The Way to Make Activity Report More Effective

What is an activity report?

Activity report is a summary of a member's work activities during a certain period of time to share the progress of tasks to others. Sometimes it is called a progress report or work log. There are long arguments whether an activity report is really necessary or not. Some people say that an activity report is not necessary as long as members are achieving their goals. Some people say it is important to evaluate the work members have done.

In fact, writing an activity report will cost working time for employees so that people who would like to focus and spend as much time as they can for their tasks will feel it is redundant and precious time is wasted to create a report which is only for internal use. This is certainly true that if a person spends 20% of their working time to create a report, many will feel that time should be used on their main tasks. But, if members are working as a team, it would be important to share the status of tasks so that other members can adjust their time to pursue their tasks according to the progress of others tasks. For managers, it is important to be able to track whether plans are progressing as planned. Plus, especially for junior members, feedback from managers regarding progress might help members to achieve their goals.

Focus on the purpose

In order to make the activity report more effective, it is important to focus on the purpose. If all members understand and agree to the purpose of the activity report, the activity report will become meaningful for every team member. Basically, the activity report is to track the progress of tasks. Each team should have some team goals which they are aiming to achieve. And, those team goals are broken down into tasks for each member and each member should have a goal for each task. Therefore, activity reports of each member should reflect progress towards achieving their goals. And, a combination of progress will lead to progress on achieving team goals.

For example, let’s say there is a sales team whose goal is to close 15 deals in a month. And, let’s say there are 5 sales people and each has a goal to close 3 deals in a month. Plus, let’s say on average, the close rate is 10% and need to follow 3 times for each deal to close the deal. This means a sales person needs to make 90 follow ups in a month which is 20 - 25 follow ups in a week. Therefore, tracking whether each member accomplished 20 - 25 follow ups in a week is important to predict whether the team can achieve the goal or not. Therefore, I think it is easy to assume that their activity report should contain the number of follow ups in a week and each member can comment whether they are doing fine or having some trouble. In reality, tasks may not be this simple but by focusing on the topic which is essential, the activity report can be minimized but still effective.

Set a goal and measure the gap

We can say things are going well or bad because we do have some expectations. Without any expectation, we can not evaluate whether things are going well or not. We can say the project is delayed because there is an expected due date. We can say we don’t have enough leads because we are expecting a certain number of leads. Therefore, a good activity report should contain the goal number and actual number. And, if there is some gap between expected number and the actual number, some explanation regarding the gap might be needed.

If it is a weekly activity report, there should be a certain goal number broken down to a weekly goal and the actual number should be measurable by weeks. Then, we could track the gap between expectation and actual result to see whether things are going as planned or not. Furthermore, if there are too many gaps, we can take action to plan additional activities to minimize the gap or we can examine whether the goal is realistic or not.

I believe an activity report will be really effective if we could track the gap and be agile to modify the plan if it is not working as expected.

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