A Status Report Doesn’t Give You All The Right Information

If you really want to understand the status of your business and how your employees are doing, you need to get away from relying on scheduled status reports. That doesn't mean to away with them, it means to not rely solely on them.

A scheduled status report is something that you ask for at regular intervals. This might be a sales report or a time sheet. The regularly scheduled status report has an opportunity for an employee to prep only the components that he or she knows you’ll be checking. It is like teaching a student how to prepare for a test. It is good to be done and often necessary, but it doesn’t show you anything beyond a certain predefined knowledge set.

So, how do we get the real pulse on how things are going in our business?

The key to this is in impromptu status reports.

An impromptu status report can be as simple as an email that says, “How are things going?” to an actual conversation on certain key components of a project or task. It can be a completely unscheduled meeting where the agenda is, “Tell me everything that you are working on and what areas you need help to do better.”

The challenge that you will face by trying to implement an impromptu meeting is that your employee won’t know what to prepare and will suddenly feel a sense of being threatened. Your employee will be concerned that you will find out the problems that are trying to be hidden.

The reality is, you need to know what problems are in your business so that you can get them resolved. So often we try to pretend that we don’t have any problems and therefore we are failing and don’t know how to fix it. I would bet that many of the businesses that are failing today (those with many rounds of layoffs or filing bankruptcy) are failing because they weren’t willing to face their real business problems.

For these meetings to be successful, you need to ask hard questions. You need to have the scheduled reports to draw data from. You need to be willing to treat this as a development time for your employee and not a disciplinary time. You can’t risk your employee feeling defensive (although some will naturally feel that way). It is not a time to punish a failure but, instead, it is time to find failures and fix them.

An impromptu status report is the only way that you are going to get unfiltered information on how your business is running. If you aren’t willing to learn from the mistakes or you aren’t willing to require your employees to give you this kind of information then you don’t deserve to be successful.