For close to 10 years, we here at Weekdone – the leading weekly status reporting software for teams – have been at the forefront of building tools to make your team shine. You can try it out for free here. Here’s what we’ve learned on the way.
Have you ever wondered exactly why and how to write a employee weekly status report that is effective? Vladimir Nikolaev answers these questions in a nice presentation:
“For a junior staff member the weekly report is the only possibility to demonstrate his/her management that he/she is:
- doing the right things,
- doing things right,
- loyal to the company,
- constantly progressing his/her knowledge and skills.”
Reportingad writes that: „A weekly status report enables managers to track their employees’ performance and progress at all levels. Normally managers do not have the time to talk to every employee about each weekly task in detail due to time shortage. Thus, written weekly reports are an efficient way to communicate all projects, tasks and progresses during a week. This way entry-level employees can demonstrate their performance and progress to the middle management that can forward those reports to their executives. There are several prerequisites though to make weekly reports efficient: It has to be delivered in a timely manner, must be clear and concise. It must be in a format that is informative, straightforward and honest.“
Specialized tools lik Weekdone help you to:
- Easily adopt the best practice of weekly reporting templates for employee progress reports.
- Automate the process of employee weekly status report reminders which saves time.
It’s important to remember, managers shall not just have to read, but make comments in the employee’s report. So giving employees feedback is crucially important.
The Big Secret.
Let me share a secret: while there are tens of different uses of a employee weekly status report, there is one key thing in common for all of them.
Let’s look at how to create a weekly status report for your own use, be it personal, team or company.
3 basic building blocks of a employee weekly status report.
Thinking of it, whatever you are reporting a status report always answers one key question: “Where are we standing now?”
To answer that we must look at both past, present and future. Because of that any status report is built out of three categories:
- Progress: the past, what has been achieved already.
- Plans: the future, what are the goals, objectives and plans.
- Problems: what challenges have been encountered.
That’s it. It’s called the PPP. That’s the foundation for the world’s simplest employee status report on which all variations are based on.
You can call the sections differently: Done, To-do, Challenges or Last Week, Next Week, Open issues – it’s still the same.
You can always add additional categories to Progress, Plans and Problems. In sales you could add a section for key leads and customer meetings. In marketing a section to describe specific campaigns and events. In development you could list proposed feature ideas and customer feedback.
Use status reporting wisely.
You can use it to report to your boss, or vice versa or to get an employee report back from your team members.
Use it regularly on specific intervals – be it weekly or monthly – or just once to give an update on a project.
You can try Weekdone right now for free.