More than 90 percent of organizations in the United States currently automate various business processes. Of those who fall into this group, 73 percent say they are either “very satisfied” or “entirely satisfied” with the results they’ve seen from automation.
If you’re new to the idea of automation, a good starting point might be to use automatic reports to gather more concrete information about your team progress.
Outlined below are some of the greatest benefits you, your team, and the company as a whole can experience when you use automated reporting. Use automated reporting to gather important data about your team, progress, and business goals.
How Automated Reports Help Managers
There are lots of reasons to use automated reports in your business. Here are some of the greatest benefits they have to offer:
More Effective Team Meetings
One of the main advantages is that it can make your team meetings much more efficient and productive.
When you utilize automated reports, you get all the information you need sent straight to your email inbox. Because of this, you don’t have to worry about digging around for specific details or having every team member submit additional information by a specific date and time.
With automatic reporting, you and your team can sit down for meetings, get straight to business, and come up with solutions faster.
Save Time and Money
It takes a lot of time to manually enter information to generate any kind of report. When you use automated reports, though, you don’t have to worry about when you (or other members of your team) are going to find the time to handle this task.
As it relates to progress reports, employees should be reporting their status during the week, and teams update the key metrics used to measure goal success. From there, the data is collected and entered into the end of the week report automatically. This frees you up to focus on other things, including tasks that make the company more profitable.
Better Work-Life Balance
When you have more time to handle important tasks at work, you’re less likely to take your job home with you. This makes it easier for you to create a balance between your work and the rest of your life.
For people who work in management roles, it’s common to have trouble setting boundaries and maintaining a work-life balance. Automating certain, time-consuming parts of your job, though, is a step in the right direction.
Less Room for Error
No matter how perfect you and your team strive to be, you’re human…and that leaves room for operational error. We all make mistakes, but if you could significantly eliminate that margin of error, wouldn’t you?
Since data is pulled directly from the source, you’re less likely to run into errors that throw off your results. No one wants to sit in a meeting analyzing inaccurate data.
Tips for Generating Automated Reports
If you’re interested in how to get started, we’ve included some tips to make it easier for you!
Choose the Right KPIs
To get the most out of your automated reports, it’s important to make sure you’re monitoring the right KPIs (key performance indicators) and collecting the right data. Before you start using automatic reporting, take a step back and figure out which KPIs you want to measure.
Make sure you get specific with your goals and the way you’re going to measure progress, too. If you’re too vague, it’ll be harder to see if your team is actually making progress or not. If this happens, there’s no point in even generating reports in the first place.
Connecting your company website to Google Analytics allows you to generate custom reports from Google Data Studio. From here, you can choose different metrics to compare in order to assess how your website is performing.
Schedule Reports in Advance
Make sure you schedule your reports to be sent out regularly. Weekly reporting works best for most teams, although you may want to generate reports more or less often depending on your specific goals and the KPIs you’re monitoring.
Use the Right Tools
If it’s information about your team you want to track, you’ll need a weekly status reporting tool to automate your weekly progress reports. The software you choose should allow your team to input information related to the following elements:
- Company and Team Goals and Initiatives + relative measurable metrics (KPIs, OKRs, etc.)
- Employee Status (on Tasks, Projects and Initiatives)
- Progress on all levels: Company, Team, and Individual
- Employee Job Satisfaction, Productivity, and Engagement
There are lots of automatic reporting tools for teams, so we recommend doing some research about the best ones out there.
Measure and Adjust
Finally, don’t be afraid to adjust your reporting style as needed.
Take note of how your team meetings are going and whether or not you’re seeing the kind of results you want from automated reporting. If not, go back to the drawing board and consider adjusting your KPIs or changing up the frequency of your report generation.
Start Using Automatic Reporting Today
Now that you know more about the benefits of automatic reporting, are you ready to start implementing this technique into your team management process? Keep the tips listed above in mind so you can easily generate automated reports for your team and make your job a lot easier.
