Author: Anthony M

Some people do daily reports to account for their time at work, some are proud to share their progress, and for some, it’s nothing more than an obligation. The reasons may vary, but the important thing is that it should work for you.

For us at СleanTalk daily reports are a full-fledged communication channel, so each employee sends their daily report with the current day’s results and the next day’s plans to the whole team at once (we use Gmail + Google Groups for this). Yes, each employee gets about 20 report emails at the end of the day but it really helps to save time. Let us share with you how it works.

1. Your report is opened by someone interested in it

There’s nothing worse than wasting time on a report that isn’t useful. In a normal “vertical” reporting system, you and your colleagues end the work day by sending reports and plans for the next day to your team leader, and it’s nice if they have enough time to read and make sense of them. Also, it will be a great success if they are able to give feedback on them. With this system, the synchronization of the team members’ work lays entirely on the team leader’s shoulders who further distributes and monitors the tasks.

With a horizontal reporting system (like ours), all reports end up in the same mailing list group in Google Groups. When employees work on the same product, they often know the details better than their team leader, that is what exact task should be paid the most attention to and whose attention should be prioritized higher based on their previous experience.

2. You can adjust the plan of action better or correct a mistake in advance

For example, when one team has to start doing a new part of the project, and the other team has not yet finished the required previous part. In this case, it will become visible in the reports and the workflow can be adjusted. That is, some of the issues can be solved at the planning stage before the actual implementation.

If an error in the workflow could not be avoided, the earlier it is detected the less time it will take to fix it. For example, a backend developer can notice a possible error in the work of a frontend developer in advance and notify them. That will help in fixing the mistake quickly and time will be saved.

3. This is a full-fledged communication channel on par with audio and video conferences

In our team, on average, at least one dialog appears out of 20 reports, this happens almost every day. Part of our time is saved because the employee is not waiting for a scheduled online meeting to discuss a particular issue. Such reports are great for non-urgent tasks scheduled for the current day. However, if the task is urgent and needs to be solved quicker, an audio or video conference is more effective.

4. Possibility of retrospective analysis

You can always examine the history of reports on a particular task and evaluate what went wrong and what could have been done differently. Sometimes this may seem like a waste of time, but it helps to avoid such mistakes and save time in the future.

5. The openness of information and team building

When we say your report is seen by the whole team, it literally is without exclusions. This applies primarily to team leaders and CEOs. It’s always essential for employees to know what the company founder or their top manager is contributing to the product. Such a team leader will always earn more respect from their colleagues. Besides, when everyone sees each other’s contribution it is very important for team building and a cohesive team will probably show better results in the same amount of time than any other team.

We hope this article helps start-up companies in saving valuable time. We were a small company once, we invented and tested various approaches to organizing reports and competent time management. Some of the techniques didn’t work for us, but we’ve been practicing this approach to organizing reports for a long time and are happy that it helps our employees save more time for their families and hobbies.

Have a look at our experience how to organize task among team by using SCRUM techniques in Basecamp 2.