Self reviews are a very interesting artifact of the modern workplace. The premise is that it allows you to let your boss know all the wonderful things you did in that review period. Like most things, the premise is wrong. There are basically two types of bosses (in the context of this article) - those that have time to read reviews and those that don't. If your manager has time to read reviews, then you most probably don't need to tell her all the things you did because she probably already knows. On the other hand, if she doesn't have time to work closely with you and understand what you are doing, then she doesn't have the time to read your review either.
Fortunately, the solution to writing for both types of bosses is the same.
Don't make a list of every activity in which you participated. I see this too often. We tend to fill up our review with a laundry list of every small thing we did in the review period. Things like closed so many bugs, or created so many articles, and so it goes. Stop and think for a moment. This is your bonus and promotion that you are pitching for, why fill it up with things that you are already paid to do? Put yourself in the shoes of the company for a minute. When the company needs an accountant, the company hires an accountant. The expectation here is that the accountant will do the accounts properly, in return the company pays the accountant a salary. Now the accountant cannot come back at the end of the year and say that he needs to be paid more than that was agreed up on at the hiring. So what exactly is the performance review for?
Focus on outcomes and not effort. The performance review is to identify and reward people who have made a difference in the company. This is what you want to highlight. In effect, you want to tell the company that if it wasn't you, there is a whole bunch of things that might not have happened. So it's really not important if you wrote a bunch of code for a bunch of features. However, if the code you wrote didn't have any bugs, which then led to reduced testing times, that is a positive outcome that you want to highlight. If the other programmers had 5 bugs on average and you had 3, that is something you want to be talking about. It means you put in effort that was not called for but it helped the company to be more predictable and agile.
Be honest in your assessment of yourself. When you rate your performance honestly, it sends a signal - that you are mature enough to be honest with yourself and with others. I have seen a lot of people rate themselves 5/5 by default and then leave it to their managers to scale it down. The thinking is that by rating one's self 5, you force your manager to scale it down to 4 at the worst. Honestly, it doesn't work that way. Managers are usually well aware of the contributions to the team and are seldom affected by the self ratings. But if you are someone who wants to be taken seriously and grow within the organization, being able to be honest about one's work and contributions is important.
In the end, performance reviews are a checkpoint to see whether the employee and the management are on the same page with regards to the employee's contributions and value to the organization. Your salary is compensation for the work you were hired to do. The hike is to help you keep up with inflation. The bonus and promotion are to reward you for making a difference in the organization. Unlike school and college examination papers, a longer answer doesn't translate into more value or marks. Instead, keep your review focused on your contributions that go beyond what you were paid to do.
If you were hired as an accountant, and you maintained the accounts. That's just work. But if you implemented a centralized system that let the organization manager all their accounts from one location, now you have made a difference.
So the next time you sit down to write your performance review, ask yourself, "What difference did I make this review period?"
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