If you work in a big office or work remotely, your boss may not even be aware of some of the great things you’re up to. Bosses are busy people, after all. Consider sending them a weekly status update to keep them apprised.
Photo by andsoyoucode
Eric Barker over at Time.com has recommendations for a number of emails you can send to make your life better. Among them: a simple email to your boss each week that lets them know how you’ve spent your time. Sometimes, your performance just isn’t visible to your boss and this is an easy way of making sure it is. And even if your group is small and you interact with your boss regularly, a status update can be a great tool for making sure things run smoothly.
How to Make Your Life Better by Sending Five Simple Emails [Time.com]
Comments
8 responses to “Send Your Boss A Weekly Status Update To Stay Visible”
Seems a little micromananged to me. Your boss should be able to stay across how you’re doing and gather feedback from comforters, without you breaking from work to send an email about what you’ve done. Where’s the trust there? Empower your employees to deliver without interference, and support them as they need it. :/
While I see the benefits in doing this, I also see @meacod’s POV. Part of the responsibility of being a manager is staying across the achievements of your team, without unnecessarily interfering with their flow or breaking them out of their zone.
I keep my boss up to date with a quick chat, “Hey, I just wanted to you know what I’ve been up to lately…”
Thanks for the idea – I work remotely (seconded), I should probably do more of this….
It would be a surefire way to get fired in my office.
Maybe filter your status report, leave out the bits like:
Made 16 comments on Lifehacker
Spent eight hours on Reddit for 1138 total Karma
Posted 17 memes to the Cheezburger network
Chatted to hot secretary on level 3
My manager is in another state, so you could say I work remotely. He has good visibility over the projects I am working on and most of the time these are two to three week projects. I call him, not the other way around. I like to let him know how the day went, any wins or hiccups. It takes 5 minutes to bring him up to speed; and helps when the performance review comes around – usually via videoconference.
A status report is NOT micromanaging.
A good manager is someone who delegates work effectively, and where necessary requests some form of status update. In fact in a recent email from Mark at manager-tools.com he said:
“Work Just Gets LOST
I’m getting a growing awareness that the status of work, whether its done, whether its on our list of stuff to do and whether we’re thinking about it and doing it, and whether others who need it are waiting on it, or thinking about it, is one of the most interesting inefficiencies in modern organizations.
The growth of orgs, their diffusion geographically, the lack of relationships, the lack of communication (!), the excess of work, the lack of managers checking up on things, the unwillingness to give negative feedback, the fear of being wrong driving a quality standard that is unnecessarily high, managers not knowing what their directs’ workloads are. All these things contribute to the idea that we’re awash in work, but nobody is getting very much done.
That is something I think and think and think about.
(Short answer: never assign work without assigning the reporting of the work with it.)”
Manager Tools separately says:
“No matter what the situation: work or home, professional or personal, boss or subordinate, it is always more communication that solves the problem or clinches the deal.
And think about this: communication is what the listener does.”
Their definition of micromanagement is:
“Micromanagement is a sustained, long term practice. It is a WAY of managing ALL THE TIME. Micromanagement is a form of ANTI MANAGER TOOLS management. It is against most everything we stand for.”
Having said that the way to manager an employee depends on their ability and your level of trust:
Low performance / Low trust: Move them on
High performance / Low trust: Micromanage
Low performance / Hight trust – coach them to improve their performance
High performance / High trust – get out of their way
I use to do this at the company I worked for 5 years ago as a consultant. We were always all over the place and quite often found our own work.
Sending a status report to our boss, and in fact all our team helped not only keep our boss up to date but helped our team know what everyone was up to.
When you know what everyone is up to, it allows you to work better as a team as people start to help each other out. Especially when everyone is on their own at client sites.
Saying that, if you, your boss and team are in the same location, sitting near each other, I found that a Kanban board works just as well.