How to write a self-review

What a self-review is for

A self-review is the written case you put in before your performance review. It exists because nobody has the whole picture of your year. Your manager saw a slice of it, their manager saw less, and the work you did in February is gone from everyone's memory by September, including yours.

Find out who reads it before you write it. In most New Zealand workplaces that is:

• Your manager, who writes their half of the review from it.
• Their manager, in many organisations, especially where ratings are moderated across a team or a whole department.
• HR or people and culture, who keep the form.
• Your file, where it stays. A self-review can be read years later, by a manager you have not met yet.

That changes how you write it. Do not write a private note to someone who already knows the context, and do not write a confession. Write so that a reader who was not there can follow what the job involved, what you did, and what is different because of it, and can then repeat your three best points to somebody else without the document in front of them.

None of this is required by law. Employment New Zealand says there is no obligation to hold a performance review unless your employment agreement or a workplace policy provides for one. If your workplace does run one, treat the form as your chance to set the agenda rather than as a hoop.

Gather the evidence first

Do not start with the blank form. Start with an hour of collecting, so that the writing is editing rather than remembering.

Where the evidence lives:

• Your wins journal. One line a week, written on the day, is the best source there is. If you keep one, this step is mostly done already.
• Your 1:1 notes. What you were asked to do, what was agreed, and the feedback you were given, each with a date. See 1:1 meetings with your manager.
• Your sent mail and your calendar. Scroll back through the year a month at a time. It is slower, and it works.
• The numbers you moved. Whatever your work is measured by: volumes, times, errors, sales, complaints, uptime, days to close. Get the figure before and the figure after, and the dates either side of them.
• Thanks you were sent. The email from the customer, the message from another team, the note from your manager after a hard week. Save these the day they arrive, because you will never find them later.

Then sort what you have into four piles: delivered, improved, learned, and feedback received. Most self-review forms ask for some version of those four, whatever they call them.

One caution. Keep your own record of your own work, and do not copy confidential customer, patient or client information out of your employer's systems to do it. A line saying what changed and by how much is evidence. A copy of the file is a problem.

The structure that works

Whatever headings the form uses, the material underneath them is the same five questions, in this order.

Two or three items carried all the way through those five questions beat ten items that only make it to the second one. If the form has its own headings, keep the five questions beside you as a checklist and answer them inside whatever boxes you are given.

Put your strongest item first in every section. Some readers stop after the first bullet.

Write about what changed

The most common fault in a self-review is that it describes activity. Activity is what filled your calendar. An outcome is what is different now.

A line that works has three parts: what you did, what changed, and how you know. The third part is what stops it being an opinion.

• Activity: "Managed the monthly reporting."
• Outcome: "Automated the monthly report. It now goes out on the first working day instead of the fifth, and the finance team stopped rekeying it."

Numbers are the easiest proof, and most work has one hiding in it: hours, dollars, days, volumes, errors, complaints, turnover, customers kept. If you cannot find a number, do not invent one. Say who noticed, or what is now possible:

• "The team leaders do the roster themselves now. It used to come to me every Thursday."
• "Two other branches have picked up the checklist."
• "The auditor's report had no findings against the process this year."

Three habits are worth cutting. "Responsible for" describes a position description, not a year: say what you did with the responsibility. "Assisted with" and "was involved in" hide your part: say what your part was. And adjectives do no work at all, because the reader discounts them. "Significantly improved" persuades nobody. "Cut it from eight days to five" does the persuading for you, and it is shorter.

A weak line and a strong one

Here is the same year of work written twice. The workplace and the figures are invented and deliberately generic: take the shape, not the details.

Weak. "I worked really hard on debtors this year. I am proud of how I handled a difficult ledger, and I was always willing to help out the wider team, often staying late in busy periods. I have a good relationship with our key accounts."

Strong. "Took over the debtors ledger in March, on top of my own accounts. Rewrote the reminder sequence so the first chase goes out on day 3 instead of day 14, and rang the twenty largest accounts myself. Average days to pay fell from 54 to 39 between March and August, and accounts more than 90 days overdue went from 31 to 12. Our financial controller asked me to write the process up for the other two branches, which I did in September."

The second version is not stronger because it says more about the writer. It is stronger because it carries evidence. Four things changed:

• It names the work and when it started. "Took over the debtors ledger in March" tells the reader this was a change in the job, not business as usual.
• It gives a before and an after, over a stated period. 54 days to 39, between March and August.
• It names someone who noticed, and what they asked for next. That is independent evidence, and it costs you nothing to include.
• It has no adjectives. Hard, proud, difficult and good have all gone, and the paragraph got stronger as they left.

Everything in the strong version was available to the person who wrote the weak one. They simply had not written any of it down at the time.

Work that failed or was cancelled

Leave it out and one of two things happens. Your manager raises it, and you look as though you were hiding it. Or nobody raises it, and you get no credit for the work or for the judgement you showed. Name it yourself, briefly, and keep control of how it is described.

There are three different situations here, and they are not written the same way.

• Cancelled above you. A project stopped for budget or a change of direction is not your failure, and you still did the work. Say what you delivered before it stopped, and what came out of it that is still in use. "The pilot ran for four months before the programme was paused in June. The intake form we built for it is now used by the whole team."
• It did not work. Own it in one sentence, then spend the rest on what you did about it. "The new supplier did not work out. I had not checked their delivery times against our peak season. We moved back in August, and I check capacity before price on every quote now."
• Still unfinished. Say where it has got to, what it needs, and when it lands. Unfinished is normal. Unexplained is what worries a reader.

Two rules cover all three. Do not name a colleague as the reason: it reads badly whatever the truth of it is, and the person reading may know them. And do not over-apologise. One sentence of ownership sounds confident; three paragraphs invites everyone to dwell on it. If something went seriously wrong and is still live, talk to your manager before the form goes in, so the review is not the first time they hear your account of it.

How much to write

Aim for one page. Two is the most anyone will read closely, and a form with a word limit is telling you what it wants.

The test is not length. It is this: could your manager read it in five minutes and then repeat your three best points to their own manager, with the document shut? If not, cut until they can.

• Three strong items beat ten thin ones. A thin item does not add to a strong one, it dilutes it.
• Write in bullets rather than paragraphs, unless the form asks for prose. Bullets survive skimming.
• Lead every section with its best line, for the same reason.
• Write long, then cut. Draft everything you have in a separate document and then choose. The cut material is not wasted: it is your pay case and your next CV.
• Send it a few days ahead, so it is read before the meeting rather than during it.

If the form is a set of small boxes with character limits, write your answers outside it and paste them in. Writing straight into a box makes people pad the first answer and rush the last one, and the last one is usually the question about what you want next.

One more thing is worth the space: a line on each thing that was agreed at your 1:1s during the year, and where it got to. It is short, it is factual, and it quietly shows that what you agree with your manager actually happens.

If claiming credit feels wrong

Plenty of people find this the hardest part, and it is worse if you were raised not to skite. Two things help.

Facts are not boasting. What feels like bragging is almost always the adjectives, not the evidence. "I did an outstanding job on the migration" is a claim about you, and a reader is free to disagree with it. "The migration finished two weeks early with no data lost" is a fact about the work, and it is not arguable. Strip the adjectives and the discomfort usually leaves with them.

Be exact about your part. The fear is normally of taking credit for the team's work. The answer is not to write "we" across the whole thing, which erases you. It is to say plainly what the team did and what you did inside it. "The team delivered the rollout. I ran the training and wrote the manual the other branches use now." Name the team, then name your part.

Then check the other direction, because under-claiming has a real cost. Your manager may be arguing your case in a moderation meeting with nothing but what you gave them, and they cannot use what you left out. Hunt for the hedges and take them out: "helped to", "was involved in", "supported", "was lucky enough to", "just". If you did it, write that you did it.

If it still feels too strong, read it aloud, or give it to someone you trust and ask one question: is any of this unfair to anyone else? If the answer is no, it stays in.

When your manager is new

Managers change often enough that this is worth planning for. If yours started part way through the year, they are reviewing work they never saw, from a form and a handover note. Write for that reader.

• Add the context a colleague would not need. One or two lines at the top on what the job actually involves, what was agreed at the start of the year, and who agreed it. Without that, a new manager measures you against their own idea of the role.
• Put dates on everything. "In March" and "by August" let them place your work against the part of the year they were not here for.
• Name people who saw it. Your previous manager, a project lead, a colleague in another team, a customer. A new manager will often go and ask, and you want them asking people who can answer.
• Get it in writing before your old manager goes. A short paragraph from them about your year, sent to you and to the new manager, is worth more than anything you can say about yourself. Ask in their last fortnight, not after.
• Ask what they want to see. "You have come in half way through my year. What would be most useful for me to put in the self-review?" is a fair question, and the answer tells you how they will judge it.

Ask for a longer meeting than the standard slot, and say why when you ask. And keep your own record from here on, because when managers change your notes are the only continuous account of your work that exists.