More on Progress Report Surveys

Yesterday we wrote an article about how fielding surveys may be an effective tool as a status report system, updating the company on an employee's progress throughout the project. Surveys can potentially be far more efficient, and have numerous advantages that make them better than non-standardized emails and meetings.

Time Saved Meetings are profoundly time consuming. While it's often nice to hold a meeting and discuss needs and progress, meetings prevent at minimum two employees from working on their projects for at least the length of the meeting, if not longer. Productivity is the most important part of a healthy business, and every time you hold a meeting, everyone in the meeting is not being productive.

Surveys take much less time to complete, require no small talk, and can allow the employee to continue moving forward on their tasks while the manager focuses on work other than a meeting. Less Pressure Meetings can also be very tense for employees, especially if they have fallen behind on a project or didn't complete as much as they'd hoped by the meeting. They're often worried that the manager will not think highly of their progress or they may get into an argument over how much work should have realistically been completed.

Surveys don't require a manager's involvement, so the stress and pressure is lessened. Productivity Log Companies are always looking for new ways to measure productivity, and this type of status report system provides them with some of that information. If you set an expected deadline for a project by a certain date, and the employee finishes the project well in advance of that date, that information is then logged permanently in the survey, and any time you want to learn whether or not an employee has been productive early in the year, you can view that information and easily see for yourself.

More Thorough Surveys are standardized, so there is no chance that you will accidentally forget to discuss a certain aspect of the project. Every question will be able to have an update, and over time your company will know exactly where the employee is and when they're likely to be completed. Nothing gets lost (assuming the survey was completed correctly) and everything is tracked.

We'll continue these thoughts and start to explore weaknesses of this method of data collection in the next article.