Benefits of End of day (EOD) reports
End of day reports usually gets a bad rep - because managers use it to micro-manage people. The wrong way to do this is when managers ask for a daily, detailed list of every-single-thing done by their team covering absolutely every minute of the day! But when done right - i.e. asking for a brief summary at the end of day from your team, it will not take more than a few minutes, and it can add give a lot of insight for managers.
When End of Day(EOD) reports are done properly, it does not take a significant time to complete for your employees, and they don't feel like they are being micro-managed.
Here are some benefits for collecting End of Day reports:
- Promote people who are doing well: From the daily end of day reports submitted by everyone on your team, you can make a strong argument for why someone in your team deserves a promotion, or at the least give them a shoutout in front of everyone.
- Avoid time consuming meetings: These daily end of report summaries can replace meetings (daily standups with the whole team, or one-to-one status update meetings) which waste a lot of time.
- Track what needs improvement: You can benchmark co-workers in your team with each other to see where someone needs improvement. You have multiple people to look after, and an EOD report can help can easily track progress.
- Stay curious, get additional insight: If you are working remote - and cannot be present in person, reading these summaries will give you a lot of additional insight into what's working.
- Look after your employees: No one likes to stick around in a job where they are not learning something new. EOD reports can be used to make sure that people in your team are not going weeks without learning a single new thing. You can help employees by identifying what they should be learning, and ways to learn.
Not every team is run well - or uses all the latest project management tools in the right way. Often there is too much information, too many asks with these project management tools - and the important stuff is lost in feature overload. Teams - employees and managers - are trying to learn how to be better at their jobs, and End of day reports can help with this.
The wrong way to collect end-of day reports is when you ask for an end of day report without any guidance or showing a preferred format with the level of detail to provide. Ideally, provide an example so that the rest of the team knows what you are expecting. Also, share why you are collecting these daily end of day reports, and how they are going to be used. Else, employees will feel like you are just mirroring the various time-tracking-billable-hours tools, which shows low trust, and feels like micromanagement.