Conduct a board or committee self-evaluation with MyCommittee
The goal of a self-evaluation is to identify areas, processes or functions in your organization that are working well and areas that could be improved. Self-evaluations can be performed at the board level, committee level and even individual member level.
Boards and committees of various entities are required by law or regulation to conduct annual self-evaluations, but it makes sense for all boards and committees of public or private companies and nonprofit organizations to regularly step back, review, evaluate and make improvements. A self-evaluation is a great tool to do this.
Conducting a self-evaluation can seem a little daunting at first but in fact, the process is easy. A self-evaluation is typically performed by means of a questionnaire that should be answered by all members of your board or committee. Once the questionnaires are completed and returned, the answers are compiled, and the results are shared with the group or individual members. These results are then used to discuss and identify priorities for improvement.
MyCommittee helps you to conduct a self-evaluation by automating the entire process. The only manual part is creating the questionnaire for your group. Topics and areas to consider will vary from board to board and from committee to committee but even here, MyCommittee will help you by providing questionnaire templates covering a wide variety of topics to consider. If you already have a questionnaire, you can use our questionnaire editor to enter and save it for future use.
Self-evaluation questionnaires are managed in the settings area. Navigate to ‘Settings’ and click on ‘Self-evaluation’. To create a new questionnaire, click on ‘New self-evaluation questionnaire’. The next page will provide a few different options to continue:
If you are already conducting self-evaluations and have an existing questionnaire, you can use the questionnaire editor in MyCommittee to enter it, so it is ready to be used in the next step. In this case, click on ‘Start with an empty questionnaire’. Give your questionnaire a name and start adding the sections and questions.
If you don’t already have a questionnaire, you can use one of the templates provided by MyCommittee to get started. Click on the ‘Quick view’ buttons to look at the content of the templates and choose one that is a close match to what you have in mind. Click on ‘Copy this template’ and your questionnaire will be created from the selected template and will open in edit mode. You can now make any changes by adding or deleting sections and questions.
A quick note about rating items
For self-evaluation questionnaires, the rating item type is typically used. The questions are formulated as statements and users can indicate how much they agree or disagree with the statement.
When you select the rating item type, the system will automatically translate your choices into a rating number from low to high. Here is an example of the choices and the rating score:
Once your questionnaire is ready, the self-evaluation can be started any time, and this is a fully automated process. Self-evaluations run as offline meetings. You can schedule the beginning and end time, and everything happens automatically.
“Self-evaluations run as offline meetings.”
To start the self-evaluation, click on the ‘More’ menu option and select ‘Self-evaluations’. On this page, enter a title for your evaluation and select the questionnaire you want to use (You can create more than one questionnaire in the settings). The meeting will automatically be created and the only thing you need to do is choose the start and end time.
At the scheduled start time, members will receive an email with a link to the meeting. All members can now access the questionnaire any time. At the schedule end time, the questionnaire will become read-only, the ratings are automatically calculated, and the organizer will receive an reminder email to create a summary and publish the results.
At this point, only the organizer can view the results and can add an optional summary (or minutes) to each item.
In order to share and discuss the results with your board or committee members, the organizer need to ‘Publish’ the summary. Only after the summary is published, members will have access to the results of the questionnaire.
It seems to make sense to discuss the results with the group in a regular ‘evaluation’ meeting. You can still edit the summary section of each item at this point. If you want an official record of the discussions, you can enter the key discussion points for each item during or after your evaluation meeting.
A few notes:
Looking for a downloadable version of a self-evaluation questionnaire?
Visit our self-evaluation templates page.
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