Form questions

Self assessment questions

Ask ten to fourteen, sent two weeks before the review conversation. Three are never cut: what you delivered with evidence attached, what did not go the way you wanted, and what you want to be doing in twelve months. The middle one is the question that makes the document credible.

A self assessment is the only part of a review written by the person who was actually there. It works when it asks for evidence rather than adjectives, which is why the goals section is a table with a result and a source for every line.

The questions

What you delivered

  1. Your goals, what happened and the evidenceTableRequired

    A table with a goal column, a result column and an evidence column. Evidence means a link, a number or a name, not an adjective.

  2. What did you actually deliver in this period?Long textRequired

  3. Which single piece of it are you proudest of, and why that one?Long text

  4. What did you deliver that was not on any goal?Long text

    Most people do a quarter of their work outside their stated goals, and it is invisible unless asked for.

  5. Which period are you writing about?DropdownRequired

  6. How would you rate your own performance overall?Single choice

    Keep this if your process needs a rating. It is the least useful question in the form and the one managers read first.

Skills and how you worked

  1. Rate yourself against the skills for your levelRating grid

    A grid of the skills in your own framework against a developing to strong scale, which gives the conversation somewhere to disagree productively.

  2. Which skill have you moved furthest on?Single choice

  3. Which of these did you carry this period, on top of your own work?Multiple choice

    Interviewing, onboarding, on call, mentoring, incident response, documentation. The work that never appears in a goal.

  4. Who did you help, and how?Long text

  5. What did you learn that changed how you work?Long text

  6. Which piece of feedback did you act on?Long text

What got in the way

  1. What did not go the way you wanted?Long textRequired

    Required, and written to invite an account rather than a confession. A self assessment with no misses in it is not read as modest, it is read as unreliable.

  2. What would you do differently with the same situation again?Long text

  3. What is getting in your way?Long text

  4. Which dependency cost you the most time?Short text

  5. Was anything asked of you that should not have been?Long text

  6. How manageable was your workload across the period?Single choice

Next twelve months

  1. What do you want to be doing in twelve months that you are not doing now?Long textRequired

  2. What would help you get there?Multiple choice

    Training, a project, a mentor, more scope, a different team, time. Six answers a manager can actually arrange.

  3. What do you want to stop doing?Long text

  4. Is there anything your manager has not seen?Long text

  5. How confident are you that your manager knows what you actually worked on?Single choice

    A polite way of measuring whether the review process is working at all.

  6. What should we talk about first in the review?Short text

    Put it last in the form and it becomes the first item on the agenda, which is the cheapest improvement to a review conversation there is.

Which questions to make required

Five are required: the goals table, what you delivered, the period, what did not go the way you wanted, and what you want next. Those five are the document. Everything else is there for people who want to say more. The misses question is required on purpose, because an assessment that lists only wins forces the manager to raise every problem cold in the conversation.

The form built from these questions

A static copy of the finished form, from its own example page.

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Three ways to change this bank

For a sales or delivery role with hard numbers, replace the goals table columns with target, actual and the reason for the gap. The reason column is where the useful conversation lives, and without it the table is just a report anybody could have run. For a shorter version, ask four: what did you deliver, what did not go the way you wanted, what is getting in your way, and what do you want next. Four questions, sent a fortnight ahead, and the review conversation has an agenda. For a follow up wave, reopen the same form at the halfway point of the next period and ask one question: of the things you said you wanted, what has happened. A self assessment that is never revisited is a document rather than a plan.

Questions people ask

When should a self assessment be sent?

Two weeks before the review conversation, and closed a few days before it so the manager can read it first. Sent the night before, it gets written in a rush and read in the meeting, which produces a discussion about the document rather than about the year.

How long should it be?

Ten to fourteen questions, most of them written answers. It is one of the few forms where a long text field is the right default, because the point is a considered account. What keeps it manageable is requiring only five of them and letting the rest be used by whoever wants them.

Should people rate themselves?

Only if your process needs the number. Self ratings cluster tightly and tell a manager little, and they change how the written answers are framed once somebody has committed to a label. If you keep the rating, put it after the written answers rather than before.

Why ask what did not go well?

Because an assessment listing only wins makes the manager raise every problem cold, which is the worst version of the conversation. A person who names their own miss and what they would do differently controls how it is discussed, and managers read that as confidence rather than weakness.

Is it confidential?

It is not anonymous and should not pretend to be: it is signed work going to a named manager, usually into an HR record. Say where it will be stored and who can read it. What people most want to know is whether a skip level manager or a promotion panel will see it, so answer that in the invitation.

How does a table field come back in the export?

As a single CSV column holding the filled rows, rather than one column per column of the table. For reading one person's assessment that is fine. If you want to report goal completion across a department, ask for the count separately as a number field.

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Sources

Written and checked by the OneCraft team. Last checked .