Posted by Kirsten Gibbs Last updated 6th August 2019 reading time
Nobody likes reporting. It gets in the way of doing the job.
Because it feels like an extra task, it gets pushed back to the last minute, and possibly even made up. Worse, it can be very tempting to request more information in a report, because ‘they’re reporting anyway’.
On the other hand, feedback is essential if a business is to thrive and evolve.
So how best to get feedback you can rely on?
Firstly, keep it simple. What is the least you need to know whether are not things are going well?
Secondly, make collecting that information a side-effect of doing the job. The trick here is to find a step in your process that creates its own trail. A step that either gives you the data you need or can act as a proxy for it. If that’s not possible, sample instead of monitoring continuously.
Of course, reporting as we know it only happens because the person doing the job is not the person making decisions about how best to do the job.
That’s where the real problem lies, and the solution to that is responsible autonomy.
