(Self-)reflection: the tool for personal growth of your employees

At the beginning of the annual cycle, your employees set up a personal plan to achieve their goals. Regular reflection is essential for realizing these goals.

To encourage a culture of reflection, you need to activate and inspire your employees to regularly reflect on their development desires.

We are ready to assist you with this and have therefore developed this toolkit.

Toolkit Reflection

This toolkit includes steps and interventions you can take to encourage your employees to regularly reflect on their personal development plan. We have developed supporting materials for this, so you can get started right away.

The value of reflection

Reflection equals growth

Regularly reflecting on the things you want to achieve and develop contributes to your professional and personal growth. This generates positive energy and motivation and increases the chance that you will achieve your goals.

Reflection ensures fair and complete evaluations

If you reflect regularly, you build a log of everything you have been working on over the past period. When writing your self-evaluation, both you and your manager have all these reflections at hand. This allows you to write an honest evaluation that is not solely based on feelings or events from the past few weeks.

Reflection saves time during evaluation

When you start working on your self-evaluation in Dialog, you have all your notes right at hand. You can, of course, use these as input, making the writing of your self-evaluation much less time-consuming for both the employee and the manager.

Reflection in Dialog

Goals top of mind

Employees can indicate in Dialog how often they would like to receive a reminder to reflect on their personal plan. They then receive reminder emails containing the goals they have set for themselves and the question of how they are doing with these goals. This ensures that the personal plan remains top of mind and prevents it from disappearing into the 'desk drawer'.

How often do your employees receive this reminder? Here is explained how the employee can still make adjustments to this!

Fact Check

How do your employees reflect on their goals? In Dialog, you have an overview of how your employees feel they are doing with their goals. Read here how you can quickly and easily view this.

Getting around Dialog - smileys

Do the employees know how the smiley functionality can be used? Reflecting on goals using smileys is a low-threshold way to keep goals top of mind. It also provides a quick, efficient, and fun way to show how an employee is doing. Read here how easy reflection for employees has been made in Dialog.

Getting around Dialog - notes

Do the employees know how the notes functionality works? Written reflection, of course, provides more depth than just smileys. This often feels like a lot (extra) work, but if one sentence per goal is recorded each month, then at the end of the year cycle, you still have 10 to 12 reflection points to look back on - super valuable!

Stimulating Reflection

Set an (organizational) goal

What percentage of your employees do you want to reflect on a personal plan each month or quarter? And what is the final date by which they should have done this? By setting a goal and deadline in advance, you know what you are working towards as an organization. This creates a bit more pressure and expectations on the employees, and less non-commitment - this must, of course, fit your organization.

Inspiring communication

In addition to the reminders that employees receive from Dialog, it is also valuable for the organization to communicate about the value of reflection. You can activate them with inspiring communication to reflect on their development and to discuss it. Here you can find a mail template for employees, and a mail template for managers.

Support the good conversation

Reflection becomes even more valuable when you discuss it. However, we know that many managers find these conversations challenging, which can be a barrier to having them. To maximize the likelihood that these conversations take place, it's important to make it as easy as possible for your managers. Here you can find an example that can provide managers with a structure for preparing and conducting conversations. This can of course be tailored to your organization.

Reflection as part of team sessions

Are team sessions led by managers held in your organization? If so, it can be valuable to join these and make reflection a part of the session. Reflecting together on the things your colleagues are proud of often leads to a positive atmosphere and can be inspiring. Here you can find a step-by-step plan on how to make reflection a part of a team session. Here you can find the mail template for preparing the team session.

Immediate insight into how your employees are doing

Let the managers experience that they can see at a glance how their team is doing, and thereby truly appreciate the added value of Dialog in supporting their team. In this dashboard, you can easily and quickly see how the employees' goals are progressing through the use of colors. This keeps managers well-informed and allows them to respond more quickly if challenges arise.

Tips & Tricks

Reflect at fixed moments

Your employees are, of course, very busy with their daily tasks. Caught up in the day-to-day, many employees forget to focus on their own development. Therefore, it is very valuable to build a structure so that this truly becomes part of the work. If the reminder from Dialog itself is not enough, have teams schedule a joint monthly moment, where all employees really get the time to engage with this. Naturally, guidance from the manager is of great importance.

Start small

Is reflection perceived as a lot of (extra) work in your organization? Then it's a good idea to lower the threshold and focus on using smileys. This only takes a few minutes and keeps the goals top of mind. A nice next step is substantive reflection through notes.

Good moments for reflection

Certainly, here's the response with HTML formatting: Ultimately, you want reflection to become part of the way of working. Therefore, link reflection to moments where reflecting on goals would naturally fit. Guidance from the manager is important, especially in the beginning, to give employees that extra push and to keep talking about it periodically. Examples of these moments:

Just before a one-on-one or team session
After you have received feedback
After giving a presentation
After completing a project
At the end of the week or month
Before a vacation

A good example leads to good follow

Let the management team, HR, and managers set the example by regularly reflecting on goals using smileys and notes. If the management layers do not use Dialog themselves, it becomes more challenging to discuss and encourage its use, leading to employees potentially seeing it as less important or, in the worst case, even unimportant.

Openly sharing experiences

Let multiple employees from different levels within the organization participate in an inspirational video or message for the intranet. In this, share experiences with Dialog and about reflecting on his/her goals. How has consciously pausing to assess your progress and goals helped on both the short and long term?

Discover our help center with articles on using Dialog