I work for a very small company (8 year-round employees including the owner), and have for just over 5 years. I love it, generally. But this year, we're doing self-evaluations, and I fucking hate it.
My feelings are this: there's no way for me to “win.” While I understand that self-evaluations are good for you as the employee to take a critical look at yourself in specific areas and see how you feel about areas where you can improve and the areas where you are doing well, having to turn in this evaluation to your supervisor and boss is very stressful to me. I don't know how harsh I should be on myself. If I'm too lenient, the management team is going to to say “wow, she's really out of touch.” If I'm too hard on myself, they'll say “oh, man, she really does suck, I had no idea it was this bad.” The only way for me to win this exchange is if I can guess exactly how hard the management will be on me, and at that point, why fucking bother?
Never mind the fact that it smacks strongly of a freshman writing seminar where they say “okay, now we're going to do a self-evaluation and grade yourself,” and then that's the grade you get because the TA doesn't give a fuck and they just got a whole bunch of freshman to do their work for them. I'm not saying that that's what my company is doing, but it feels a bit like that.
The thing is, I can justify either a 1 or a 5 rating in just about every single category, I just need to know how hard to be on myself. I'm not looking for advice (if you have some, great, I'll gladly listen), or sympathy, I really have just had this rant in my head for the past month, and want to share with someone. I'm at home sick today, and thinking that this would be a good thing for me to be working on while I'm limited to computer work, and it's stressing me out.
So I really want to know, how do all of you view self-evaluations?