One of my goals this year is to “Maximize Who I am“, which basically means I’m going to improve myself in all areas that I think I need to improve upon.
Grade your work performance
So with respect to my employment, I decided to grade my work. The belief is that the higher my perceived grade is, the more secure my job would be at work.
So I decided to go with a weighted average to derive my “Working Grade”. I decided to have 5 areas that I would grade myself on then I would calculate my overall working grade. I decided the 5 areas would be skill (Tech), organizational, communication, social networking, work ethic.
I’m IT (Information Technology) services, so for my job the following weighting for each topic would apply (note you topic may have a different weighting):
| Weighted | ||||
| Weight | Score | Scores | ||
| 4 | Skills (Tech) | B | 3.5 | 14 |
| 3 | Organization | C | 2.5 | 7.5 |
| 3 | Communication | C | 2.5 | 7.5 |
| 2 | Work Ethic | B | 3.5 | 7 |
| 1 | Social Networking | D | 1.5 | 1.5 |
| 13 | 37.5 | |||
| 2.88 |
So based on my calculations using weighted averages, my total score is 2.88. so it’s a little bit higher than average “middle of the road C”, so let’s say I got a “C+”. What I really need and want is for that score up to a solid “B” or “B+”. After all how wants to be average!
I weighted my skills as being more important , because I work with and on computers. Next, I ranked Communication and Organization as important but not as much as skills. Having the idea is important, but communicating the idea in a logical and easily understood manner is also very important.
How do you rate (or grade) in your self-assessment?
Update:
I plan on using the grading technique I mention above to help improve my work presence. The idea is at week end, to calculate a grade for each of the 5 areas that were identified above. Over time, while the grade in itself may be worthless at face value, the focus and attempt at improving the grade should provide me with great benefit.
Don, this is a great idea and something I need to do myself. If more of us did this exercise our economy would be in a lot better shape. Looks like you were brutally honest about yourself, I’ll have to hold myself to the same measure 🙂
It’s true, it did hurt a little doing the exercise… I had a much better social network in previous years at work, but I’ve let it slip a bit (I even dropped out of the fantasy football league at work).
This year I’m trying to better myself like never before, but it’s not easy to do, there isn’t any “Make Me better” pill, so I have to create my own tools and struggle with it. While grading myself is not objective, it will keep me focused and keep my attention on trying to become the best that I can. I’ve been doing this since the beginning of the year and I can already tell it’s working. While my job may not be any more secure, at least I feel like I’m accomplishing something positive! 🙂
Looove it!!! I totally got to do this. This is a great idea. I don’t know how I would grade myself right now because I really have to think of the categories.
Hey, if you are starting at 2.88 you can only go up, right?! 🙂
@Jane
Lol, true, it’s only up from here! I may have undercut myself a bit (except for the social networking at work)…
The important thing is to be aware of what you are tyring to accomplish. I’m trying to create new tools to help me out too. Mostly spreadsheets…
Good article. Lean Life Coach recently did a post about how trivial annual reviews are.
Like taking the initiative into your own hands. As long as you remain honest with yourself, I can’t see anything but good things coming from here.
Seen you around the sphere (and even responded), not sure why I haven’t commented on anything yet.
Regards.
Hi FinEngr,
Welcome to my site 🙂
I read Lean Life Coach too (just started to read his site, he has some good stuff).
I wrote my post after reading Financial Samurai’s piece: Do “C” Students Deserve “A” Lifestyles? .
I been playing around with a way to rate my daily performance at work anyway (initially I was going to arbitrarily assign a percentage as the grade… so 78% in my case, but decided to itemize my areas out so I could focus on what is most important.