Importance of reporting when managing remote teams

[#1]

The pandemic has changed our understanding of the workplace. Businesses of all sizes leaned on remote work to survive and found themselves forced to reduce overhead expenses, diversify the talent pool, and respond to business demands in real time. As a result, new challenges have arisen: How to keep your employees engaged? How do you ensure everyone in your team is being productive? 

The best way to answer all these questions is to use reporting.

Reporting has proven to be one of the essential tools to help managers organize remote teams. Using the right tools can help managers with:

1. Performance Reporting: Performance reporting helps managers promote a “continuous improvement” feedback loop, where reports on activities or performances provide important information to enable the best possible decision-making in the next planning cycle.

2. Time-Tracking: Using the right time-tracking tools helps managers reward efficient processes and forecast project needs. Whether remote teams are using Kanban, Scrum, or any other agile practice, they will surely benefit from reporting features to meet targets effectively and deliver valuable results on time. 

3. Transparency: When combined with communication and openness, reporting plays a significant role in helping create an accomplished and solid remote team. Communicating regularly and creating weekly check-in meetings between team members can effectively keep track of everyone’s tasks. 

 Finally, with the right reporting tool and apps while managing a remote team, can create a continuous thriving work performance and deliver exceptional customer value. 

[Angel Ruiz]

Hi, I am in the software development business and from that perspective, I was wondering in which way a team lead or manager would need a report on performance, if it is present in the daily standup of his team and it is on top of the sprint or pipeline of planned tasks.

On a daily basis, all I need to visualize and track are the planned tasks progress for a relatively small and fixed period of time. At the end of the sprint or planned period, check which tasks were completed and which weren't and why. Normally the manager should know beforehand anyway. Just need to fully understand reasons to see if we can do better next time.

Regarding transparency, daily standup and retrospectives provide that out of the box.

Well, you could consider the notes from the retrospective as a report, but it definitely is not generated automatically and it does not just provide cold numbers to assess performance. In many occasions, the performance does not get reflected in the progress made due to a very wide variety of factors that a simple report would not be able to show.

So I'd say that I would rather have better planning and visualization tools that allow me to plan and asses the progress instead of reporting tools. In our case we use JIRA Software Sprint or Kanban tools for planning, boards to visualize the progress (Canvas for Jira disclaimer: we are the makers of that app) and Confluence to record the retrospectives.

Cheers!