A timid employee enters his manager’s office, sits in a chair that’s a foot lower than the desk, and accepts a tongue-lashing in lieu of discussing his employee evaluation forms: definitely an image from the archives. Yet…if you have ever felt nervous in the face of an impending annual review, you know it can still be intimidating to submit to an evaluation by your superiors.

Fortunately, the paradigm of performance appraisal is shifting to a more holistic approach whereby the employee can be evaluated from multiple angles: by their peers, managers, customers, vendors, support staff, other departments, and even themselves. This 360-degree feedback can be a more accurate measure of an employee’s performance; after all, a manager might only directly witness a tiny percentage of their employee’s work, thus missing the bulk of their daily contribution to the company.

You may have already experienced a form of self-assessment when a supervisor casually asked you, “So, how do you think you did?” Yet we may be unfamiliar with a formal self-assessment. Far from leaving loopholes through which an employee can skate, the self-assessment tool is generally seen as quite insightful, for the following reasons:

What sorts of questions should be included in a questionnaire to provide the nost comprehensive picture of the employee?

Firstly, employee evaluation forms should be tailored to the employee’s current job description so an employee can honestly gauge whether they met the requirements. It should also provide a formal rating system (for example, a scale from 1-5). Questions to ask can include:

The most noteworthy contribution of self-rating employee evaluation forms is the improved communication between supervisors and subordinates. An honest self-appraisal allows your employee to introspectively review his or her performance, and set career goals for their future with your organization.