In spite of her illness and daily pain (because of lupus), she continues to just excel at her job. Last year I posted this: This year, the employees had to write their own "performance review", in a sense. It is a little bit weird to highlight all the things you've done to help the company in the past year, but on the other hand it's a good way to help the employer understand your value to the company. You might have helped with things they weren't aware of etc. There were several categories like in previous years and you had to basically give yourself a grade and then submit the whole thing to the office manager who then would either agree with you or disagree. You can't rate yourself too highly or lowly or you might either make management aware you aren't doing as good a job as they thought you were, or they might think you are underperforming in one or more categories while you might think you're doing great. Tough balancing act. The "carrot" for this year's review was that only the top performers nation-wide would be getting the best raises. This was both an incentive to the top performers that they'd be in line to get more and a subtle hint to the poor or average performers that in order to get much of anything, they'd have to kick their efforts up a gear or two. Only the top 10% of each work position would be getting the good raises. She was in the top 10% For her position, that means she was one of 7 best performers out of 70 for the past year. Her overall performance for the year was again a 1 which means she was a "top performer" in her position (I'd say so, being one of the top 7! ) Bringing home the bacon!! She being as good as she is impressive enough for someone not in daily pain (shoulders, legs, arms, back, neck) but for someone like her who's struggling to even get out of bed sometimes, it's downright incredible. Very very proud of her. I wish I could somehow make enough money to allow her to retire - she deserves it. Commuting for three hours per day is taking its toll.
That's just outstanding! Great feeling to be good at what you do AND get recognized for it. Hopefully she also really likes what she is doing too. The self rating (in theory) is to avoid disconnects in perceived performance. Doesn't matter if one or the other is high or low, it's the difference that's important. If there is a gap between the manager's and employee's perception of performance then there is a communication problem (generally on the manager's side). The idea is that there should be no surprises when it comes to evaluation time. There is a slight benefit in that an employee might point out some things the manager didn't track or was aware of but that usually doesn't make much difference. The manager has pretty much already rated you. It's to catch the situation where the employee thought this or that was important and the manager thought something else was. ...I really hate doing those... When I started at my current job they didn't do that here. Yea! This year HR has instituted all that stuff. You do objectives and agree on them, then you use those at evaluation time. Hahahaha, I've been trying for 20 years and I finally got a manager to go for "How about if you just fill in my goals and objectives and I will sign off on them if they're ok.". Probably won't work next time around.