PA and Secretary Community - Deskdemon.com

Hello,

My name is Melli and since a few minutes I'm a new member. I discovered this forum by chance and must say it's really great.

I am 36 years old, German, not yet married, and work as a secretary.

Only being a new member for some minutes now, I already would need your advice:

Our company introduced a new appraisal system and next week I will be appraised by my superior. Beforehand I have to write down a self-evaluation. I have really no idea what to write. Did you ever do this kind of thing and could give me ideas? I will try to write down some ideas this afternoon and would like to ask you wheter you could give me your opinion on the outcome and I would also appreciate if you could correct my English (yes, we have to do it in English).

Kind regards
Melli

(Sorry for the English mistakes...)

Welcome, Melli! It's very nice to see you here.

You English seems very good already, but lots of us like helping. I would be happy to read through what you write and offer suggestions. By email or private message might be best.

Appraisals that I have had in the past have been varied in quality. I have know of appraisals where a supervisor has used it as a chance to list everything that has been done wrong in the last year or has said that everything is fine and left it at that. I hope that your superior will be helpful and has been trained in giving appraisals.

In your self-evaluation I suggest that you identify the following areas:
1: Areas of your work where you think you have done well, with examples to show how you are a competent and valuable employee.
2: Areas of your work where you think you have improved, plus examples and details of how you have improved to show that you are improving and growing
3: Things that you have learned from, such as mistakes (don't put too many in!) or things that you would do differently in the future to show that you have learned from valuable experience
4. Things that you would like to achieve in the future, improvements you would like to make and things you will be trying to avoid.

Hope that helps!

Bethalize
Peer Moderator

Thank you very much for your explanations and your readiness to help me with this - for me crucial - excercise. The points you indicated are really helpful!

I hope that I have something ready on Monday and will accept with pleasure to send it to you by e-mail for comments.

In the meantime I wish you all a a nice week-end.

Melli

I'd just add another point - our appraisal system is linked to identifying training. If there's a particular type of training which is relevant to your work, that you would like, it might be worth mentioning this. You could link it to something you're less confident about or that you would like to aim to improve at work.

Luci

Excellent point, that.

Joan Lloyd, whose articles feature on the front page of Deskdemon and whose advice has helped me several times in the past, has a very good article on appraisals.
http://www.joanlloyd.com/articles/open.asp?art=/articles/045.htm


A very good point she makes is not to be defensive in the face of criticism. You need to hear the criticism and then ask for examples of how you could improve. It can be hard to do this, but if you are prepared, it helps.

Bethalize
Peer Moderator

Thanks for that too,

I've got my appraisal on Monday 27th Jan, we have an in house  self evaluation doc which  we fill out first and we go over this and also discuss the appraisal in detail. now I have a lot more info about the process I'm actually looking forward to it,

the best advice go in prepared.

Hi Melli!

I'm German as well, and before I moved to England a few years ago, I didn't even know what appraisals were. The important thing is: don't panic. Be honest with yourself, what you have achieved, what you want to achieve, what you are doing, where you are happy/unhappy. Have a positive attitude, and even if bossie thinks you a bit too positive, and he/she sees things in a different way, well that's the idea of an appraisal. It is YOUR chance to tell them what you think (unless you are extremely happy to get on as well with bossie as I am).

Bossie might even give you the opportunity to make any suggestions how to improve some aspects of work.

Do you live in England? If you want to contact me outside this forum, my direct email address is: nickless@deskdemon.com

Good luck for your appraisal!

Annegret
Preston, UK

I don't have anything to add to the advise already provided.  I just wanted to take the opportunity to welcome you to DD.  And I'd also be willing to read anything you prepare, either via e-mail or private mail (PM).

CountriGal
Peer Moderator

Thanks again to you all! You are really great!!!

My job just left the office, so now I will sit down and think about what I could write.

Hopefully will let you know my result on Monday.

To Emero: Good luck for Monday

Bye for now,
Melli

I don't have time to write any advice at the moment, but I did want to pause and say hello to our new friend.  Welcome to DD!

Ellen in TX

Hello Melli,

You've received some excellent advice here.  I would just like to add a couple of points from my own company's appraisal: what could your manager do more of and what could your manager do less of?  It's your manager's duty to "manage" and therefore to help build teamwork and nuture your professional development.  

Let us know how you get on.

Raindance

Hi Melli,

I think I am too late to offer any advice but accept my congrats on joining this wonderful site and best of luck for your appraisal.

mnaeempk
Naeem in Pakistan

I was so busy today so that I had not the opportunity to check the forum until now. Just want to say THANK YOU to you all for the warm welcome!

I am still writing down my ideas for my self-assessment...

Dear all,

Just wanted to let you know that I didn't come back to you as I got a little bit under pressure to prepare my self evaluation. I was ill last week and when I came back to the office on Monday my boss immediately gave me an appointment for yesterday morning.

So I quickly had to prepare something. Already last week I was in contact with Liz and so I continued to bombard her with corrections, new ideas etc.
Again a big THANK YOU to Liz and to all of you who gave me valuable tips.

And here the result of my appraisal:
As I said, my interview was foreseen for yesterday at 10 am.  I already was on my way to my bosse's office when he came out and said that he will go to meeting X.

I didn't say anything, but was soooo disappointed. What a behaviour - on Monday he insisted on our meeting and I took everything so serious and then this.

Finally I left a message asking whether he would like to fix a new appointment for our meeting. When he came back from his meeting he looked at me and asked for when our meeting was scheduled and I could FEEL it that he has not forgotten it and that he did it on purpose (I also gave him a copy of my self-evaluation indicating on a cover page date and time of our meeting the evening before). The thing was that I was not informed about this meeting where he went to and it was not in his calendar neither. Anyway my bosse's intention was to tell me that I should know what's on the calendar (he's right but I was ill, no one told me and how can I then know??? - but I didn't say anything of course).

Well, anyway - Today we had our meeting and I am more disappointed than yesterday. I was so good prepared, wanted to let him know my training needs, wanted to hear what he expects from me, which things I did not good  and how we can improve etc. etc. - but nothing.

He just told me that my colleague will leave us on 1 March (this was not new) and that we have to continue our work and that we will get someone for support.

Then he just told me that he agrees with my self-evaluation and that he will write a report which I have to countersign when I agree and that was it.

I tried to stimulate the discussion and referred to training needs and told him that sometimes I have problems with his appointments - but he was not very keen on discussing all this with me.

Well, he was very nice to me I must say (he must as I will have to run for some time  the secretariat alone when my colleague leaves us) , but finally we just had a chat and not an appraisal.

I hope that you could understand what I want to say - I am writing between doing other things and don't really have the time to think how I could express myself better. But it would not have been nice from my part not to give you a feedback after you have all proposed to help me with this exercise.

So, now I have to work again.

Bye for now and I am really glad that I have found this forum!!!

Have a nice evening.
Melli

Melli, this is part of office life. We have to pick positives out of negatives. Apart from the little initial mishap, the good part of this episode is that he AGREES to your self-evaluation and I am sure your self-evaluation would include all the essential elements of a job appriasal including your training needs. In the meantime, keep on preparing in the light of whatever discussions that you had with the boss.

mnaeempk
Naeem in Pakistan

Don't take his behaviour personally - it doesn't reflect on you. He accepts your self-evaluation.

He's busy or he's a lazy so and so (polite phrase here) and he sees your company's appraisal system as just a chore, doesn't appreciate how much it matters to you.

I would accept it this time but if there are things you would like to change/improve, ask him for a meeting where you could discuss those.

Luci

Oh no, I will not take this personally and I will not think about it anymore. It's done and finish.

Wish you all a nice week-end.
Melli

This one might be done, but dont forget this.  Next appraisal will probably be the same way.  This will now allow you to know what to expect (or not expect) from him and you'll be more prepared for his way of doing things.  Unfortunately, I've had a few bosses like this.  The best boss I had was similiar to this, in that our appraisals were self-done and he just signed off on them, but the good thing was he didn't wait until evaluation time to let you know of areas he could see might need improvement.  He also had an open door policy, so any room for improvement I had could be brought to him immediately.  So it was kind of nice not to stress over appraisals, to know at all times how he appraised me because of immediate feed-back.  You might be able to develop this with this bossie, simply start asking for time to speak to him on issues that you think are important, especially education and advancement opportunities, and see what happens.

CountriGal
Peer Moderator