For successful businesses, status meetings often become a necessary evil. While almost everyone agrees that meetings waste valuable time and energy, it’s impossible to stay productive without also being informed. Thankfully, innovative team collaboration tools now allow companies to implement weekly status updates, making it easy to abandon time-consuming meetings without sacrificing the importance of staying up to speed. Here are five of our favorite reasons weekly status updates improve productivity and enhance the overall employee experience.
Strengthen Existing Meetings
Weekly status updates allow employees to post their progress, questions, and developments online to a shared company or team space. This gives leaders and coworkers the chance to read updates at their convenience and prepare answers ahead of time. While nothing will completely replace meetings, status updates make essential meetings faster, focused, and productive. Regularly established status updates let employees know in advance what to expect and gives them time to think about problems and present solutions. Instead of putting everyone on the spot, or scheduling another meeting, weekly updates help teams tackle issues and action items right away, transitioning meetings from summary sessions to active work environments.
Improve Team Collaboration
Weekly status updates increase team collaboration too. Instead of trying to manage dozens of different schedules, employees can post, read, and respond to status updates whenever works for them. When employees have the freedom to work updates into their own schedule, thoughtful collaboration becomes easy, and never negatively impacts other responsibilities. Online, interactive, team environments, like MangoApps, naturally improve coworker participation, resolve simple problems, and facilitate meaningful discussions.
Maintain a Written Record
Weekly status reports are shared online, making them written rather than verbal communication. Unlike traditional status meetings, weekly status updates give everyone a tangible record to rely on. With verbal updates, it’s easy to forget details, misremember, or lose track of information. Weekly status reports are organized, unchanging, and don’t depend on memory, offering employees a reliable space to find details and clarify communication. A written record also keeps goals visible, improves accountability, and simplifies idea sharing, helping everyone access important information.
Filter Out Irrelevant Updates
Employees rarely need to know everything shared at a status meeting. Different work roles, team projects, or areas of expertise often gather in status meetings to report their progress. But what’s essential to one project won’t matter to another team, leaving every employee at some point uninterested and unproductive. Instead of taking the time to hear irrelevant updates, online weekly status updates let employees filter information to find only what they need. With published status reports, employees can individually evaluate every update and quickly determine its significance. Whether you need to read a report in-depth, skim it for general information, or skip it entirely, is completely under your control.
Manage Long Term Analytics
Businesses depend on constant improvement and progression, but without easily maintained, tangible records, it’s difficult to assess progress accurately. Traditional weekly status meetings might give managers information for the future, but information shared in meetings is rarely saved for reflection. With long-lasting, weekly status updates, every employee has an in-depth record of their work over time, making assessing individual goals, reflecting on team progress, and finding work patterns infinitely easier. Archived weekly status updates give manager and employees the tools they need to facilitate future company and career success.
Weekly updates don’t have to boring, tedious, or time-consuming. With innovative and simple to use team collaboration tools, weekly status updates are fast, informative, and inspire team collaboration. To learn more about weekly status updates, or how MangoApps helps businesses of every size simplify communication and improve productivity, contact us or schedule a personalized demo today.
