There’s almost no business threat more insidious than a team unable to communicate with each other. Usually, this problem is indicative of an even stronger issue, that the team are confused to begin with. Businesses spend good amounts of time and investment trying to keep their team up to speed, as this cannot be considered something that you may ever take for granted.
Keeping your team informed via effective reporting, then, will be the most important preventative solution to enact ahead of time. Further measures such as encouraging the use of intra-team IM apps such as Slack or utilizing your WordPress platform to its best capacities can be important.
However, we would also recommend that the need for an effective digital annual report can help you curate all of the lessons learned from that year into a document worth considering. But what should be included in that report, and how might you best offer it to your team in a manner that both educates and suggests actionable results? These are great questions to ask. Let us consider them ahead of time:
Successes & Failings
Discuss the successes and failings you may or may not have managed to gain thus far. Doing so will enable you to take a more rational, reasoned perspective to the year gone by. It will also help you provide further context to the decisions made by management or the struggles everyone on the team has lived through and will be familiar with. When you can honestly approximate which decisions panned out, which didn’t, and how you’re going to use those results to encourage your future convenience or success can be important. It will also enable your team to see you know what the problems are.
Statistics
Researching statistics and presenting that to your staff can be important. Maybe you’re aware that your failings came from the marketing direction you took rather than the productivity issues within your departments, as you’ve noticed less staff turnover and fewer absences or sick days than ever in the last twelve months. When you have statistics to back up your arguments, noting where things went wrong or admitting blame can help the team seem like a cohesive unit rather than a collective pointing the finger at one another. This will be truly appreciated.
Personal Results
It can also be worthwhile to give staff a summary of their own personal results at this time of year. Perhaps you are quite happy with their progress, or maybe you have things to work on next year. These ideals can help staff understand, in a confidential and respectful manner, just what the goals are for next year. It can also help you better illustrate where you hope to take their professional development. Of course, coming to insightful conclusions is always the first step before approaching someone with this data, because it must be used as a platform, not a means in which to denigrate.
With this advice, we’re sure you’ll keep your team informed via effective reporting.