First appraisal cycle I'm running and the self-assessments are coming back useless. How do you get people to actually engage with them?
First proper appraisal round I'm running on my own (small company, ~40 people, I'm the only one in HR currently), so apologies if this is a solved problem everyone cracked years ago.
The bit doing my head in is the self-assessment section. I send the form out and it comes back one of two ways: completely blank, or people have basically pasted their job description back at me. Almost nobody can write down what they're actually good at or where they've grown. And when I sit in on the one-to-ones the line managers hit the same wall. They know this employee is great, but ask them to put it into words for a development plan and it's usually "reliable, good team player" and that's it.
I redid the template again last week thinking it was a wording problem. It's not. I think people genuinely can't describe their own strengths cold and a nicer form isn't going to fix that.
So how do you actually handle this? Do you scrap the self-assessment bit entirely? Give managers a competency framework to work off instead? Run a session first so people have some language before they fill it in? Anything that gets people past the blank-page thing would be a massive help.
Not trying to overhaul the whole process this cycle. I just want the development conversations to be worth having.