notes with your manager 

Just before your performance appraisal, make sure that you share your notes with your manager. This will ensure that both of you prepare well in advance. After the review, the manager will be able to address all the perception gaps and give you more constructive and unbiased feedback.  

Final review 

Now the manager is ready to give you your performance review. At this point take all the comments seriously and try not to get defensive or cynical after receiving criticisms. This is an opportunity for you to improve your performance. 

In conclusion, if your organization has a good performance management software, for instance, Synergita, it is easy for employees to prepare for their appraisal process. Synergita is a cloud-based employee performance management software that has a visually appealing dashboard, that facilitates better communication between you and your manager. 

You are now ready for your performance appraisal process. Make the most out of it. You alone have the power to manage your performance and success.  Good Luck!  

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *