Businesses communicate all the time, it’s essential Without it key decision-makers wouldn’t know things like issues, risks, budget performance, opportunities etc. your team’s stakeholders want regular communication and chances are you’ll be doing some form of updates/reporting most days. It’s a part of everyday business life but it’s remarkable sometimes how we take it for granted and fail to optimize what it can do for us.
As something so simple it’s surprising how challenging it can be to get right. Improved business reporting offers one of the better business improvement ideas as it typically affects most areas and you can really boost your business without too much effort.
So here are our top 5 ideas on how to improve your business reporting
1 – Be clear about what you’re saying
First things first, your business report doesn’t have to be an essay. What it should be is consistent, so if you do this report regularly – try and stick to the same format. Try and focus on *
* Status
* Fact
* Context
So for example, if you’re reporting about a performance issue at the supplier you could go about it a couple of ways:
a) Delivery of product x by supplier y has not been satisfactory.
b) The delivery performance of supplier y has been measured at 35% below a target of 85%. This is predominantly due to the availability of raw material y at the factory which is currently delayed by up to 3 months. This is likely to impact our companies ability to ship product ABC over the next 3 months and we expect to stock out in the next 3 weeks.
2 – Don’t use fake news, tell the truth.
Be truthful. Bad things happen in business and you can still be a great manager who’s managing issues. Whilst we can be tempted to put some gloss on the situation remember that you’re likely to be reporting things to escalation points. It’s probably part of your role to capture issues and escalate where help is needed so don’t follow the watermelon effect where you state that indicators look green when the status is actually bright red.
3 – Don’t use meaningless metrics
We all love metrics and a chart can help portray a 1000 words in a simple image but don’t use them when they add nothing. It’s great that your department has so much data that you can construct all manner of detailed analytics but don’t fall into the trap of using them just because they are there. They should help tell your story and back up any facts that you’re trying to put across.
4 – Review your format
While your likely to have a standard business report, it may not hurt to tweak it once in a while if you think it may benefit you or your audience. For example:
* Do you have the right mix of images/text?
* Is your report concise enough
* Does it capture everything you need to put across (i.e. status, opportunities, risk etc)
* Is it easy to follow?
5 – Learn – ask your audience what they felt worked and what didn’t and improve it next time
Continous improvement is one of the more common business efficiency tips and tied to the above one of the best tools to improve reporting is simply to ask your audience. The people that you send your business report too. Does it provide everything they need? Are they getting it frequently enough? Is there anything in it that they are confused about? Did they have any questions? Is there anything they’d like added/deleted changed? Learn from this feedback and look to hone your report based on comments.
So there’s our 5 tips for better business reporting. Have your own ideas? We’d love to hear back from you in our comments section below.