It’s a good habit to routinely check ourselves—whether it’s to mark progress on our goals or simply to correct if something is off.

Self-assessment can be easily overlooked, especially in industries like facilities management where attention is divided among tasks and challenges. However, it remains a powerful tool to assure quality, mitigate risk, and avoid difficult performance conversations.

Benefits

Self-assessment contributes to overall operational health. It helps identify process inefficiencies and potential issues before they escalate, contributing to smoother operations and long-term stability. Here are some of the benefits:

• Accountability: Self-assessment encourages individuals to take ownership of their responsibilities and ensures teams are aligned with operational goals and performance standards.
• Transparency: By fostering open communication, self-assessment builds trust at all levels of the organization. Regular evaluations give clear insight into performance—showing both strengths and areas that need improvement.
• Culture: A program of regular self-assessment builds a culture of openness and continuous improvement. Encouraging team members to contribute feedback and ideas positively enhances engagement and morale.
• Proactivity: Self-assessment enables early identification of problems for timely corrective actions. It’s focused on prevention, reducing the likelihood of issues, client dissatisfaction, or operational disruptions.
• Credibility and Trust: Consistent, transparent performance assessments build trust internally, with leadership and employees, and lead to more trust with clients because they know you do what you say.

Neglecting to regularly evaluate ourselves increases the risk of misalignment and could create more vulnerabilities to financial or regulatory penalties. Facility leaders can set an example about what is important. How seriously they take assessments sets the tone.

Best Practices

The foundation of self-assessment is being honest and ethical. Those are non-negotiable. This includes being honest with yourself—even if it’s uncomfortable. Here’s how to build an effective self-assessment program:

• Know Your Standards: Knowledge is power. Teams, and their individual contributors, need to have a clear understanding of their job requirements, key performance indicators (KPIs), goals, etc.
• Establish a Schedule: Biweekly, monthly, quarterly—scale the timing based on what works for the business. Without a set cadence, assessments will be less effective and more often overlooked. If assessments are not conducted regularly, there is no good data to compare results against.
• Leverage Data: After an assessment, look at the data collected. This is the time to look for gaps in meeting KPIs.
• Engage Your Clients: Aligning operations with expectations ensures continuous process improvement.
• Set Actionable Outcomes: Data does not solve a problem on its own. Use the information discovered and take action. Showing stakeholders how operations are reacting based on data and adjusting to ensure compliance goes a long way in establishing and maintaining trust.
• Tools for Success: Leverage training platforms and development plans to invest in your team. Balance individualized learning and standardized training. Emphasizing development builds a positive culture where associates understand they are valued. When individuals feel valued, it positively affects performance.

Feedback can feel uncomfortable, but embracing self-assessment is a positive accountability measure to ensure consistent, quality facility experiences. Quality assurance is the walk behind the talk—helping facilities managers remain compliant and deliver on promises.

Lawyna Holland-Parish is a U.S. Army veteran with more than 30 years of quality assurance (QA) and biopharmaceutical experience, including serving as director of vaccine production. She leads ESFM’s Center of Excellence team, which includes QA; business standards and practice; technical services and energy solutions; mobilization; and environment, health, and safety. She also serves as a cGMP/GxP Subject Matter Expert, assisting clients with their contamination control strategic planning.

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