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The Dreaded Weekly Status Email

by ryanlm on 7/28/16, 1:12 AM with 98 comments

• by leroy_masochist on 7/28/16, 2:56 AM

  My personal view of status emails is that they are largely an artifact of engineering-driven companies in which managers, who must possess a given level of engineering competence in order to have supervisory credibility, often have very poor social skills.

  To be clear, I'm all for pushing stats to the central org. Every week when I was a company commander in the Marines, for example, we sent our battalion HQ a big Excel sheet with a summary of who was on light duty, who was going on leave, weapons count, etc -- that kind of basic accountability is fine to put in a weekly email IMO.

  What is not fine is abdicating your responsibility as a leader by living within a Potemkin supervisory framework that reduces or even eliminates your need to have daily face-to-face (or telephone/VTC) conversations with the people you have the privilege of supervising in order to figure out what challenges are in their way and what you and the larger organization can do to help.

  The straightforward way to do it is not weekly status emails, it's limiting the number of direct reports anyone has to a reasonable number and holding them accountable for everything their portion of the org does or fails to do. They in turn should be holding their people to a high standard of not letting bad news age and being forthright about what's not working.

• by robert_tweed on 7/28/16, 2:10 AM

  Funnily enough this format is nearly identical to what I call the "scrum email" which is something I've previously asked remote freelancers to send in daily and found it works as well if not better than actual stand-ups. That list of things to put in a sitrep is one of the things that Scrum gets right:

  - Brief summary of what was done since last report

  - What's next

  - Any blockers

  - Anything else important (optional)

  The only difference is the inclusion of OKRs/KPIs, which makes sense if you are using them. I tend to do something similar with project status reports as well, which will usually have red/amber/green in the subject line and if the status isn't green, the email starts with the reason!

• by cel1ne on 7/28/16, 7:41 AM

  > "List last week’s prioritized tasks, and if they were achieved."

  In theory this sounds good, but that is an emotionally charged and negative way of saying it. "Tell me what you promised to do and if you actually did it." You would not use such a construct in a negotiation except to intimidate the other.

  In certain people, this destroys motivation, even when they didn't achieve a prioritised task because they found a better way or reprioritised for good reasons.

• by SmellTheGlove on 7/28/16, 3:50 PM

  I'm a director. I developed an easy test for whether my status reports mattered. One week I simply stopped sending them. It was mentioned to me once, about 3 months later, so I sent one that week. And then never again, for about the past year at least. It's not like I didn't have weekly 1x1s with my boss, in addition to our hallway conversations, so what we were doing was already communicated.

  The only time I asked members of my team to write them was when I needed certain individuals to really think about their work and focus on what was important vs low priority. We talked about it, but then I had them write status each week for a while mostly to force them to stop and think about the connection of their work to the larger business objectives. I really value developers who have some level of business acumen and ability to understand the "why" of their work at a more strategic level - and if someone doesn't have that I'm going to coach it. That's just one way that works for some people. More of a coaching tool than an actual status report, though.

• by elgoog1212 on 7/28/16, 4:01 AM

  Google has "snippets". You basically write up what you did last week. They aren't mandatory, but encouraged. I have found them useful because I can then just go through them and pick the things I want to write in my performance review. Before I started keeping snippets, I had a hard time digging up a sufficiently meaty list of accomplishments, because I'd just forget most of them. And you can subscribe to other people's snippets as well.

• by philip1209 on 7/28/16, 1:58 AM

  We have replaced our in-person team retros every week with LatticeHQ.com's weekly check-ins, where every employee answers 4 basic questions (the defaults on Lattice):

  1. What did you focus on this week?

  2. What are your plans and priorities for next week?

  3. What challenges or roadblocks do you need help with?

  4. Is there anything else on your mind you'd like to share?

  Managers then can review and comment on each part of the check-in. That happens the same day, which means that it doesn't feel like a waste of time. Even just an emoji as a comment can provide positive feedback.

  I like this process because it's efficient. I also enjoy a log of what I have done in past weeks to reinforce that we are progressing. Lattice is primarily a goal-tracking app, so tying goal updates to weekly check-ins makes the process easier.

  This works for us, but we're a small team. Weekly status emails sound like a different beast relating to tiers of tiers of teams.

  I suspect that part of the difficulty of the "weekly status email" is keeping track of updates from memory. As the author describes the Zynga framework, it's clear that it's easy because it asks for fairly objective things - like OKRs. It sounds like scaling a solution like Lattice to larger companies would ideally prepopulate reports with data - like "Closed these 7 goals . . . , closed these 8 pull requests . . . , analytics shows goal X did Y" - then allow the manager to edit and provide context.

• by lawnchair_larry on 7/28/16, 2:47 AM

  I'm not sure what it is, or if it's justified, but I've always hated having to explain what I'm doing and why. I think that I will involve people as needed and when needed, and assume others will do the same. Most senior engineers I've worked with have been this way.

  Are there effective teams who don't do anything like this at all?

• by wiradikusuma on 7/28/16, 1:45 AM

  What's missing is a Concrete Example of the "status report that's enjoyable to read because important information laid out in a digestible format." Sure, she lists down the format, but would be great if she can put some samples.

• by cyphunk on 7/28/16, 9:03 AM

  This article and much of the conversation here-in reminds me of THX 1138. There is a disconnect between how-to-manage and how-to-be-productive discussions on HN. Definitely daily mails, and also probably weekly's with intense liability attached to them in the name of "quality" seem to go against promoting humane productivity.

  Perhaps there are projects that require this level of management and communication, and perhaps there are people that work well with it. But there are also probably many projects that do not need such management overhead and where some types of people do not work very efficiently in. So, what I'm saying is that I think this management style shouldn't be an assumed default.

• by engi_nerd on 7/28/16, 4:02 PM

  At one job, our management asked us to write a status email to be sent in every Friday afternoon by COB. After about six months, the management decided that it couldn't be bothered to sift through 30 emails from engineers each Friday afternoon. Therefore, they requested that we put our weekly status into a single Word document stored on a Sharepoint site.

  You can guess what happened next -- someone would check the document out of Sharepoint, locking it for everyone else. Then that person would inevitably get interrupted and go handle the latest crisis. Meanwhile everyone else was unable to enter their status into the shared Word document.

  Eventually management gave up and returned to having us send emails.

  Fortunately I don't work there anymore.

• by iamleppert on 7/28/16, 3:25 AM

  "Send me your status in an e-mail" is a way for a lazy, un-engaged manager to dot his i's and cross his t's. If you're doing a good job managing your direct reports, you'll have a good pulse of what they have been up to at a resolution of at least one week, without being a micromanager.

• by swsieber on 7/28/16, 3:41 AM

  I actually liked the linked article about the art of OKR more. While I've been exposed to SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Timeframe?) as a missionary, for some reason it didn't ever really carry over into the real world.

  I do feel like OKR has a fair amount in common with GTD as well, though I'm not actually familiar enough with GTD to assert that, though from the outside they are similar.

• by brlewis on 7/28/16, 1:26 PM

  I've been using 15five, which is a weekly report format with the usual done/to-do/blockers questions, but every other week asks for suggestions to make your team/role better. It sends reminders, tracks your longest streak of completing reports, and has a public/private comment system with likes. This is a referral link: http://ssqt.co/m5blUWz

• by pzh on 7/28/16, 2:00 PM

  It's much better to have a weekly status email than a daily standup. Status emails can simply be scheduled with a cron job if one is not disposed to write them in the accorded time...

• by bitshaker on 7/28/16, 2:48 AM

  At our remote company, we use http://Jell.com which was built for this purpose.

• by PapaSlug on 7/28/16, 3:30 AM

  https://home.idonethis.com/ for remote teams.

• by ktRolster on 7/28/16, 4:25 AM

  Trust your employees enough that as soon as something goes wrong, they will let you know. Don't expect them to wait until the end of the week to alert you of something, that makes no sense.

• by hga on 7/28/16, 11:56 AM

  For me, when handled well when working for a good boss, starting the week with one was an excellent way of organizing that week. I'd remember, think about, and memorialize what happened last week (and enough times there's a large portion of "what happened" vs. "what I did", i.e. putting out fires), and then planning what to do in the next 5-6 days (6 for crunch mode: 6 days x 7 hours of real heads down work in each, which I could sustain for a number of weeks).

  Sure, "No plan survives contact with the enemy", but I've always found the process of planning to be invaluable.

  As others are noting, all this is very subject to abuse, but it can be a very good thing.