Smarter Self-Assessments

If you're a federal employee operating under a pay-for-performance system, there is one thing that could make or break you when it comes to annual performance reviews and pay increases: how you write your self-assessment.

That's according to Kathryn Troutman, president of The Résumé Place Inc., a federal hiring and résumé shop based in Baltimore. She said employees often are clueless on how best to highlight their accomplishments.

By Sept. 30, the 181,500 employees currently under the Pentagon's National Security Personnel System will have to submit their 2008 self-assessments to managers. Federal employees in other performance-based pay plans will face similar deadlines.

Troutman said many NSPS supervisors base their assessments and rating recommendations largely on an employee's self-review. "Supervisors do not necessarily know what the employee did because some of them manage 20 to 30 employees," she said. "The supervisor has trouble writing a good assessment because of the mess employees are writing."

Brad Bunn, program executive officer of NSPS, said in a recent interview that employees "aren't used to writing about themselves." As a result, he said, the Pentagon has beefed up training and created a tool called iSuccess.

"What they [employees] often write is a description of activities, as opposed to the accomplishments and results based on all that effort," Bunn said. "Once employees start to see that, they switch to talking about results, not the up-and-down lifting they did to achieve those results."

Bunn said employees also cite problems stemming from the Defense Department's automated performance appraisal application. In response, Defense plans to launch a revised version this fall. Unlike the previous tool, employees will be able to track their accomplishments throughout the year. The new application also will help workers focus on each goal separately.

"We changed the design of the tool so employees could write assessments by job objective rather than a bunch of space to write about anything," Bunn said. "They can strike the balance between being brief and concise and also having a good robust description of accomplishments."

In her new book, "How to Write Your NSPS Self-Assessment," Troutman advises that employees track their accomplishments continuously and initiate more conversations with their supervisors about their performance.

It may be too late to do that this time around, but there's still time to begin thinking about the 10 steps toward improvement Troutman recommends:

1. Get your organization's mission statement: Summarize how your work relates to it. Making this connection on paper can help you understand how you fit in.

2. Find your position description or résumé: Look to these documents to determine what is most important about your job. Develop three to five job objectives or buckets for your duties. Each goal should represent something that takes at least 20 percent of your time.

3. Write your objectives: These should be results-oriented, not job duties. Make sure to use present tense and an active voice, and use the SMART rubric -- specific, measurable, achievable, results-oriented and time-bounded.

4. Select your contributing factors: While objectives describe what you will do, contributing factors describe how you will do it. There are seven contributing favors for every NSPS employee -- cooperation and teamwork, communication, critical thinking, customer focus, leadership, resource management, and technical proficiency. In the performance appraisal application, employees should select one to three contributing factors for each job objective.

5. Conversations with your supervisor: Your supervisor will have to sign certain sections of your appraisal to demonstrate that performance discussions were held throughout the year. Make sure to talk to your supervisor in the performance planning stage, after you have completed your job objectives, during your interim review, at the end of the rating cycle, after the pay pool process and at the beginning of the new rating cycle.

6. Review your performance indicators and benchmark descriptors: These are the measuring sticks for performance. Use Troutman's NSPS Keyword Tree to define these according to your pay schedule, payband and career group.

7. Track your accomplishments: At the beginning of the appraisal year, set up a tracking system with three components -- accomplishment list, file of important records and an alarm or reminder system. During the appraisal year, regularly record your accomplishments and update your file.

8. Draft your self-assessment: Using your record of accomplishments, develop your self-assessment using a word-processing program. Do not create a draft in the performance appraisal application form. Be sure to demonstrate how your accomplishments made your organization better and check to make sure your assessment is the right length -- no longer than 4,000 characters.

9. Add your keywords: Your self-assessment will stand out in the pay pool process if you use keywords that can help the panel identify how your accomplishments match the mission. If you have completed the previous steps, you should already have defined your keywords.

10. Complete the performance appraisal application: Copy and paste the text of your draft appraisal into the tool and proofread carefully. Use bullets to improve readability and edit your content to eliminate unnecessary language.

NSPS does not appear to be going away, Troutman said, but learning to navigate the system could be the key to a Level 5 performance and the accompanying rewards.