Annual reviews
21st Jan 2021
For many employees, the annual review comes with dread. Some see it as a pointless exercise, others try hard to justify a pay rise.
Within Framework, we have a commitment to conduct an annual review, but the format is flexible and self-directed. Refreshingly the whole intention is to make the process actually useful to us as individuals, and to enable reflection on our current practice and future development.
I’ve used a couple of competency frameworks and assessed my skills against these, which has given me a few areas to pursue to get more experience. I’ve reached out to clients for feedback, and I’m genuinely interested to hear what they have to say.
I’ve also done some analysis of how I actually spend my working time as opposed to how much time I’m contracted for and how much time I aspire to spend on learning and reflection. As a result, I can see clearly that I’ve spent more time than contracted on most tasks (not unusual!), much more time than ideal on admin, and also that I’ve NOT spent the time I’d like on learning. As a result of this, one of my intentions for 2021 is to keep my diary a little freer and allow more time for reflections and learning.
I’ve also been reflecting on the nature of my work, and how this has been shaped by the events of 2020. I’ve missed doing consultancy and writing work, and would like to do more of this in 2021. I’ve been very fortunate that my training work moved online and by the autumn I was back to a normal income. I’ve been surprised that delivering online training can still be an enjoyable and rewarding experience. Participants’ evaluations have been very positive from the start, but it is also interesting to see how the scores and comments improved through the year as I became more confident and skilled in online delivery.
For the first time ever I’ve actually enjoyed the annual review process and it’s been more worthwhile than any I’ve done before. It’s given me a real opportunity to reflect on the past year, and it felt like a closure process at the end of a tough year. It’s also given me focus for this next year and allowed me to set intentions which are soundly grounded in evidence.
