What's actually the point of reports?

The context:

Building a scale up which is highly focused on providing data-guided actions to Field Leaders. People often ask us how we think about reporting internally.

The honest truth is that, like most scale up companies, Quorso doesn’t have an infrastructure of reporting like mature enterprise companies. We’re coming from a position of ‘what are we putting in place’ rather than ‘how are we simplifying’ the behemoth we’ve created. 

However, in the process of creating information and reporting infrastructure I’ve learned some important things about what reports do to a company / area that could be helpful to others.

Firstly, why do most people think we have reports? I believe most people would say something along the lines of:

“To provide information related to performance vs expectations and analysis as to where we can course correct”.

As much as that’s a fair description, here’s a few other thoughts of what reporting does:

1.Communicate what’s actually important

John Doerr said “What we measure matters, and what matters gets done”. When a report is created it suddenly puts spotlight on something we want to track and therefore deem important. 

This can be a double edged sword adding and implementing more reports dilutes focus and can minimize these core behaviors.

2.  Reinforce behaviors

Every week when I sit down with teams, they know we’re going to look at activity reports, and that reinforces the behavior of these activities being done. Reporting on the right data reinforces accountability as long as the team knows and believes they can be accountable for it.

Of course this can also have unintended consequences so it’s important to be thoughtful on the actions trying to align.

3. Cascade organizational design

Separating objectives across the company often requires clear swim lanes and the outputs on a report with accountabilities helps reinforce those. It’s why it’s so important for outputs to have clear accountabilities set next to them.

4. Communicate across the company

As we’ve grown, reporting has been a key way to communicate well up, down and across a company. It allows us to have a common vernacular that a department can consistently present on, and a way to quickly summarize and then go deep on areas in executive meetings.

5. Capture a training data set.

A relatively new one in the common world. But structure data is essential for training sets for any AI or Machine Learning algorithms you try to build and creating the right data structure in reporting is essential to being able to do that properly.

So when you are next pulling information into a report think about how it can have some of the other consequences rather than just the informative.