Getting ready for your performance review can be exciting as well as scary at the same time. You have spent the entire period under review working hard (or not) and now, your results for the organisation are about to be put through the organisation’s strategy of assessing your performance.
According to Investopedia, a performance review is a regular review of an employee’s job performance and overall contribution to a company. This is sometimes referred to as performance appraisal, employee appraisal or simply tagged ‘appraisal.’.
While there are different methodologies employed by different organisations in the conduction of its employee performance reviews, let us take a look at how you can prepare for your next performance review.
Assess Yourself
Weeks leading up to your performance review is a good time to review yourself and your performance over the period under review. This gives you an opportunity to align yourself with your shortcomings as well as your accomplishments. What a self-assessment does is that it prepares you to have a clearer picture of where you stand in the organisation’s performance over the same period.
Outline Your Accomplishments
You need to draw up a list of your accomplishments as most of this is what your performance discussions would revolve around. This would also ensure that you are able to present facts that are backed with empirical evidence rather than just making reference to the things you remember. This will help you prepare better for your performance review session.
Make a Request
This would be based on your organisation’s culture or policy. Performance reviews are a great opportunity to discuss things like salary raise, training, other work perks and/or promotion. To ensure you are not just going in blindly when asking for a salary raise, make use of tools like Nigeria’s first salary tool to familiarise yourself with the industry-standard salary range for various professional specialisations.
Final Thoughts on Performance Review
It is very important to go into your performance review session with an open mind and an ability to receive constructive criticism. In some cases, you won’t like the feedback you’ll get but ensure to take notes and make required changes. Also, another thing is to outline your agreed expectations with your team lead or HR manager. This would help you understand the focus areas for the next phase/year. Make the best of your the process and get yourself an impressive score!
