With over 10 years of experience, Weekdone has provided tens of thousands of teams from startups to Fortune 500 with a simple goal-setting, status updates and progress reporting tool. This is why we developed Weekdone.
Weekdone is your solution for connecting managers and employees through real-time updates, e-mail reports and social newsfeed. Try it here! It’s free forever for small teams and offers a free trial for larger ones! Read about the benefits here.
The information in these reports help managers track team and individual’s progress while observing both company and team goals.
However, not many are familiar with the benefits of progress reporting.
So, let’s fix that too!
When you keep in mind these three things, you already have what it takes to write a simple report. Should you choose to try Weekdone for free, these 3 categories are the ones in the default weekly status update form. *Which you can change and customize the titles of, if something else resonates more to you 🙂
Furthermore, if you really want to succeed in communicating the details and nuances of progress reports, you should always have these three questions in the back of your mind: who, how, and what?
The key part of progress reports is your team. Michele Puccio, Sales Director of Arrow, says that they helped him “stay connected with the team”. This is why your immediate focus should be on your colleagues and team dynamics.
Reports need to be concise and focused, so you should understand what your colleagues want. To help yourself with this task, ask a few questions:
Next, consider the tone of writing. Managers and executives may not understand the intricacies of employees’ conversational style. Use longer, comprehensible sentences but also try to refrain from writing essays. Ideally, there should be 5-7 keywords per sentence.
Take a look at a sample report for further guidelines and inspiration. Remember that the modern world is metrics-driven, so figures are more important than descriptions.
Instead of: “we need to increase the output”
Try: “we need to increase the output by X%”.
Concrete goals are more inspirational and, at the same time, more attainable.
The one mistake people tend to make when writing a progress report is avoiding writing about mistakes altogether. The purpose of progress reports is to objectively identify key difficulties and concerns and help them along the way. Even if the problem was already addressed, it needs to be put into writing to help avoid making the same kind of mistake in the future.
Secondly, keep in mind the relevance of your writing. Explain how every individual item connects and compares to Progress.
The key to progress reports is regularity. Progress reports need to be done at least on a monthly basis, though weekly is encouraged. With a notification system integrated in Weekdone, you ensure that everybody remembers to send their reports in time.
Try Team Compass for automated weekly progress reports.
This one seems a bit obvious, but going ahead without explaining employee benefits risks employee buy-in later. You need to explain the ‘whys’ to everyone. Some easy benefits to sell include: employees having a voice within the organization, and raised productivity and focus on new plans. To find out more about selling the benefits to your team, we recommend drawing from this infographic.
Create a culture that allows discussions to be held from both sides and allow team members to provide feedback to their superiors as well as the other way around. Making a culture that encourages feedback as the default model improves overall company communication and makes progress reports more meaningful to employees and managers alike.
Use progress reports (and other tools like our Weekdone) to decrease the amount of time wasted at meetings by encouraging frequent updating through the web and mobile-based services. If your status meetings stay in one place, you’ll save countless hours every month by writing instead of speaking.
It may sound a little promotional, but online tools can make the implementation process so much easier. Progress reporting can be done via e-mail, word document or spreadsheet, but the challenges are far greater and you risk not having all of your information in one, easily accessible place. Combing through Google docs and emails is a colossal waste of time, after all. One of the advantages online tools have is that they automatically remind your team to fill their form, compile the received information, and then present it to you in a way that’s both appealing and fun.
Using a ready-made template does not mean that you have to adjust to its specifications. Actually, these tools are flexible enough to meet your standards and needs. What is more, they provide you with even better ideas that might have been missed otherwise.
Before inviting your whole team, make sure you have set up Objectives. The goals that need to be reached in a certain period and key results that help the team achieve these. Try this management technique used by LinkedIn, Twitter and Google. For a more in depth understanding of OKRs, feel free to check the Weekdone step-by-step guide to OKRs.
After you have set up all crucial information, it is time to invite your team. Send them an automatic e-mail to sign up.
Explaining this new tool to everyone on the team might be a challenge. Especially when you are not too familiar with it. No worries, that is exactly why product support people are here for. Remember, there is no such thing as a dumb question. There are only dumb answers. Don’t be afraid to contact the support for additional materials, demo or whatever is on your mind.
Sign up for free Weekdone team management software trial to implement best practice based progress reporting in your team. Set structured goals to align activities throughout your organization via leading OKR software. Track weekly plans and progress. Provide feedback and move everyone in a unified direction. Try it now!
