Imagine: This time last year, you told yourself that when the start of the new annual performance review cycle came around, you’d complete your self-review gradually, taking note of accomplishments each month, better equipping you with the ability to showcase your work over the last year. Instead, time got away from you and now you’re staring blankly at your computer screen trying to complete your self-review, trying to remember everything that you did over the last year. You’re stuck between wanting to shout yourself out for all that you’ve been able to accomplish, without over-inflating your successes and contributions – waffling back and forth between ratings of “meets expectations,” and “exceeds expectations,” trying to strike a balance of honesty, humility, but also knowing your worth. Sound familiar?
Annual performance reviews (APRs) often bring up a lot of feelings – some pride at being able to showcase work over the previous year – but if you’re anything like me, also a considerable amount of overwhelm. At my current institution, our human resources department often schedules our self-reviews right around the height of student staff selection, so taking the time to complete an honest, comprehensive and fair assessment of my personal goals and commitment to institutional values isn’t always easy – it’s time consuming, and with the pace and priorities that my day to day work requires, a self-review is usually not something I’m excited to complete or prioritize. At the same time, if I don’t capture something important or notable in my self-review, my supervisor may not note it either. If you struggle with this aspect of the professional working world, you may find this post helpful. Below are some things that have made APR season a little more bearable for me.
Start early and make notes often. It’s not always easy to prioritize this task when each day in Housing and Residence Life can pull us in so many directions, but having a file or tab in your one on one notebook where you can capture performance based notes – accomplishments, completed project tasks, initiatives you’re working on, and anything related to professional goals that you set for the year can help. I usually keep a running bullet point list per month, or by topical area (supervision, HRL training, HRL recruitment, programming/residential education, divisional commitments and committees, to name a few). While not everything will make it into my APR self-review, this helps me remember things I may forget to note from 10-11 months ago, and I can take these micro lists and synthesize them into salient accomplishments when the time comes. I try to update these notes at least once every two weeks or once a month, when I can. That way, my APR becomes more about pasting relevant material that I’ve collected over time, instead of trying to generate notes from scratch. Keeping these notes detailed with data and quantifiable information (e.g. how many students of concern you assisted with, or how many hours you spent responding to active on-call duty concerns) also helps communicate impact.
Capture information that aligns with your role but showcase other duties as assigned. Depending on how your institution sets up their APR process, the goals that you set at the beginning of the year may be completely eclipsed by the demands, needs, and realities of a department. By the time you sit down to do your self-evaluation, those goals may no longer make sense, or you may have not had the capacity to work on them throughout the year like you had originally planned. If you find yourself in this situation, make sure you note why you weren’t able to work or complete certain tasks. In addition, your APR is a great place to capture all of the work you do – both within the scope of your role, but outside of it. Did you help provide coverage for another community so the department could cover a staff vacancy? Did you assist with more departmental processes than is typically required for your role? Did you sit on a divisional committee? Did you do in-house presentations for your division or within the field at a conference? Over the course of a year, we can forget the sheer number of extra asks and contributions we make that don’t fall within the role we were originally hired for. If you’ve done work outside the scope of your usual responsibilities, keeping track of these, and then noting them in your self-review helps paint a picture of where you’ve exceeded expectations, not simply that you have exceeded them. This also helps illustrate where employees are spending their time due to institutional needs and can help leadership understand where gaps exist when it comes to bandwidth and support.
Align your APR notes thematically and where you see yourself – in the future. The beauty of capturing notes for a self-review over several months is that you then have the ability to organize your notes in your APR so that they are thematic to essential functions of your job, and roles that you want, as you ascend. Each person’s priorities may look different, but I typically organize my successes and growth edges so that they are organized by the essential functions of my role’s profile – supervision, residential ed development, professional staff recruitment and development, student staff formation and training, departmental leadership initiatives – to name a few. By aligning my contributions with essential functions, it’s easier to provide an honest assessment and demonstrate to my supervisor where I am meeting expectations versus exceeding them – this ultimately helps me feel that my overall rating is fair when I decide what I think I deserve for a given year. I also tend to capitalize or stress notes and impacts based on the essential functions of roles that I am aspiring to – this helps my mindset and communication for future cover letters, interviews, and when thinking about where I want to be beyond the current role I am in.
Bonus – from a supervisory perspective: If you are someone that completes and approves APRs, give yourself ample time to complete a supervisee’s review, and try not to complete review write-ups back-to-back. In the same way that we can experience interview burnout, if you have multiple APRs to approve and contribute to, it can be easy to run out of original things to say about each of your team members, which then can make all of your reviews sound the same. This isn’t fair to your supervisees, and it also isn’t fair to your team’s growth overall. If you can, spread APRs out over a few weeks to make the task a little less daunting.
