Reporting, Discipline, and Motivation

Did you ever created a report, or asked for a report from your subordinates? It could be a problem report, regular status or progress report, or any other kind of summarized information.

Some reports are very useful, others are just waste of time.

A lot of bosses are sure that reporting is helpful to maintain discipline. True, until the person who prepares the report realizes that this information is really useful for someone (even for herself/himself). Boring and useless work is one of the strongest demotivating factors!

There is no need to look for a compromise between discipline and motivation. You can have them both in your team!


Useful reports

To get a good report, first of all, it's required to understand why this report is needed, and how it's going to be used.


Samples of bad reasons:

• just to have this report;
• to have something to read;
• to make someone thinking that she/he is under the control.

Samples of good reasons:

• to check how results correlate with the plan => to make adjustments if required;
  
• to analyze possible reasons of the problem => to fix the problem and adjust the process for future;
• to get more details in particular subject => to make a decision;
• to combine separate parts into a large picture => to make adjustments in a global plan or to report upper for even more global analysis.
  

As you can see, all good reasons assume further use of that information. It's simple, isn't it?