How To Assess Your Performance Before Appraisals

Self-assessment is very crucial before appearing for your next appraisal. Here’s how you should go about it…

Another year; yet another round of appraisal! But are we prepared yet? Are we certain that we are ready to justify our achievements from last year? Perhaps it’s a yes/no situation. It’s true that one can never be fully prepared for anything, even if he/she claims otherwise. Just like there’s no end to learning; there’s also no end to fine-tune your points before the next appraisal meeting with your reporting manager.

One great way to fine-tune the talking points is to focus on what you did right or things which weren’t in your favour during the last appraisal meeting. Taking some points from your previous interaction, won’t be harmful after all!

We all know that an appraisal meeting is usually an effective tool to give feedback to a candidate on his/her performance. It’s also important to do self-analysis both before and after an appraisal meeting. “After an appraisal, a candidate is eager to find out where he stands among other team members, so that he/she knows their relative performance level. He/she should analyse performance thoroughly post this review in order to improve on all parameters,” suggests Chander Agarwal, joint managing director, TCI.

Agarwal believes that an appraisal meeting is a learning experience for both candidate and an organisation; such meetings provide an opportunity to discuss factors that influenced candidate performance during the period under review. He states, “HR departments also share management’s expectations from the candidate during such meetings, so that they can enhance their performance in the next appraisal cycle. These meetings can also be used for grooming candidates for leadership roles.”

You can assess/measure performance in some of the following ways, as Agarwal points out:

. By doing objective review of his/her performance against preset targets

. By preparing a list of achievements and what couldn’t be achieved during the period under review

. By taking feedback from peers/team members on their performance

. By keeping a track of the overall team performance

. By comparing your performance vis-a-vis performance of others in the function/team, as performance level of others has an impact on your performance.

With your performance varying from year-to-year, it’s practical to think that your appraisal meeting will also have different discussion points; but the basics always remain the same, according to experts. An employee can prepare on these basic talking points and can use some of the learning from his/her past appraisal meeting.

My Team Plugin for WordPress

We are  happy to release “My Team” a new WordPress to display team/staff members. You can also display a set of pictures and information in different layouts.

Nowadays, WordPress is more than just a blog. And behind such website is a team. The plugin acknowledges those guys, by creating a template which anyone can copy in his theme directory and have a page ready for the people behind it. The plugin provides the administrator with a nice interface to add/edit/delete the team members. The plugin is under active development so keep checking the page. The plugin uses the short-code given at

http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-my-team/

Features:

You can display the entries in 4 different main ways

1. Grid view.
2. Grid view with Information on hover.
3. Table list view.
4. Number of Columns.
5. Image Shapes and effects.
6. Text Align.
7. Special Settings.
8. Image Sizes.
9. Email Settings.
10. Single Page Settings.
11. Auto Generation Shortcode & PHP Function.