Self-Evaluations
Boards and committees can greatly benefit from regular self-evaluation. The purpose is to identify areas of board or committee functions that are working well and areas that could be improved.
The process is easy and consists of a questionnaire that should be answered by all board or committee members. The answers can be shared openly or anonymously depending on agreement.
Self-Evalution with MyCommittee
MyCommittee has a built-in self-evaluation tool. The questionnaire templates provided are based on best practices and make it very quick and easy to get started. Once you have created your own questionnaire, you can use the self-evaluation tool to create an offline meeting. This is a meeting with a start and end time that can run over multiple hours, days or weeks and can be joined by members whenever they want.
Learn more about offline meetings.
Members can join the offline meeting and answer the questions at their leisure. At the end, the results of all ratings will be calculated automatically and a summary can be added.
Creating a self-evaluation questionnaire
You can create and manage self-evaluation questionnaires for your board or committee in the settings area. Click on settings (top right corner) and open the self-evaluation section.
Create a questionnaire from a template
A fast and easy way to get started is to copy an existing questionnaire and customize this copy to your needs. MyCommittee provides self-evaluation questionnaire templates for boards and committees. There is a quick view button that will allow you to preview the sections and questions in the templates.
When you click on ‘Copy this template’, the entire template will be copied, including all sections and questions. The questionnaire will automatically open in edit mode and you can now start to customize the questionnaire to your own needs.
To add a new section, enter the section title in the box at the bottom of the template and click on ‘Add’. The new section will be added at the end of the questionnaire.
To add a new item to a section, hover over the section title until you see a '+' button. Clicking that button will add a new item to the end of that section. You can edit the item details on the right-hand side of the page.
Sections and items can easily be re-arranged (sorted) by dragging the item to a new place in the questionnaire. All changes are saved automatically.
The questionnaire templates use the ‘Anonymous Poll’ type by default. This means that you won’t be able to see the ratings from individual members but only the totals. If you wish to see these details, switch the item types to regular ‘Poll’ type. To learn more about the item types that are available see More about decision items
Create an empty questionnaire
If your organization already has an existing questionnaire, or you want to create your own questionnaire from scratch, click on ‘Create an empty questionnaire’. The questionnaire editor will open an empty questionnaire. You can now add your own sections and items.
Note: Each board and committee can create up to three self-evaluation questionnaires.
Share a self-evaluation questionnaire
An easy way to create and use a common self-evaluation questionnaire across your organization is for the board or a committee to create the questionnaire and share it with other committees.
To share a questionnaire, open the questionnaire in the settings area and click on the ‘Share' button. Select the 'Share this template’ option and enter an optional description. All committees in your organization will now be able to use this questionnaire as their template when they want to create a new questionnaire.
Starting the self-evaluation with the tool
Once your questionnaire is created and customized to your needs and you are ready to start the self-evaluation, click on ‘Self-evaluation’ under the ‘More’ menu.
A self-evaluation runs as an offline meeting (see Offline meetings to learn more). To create the meeting, enter a title for the self-evaluation (E.g. Annual board self-evaluation) and select the questionnaire you want to use. Click on ‘Create offline meeting’. A new offline meeting will be created. The questionnaire you created in the settings area is used as a template to create the offline meeting agenda. All sections and items will be created automatically and the meeting will open in edit mode.
The rest is very similar to any other offline meeting. You can select the start and end time and can still edit the agenda (questionnaire). Members will be notified automatically by email when the meeting starts. At that time, all members will be able to access the meeting and answer the questions. Members will be able to enter their answers until the meeting ends.
You can find the self-evaluation offline meeting from now on under the Meetings tab.
After the self-evaluation is done
Once the meeting ends, the results of all ranking questions will be calculated automatically. You can now open the summary of the meeting, view the final results and optionally add a conclusion to each item.
Members will have no access to the summary until it is published. After the summary is published and approved, you can electronically approve the summary. A final PDF version will be created automatically and the summary will become read-only.