End Of Day Reports
Creating End of Day Reports is one of the responsibilities of a team member. Team Members must start creatie End of Day Reports from one’s starting date and beyond. A team member can set an alarm at the end of the day, create a daily to-do list, or post a memo near one’s desk to make sure one always keeps them in mind. We post these messages on Basecamp.
A team member answers the following questions with the team member’s top 5 most significant tasks once per day at the end of one’sworkday. Top 5 means the most important items. So if you're listing 5 random things, instead of the top ones, the team will not understand the value of the team member’s day.
A team member must give specifics in one’s answers to help the team differentiate from answers in previous days. For example, if a team member uploaded 15 more episodes of a series of videos or let in 3 customers. This is to ensure that the End of Day Report will be a meaningful exercise instead of pasting in the same functional line items each day-- not useful to the team.
What a team member should not write in an EOD report
End of Day reports are what you can use as the Metrics or Analysis of why you’re doing what you’re doing since you can cross-reference it with your team member’s actual output and the team member can communicate what one needs at the end. In our experience, 99% of our EODs have "Nothing right now!" in the *What You Need From Us* section yet our average output of tasks is fewer than 15 per day whereas our goal is 30 tasks per day per VA. Thus, this is a management problem, because the managers do not understand (Analysis) that the task volume is too low, that the VA should speak up more (in fact it's their responsibility), and that then a manager can intervene on the EODs to help them.
Some businesses conduct 30-minute coaching sessions about tasks and topics that the coach hasn't done or is not knowledgeable about, which will only burn more time and get further from core training. One-on-one coaching is the classic mistake made by all managers. It's an incredible investment that almost always ends up having a negative return on investment ROI in comparison to group/process/systematic training.
If there is something a VA cannot complete, then you can create additional training because the manager can clearly identify the problem, analyze why it's happening, and propose an action plan to solve it. Get explicit and written feedback from the Specialists so that we can clearly identify problems and change them systematically. However, without the feedback from the Specialists, the manager has no ammo to bring a problem up to the architect to solve at the root with training or process. We must also understand that "Management" doesn't mean higher frequency in communication or coaching - but rather guiding goal-driven outcomes - where all parties know the goal.
Examples
