How to survive the hell of corporate reporting
26 October 2010
Read by 2518 persons
Managers are spending more and more time giving their bosses updates on their work. And they complain about it. Here are some tips to avoid drowning in paperwork.
Philippe Rambeau has filled more Excel spreadsheets than he cares to remember. This former sales director at Ashland experienced a real nightmare at this American water treatment company. Every time he visited a client, his superiors asked for a report. And when he wasn't in the field, they asked for a prospecting report.
That's not all. At the end of each week, he had to produce a weekly activity report. Then, at the end of each month, he had to create a summary report of the weekly reports! Enough to drive anyone crazy. "I felt like I was being watched. And the worst part is that no one read these reports carefully," says this chemical engineer.
For executives, dashboards are a symbol of power
Reporting is, according to many executives, the scourge of modern management. A time-consuming activity, as shown by the 2009 survey by the Alexander Proudfoot firm. According to these British experts, reporting and related administrative tasks account for 40% of the activity of French managers, compared to 34% on average worldwide, which is already a lot.
In other words, they spend almost as much time commenting on their actions as they do acting. "This is done at the expense of team management, to which they now devote only 30% of their time," estimates Claude-Emmanuel Triomphe, director of the Association Travail Emploi Europe Société (Astrees).
This worrying bureaucratic inflation is also a stress factor. "The development of matrix organizations and permanent reporting contributes to the feeling of loss of autonomy, efficiency and usefulness of teams," analyze the authors of the report "Well-being and efficiency at work", submitted to the government in February 2010 by Henri Lachmann (chairman of the supervisory board of Schneider), Christian Larose (vice-president of the Economic and Social Council) and Muriel Pénicaud (HR director of Danone).
The cause is the financialization of the economy, which imposes maximum transparency on companies, but also the development of sometimes overzealous information systems. The crisis is also highlighted. When results are down, everyone tries to cover themselves. What better technique, in this case, than to demand explanations and visibility from the level below? In short, cascading reporting.
What should be done then? Should one oppose, rebel and throw the dashboards in the face of one's boss? Some managers we interviewed, exasperated, are not far from thinking so. This is particularly true in the telecommunications and IT sectors, the two sectors most affected by this scourge. The usefulness of reporting is not, however, negotiable. "I tried to talk to my management about it, but the discussion was short-lived," says Alain, marketing manager at a telephone operator. "My boss's counter-argument is that without these reports, it is impossible for him to know who is working or not."
At Altran, a firm that implements computerized reporting systems, a consultant notes that, "in the audits we carry out, we very often identify activity reports that serve no purpose, but it is very difficult to have this uselessness recognized by the company." Why? Because for a manager, receiving reports is also a symbol of power. It's hard to give that up. To stop this phenomenon, only an initiative from senior management has a chance of succeeding.
Within RCI Banque, the Renault group's subsidiary dedicated to car loans, a group of experts was formed at the beginning of the year to review all reporting procedures. Well, no less than 20% of them (or 42 models out of 215) were deemed totally superfluous by this group and will be thrown in the trash. Managers are breathing a sigh of relief. Those who don't have this chance will have to resort to Sioux techniques to lighten their burden.
The first step is to make reporting a tool that is useful to you, and not just to your superiors. Don't hesitate to suggest to your boss that you modify the indicators. This is what David Toursel, 33, did when he was sales director at Café Prestige, the distributor of Nespresso in France. "Instead of a sales-per-call ratio, which didn't bring much, I suggested breaking it down into two indicators: the number of physical appointments made per call and the number of sales per appointment," he says.
Thanks to these new indicators, the conversion rate almost doubled. David Toursel gained the recognition of his employer and, above all, valuable information for his own work. To make the pill go down, always tell your superior that it is in the company's interest that you propose new options; it must not appear as a slacker's initiative.
You can also use reporting to self-promote. Especially if you are very shy and not inclined to spend your day walking the halls and shaking hands. "Regularly, think about detailing in writing the missions that have been entrusted to you and the objectives that you have achieved," recommends Fabrice Coudray, director of the Robert Half recruitment consultancy. This is what Mathieu, a consultant at Accenture, does. In his profession, he has no choice. He constantly has to fill out timesheets to inform his superiors about his activity, hour by hour.
How many hours he spent with the client, in training, or waiting patiently for something to do. This schedule is then dissected and used to award promotions to some and push others out the door. This experienced reporter explains: "It is obviously in my interest to highlight the slightest thing I have done and thus avoid displaying too much availability." All tasks must be properly named. Half a day of reflection is transformed into "formalizing offers made to clients" or "identifying business opportunities." It sounds more serious.
Reporting can also be a weapon to keep your superior at a distance. "When I started at Deloitte and my boss kept asking me for updates, I would comply immediately. Even if it meant finishing after midnight," recalls Xavier, 30, who has been working for this audit firm for five years. A stressful period that he managed to put an end to by reversing things. Xavier proposed a weekly update to his boss.
"To avoid being surprised unexpectedly, you must establish a kind of contract between yourself and your superior," insists Jean-Louis Muller, director at Cegos. Simply go see your N+1 and tell him: "Boss, in order to better organize my work, can we agree to have a progress report once a week at this time?" There is a good chance he will accept and forbid himself from asking you to account for yourself in the meantime.
By trying to do too well, some managers make a bad impression
If you are struggling with your spreadsheets, ask for the help of a consultant. Excel is the most widely used computer tool in companies for activity reporting. Practical for financiers, it is much less so for sales or marketing departments. When shared between several departments, "their spreadsheets quickly become unwieldy with more than 20 tabs," explains Bruno Joliveau, the head of Azura, a training company for management software.
In a company where he recently intervened, a completely depressed management controller spent forty hours a month entering data from four different sources. Intern-level work done for years! And yet, it only took Bruno Joliveau half a day to automate the data entry required for his dashboard. This situation is more common than one might think.
Another tip to lighten the load: solicit your teams upstream. The problem with reporting is that you are dependent on information from your subordinates. To save time, collect this information as the project progresses. This will prevent you from having to solicit your team urgently the day before the deadline. Better yet, delegate the collection task to an assistant. Entrust him or her with the less strategic social or environmental reports. "It's a way to make him or her more responsible," says Jean-Louis Muller of Cegos.
Finally, for the most unfortunate, who can negotiate nothing with their boss and have no assistant or subordinate to solicit, there is cheating. Shocking, perhaps, but frequent. "The managers who make the worst impression are those who are slow to respond to reports because they try to do things right," points out Jean-Louis Muller. Or, conversely, those who choose to play dead, like Jean-Philippe, partner and major accounts manager at the advertising agency Edip.
For having failed, according to the Lyon-based company, to submit to its CEO his "activity and forecast reports on the progress of his prospecting," he was fired. The magistrates of the court of appeal finally sentenced the company to compensate him, but the damage is done: our man no longer has a job.
The cleverest are those managers who do rough reporting, based on estimates, to save time. There are so many reports in large companies that, ultimately, the risk of being noticed is minimal. 40% of managers would proceed in this way, according to an online survey by "Le Journal du Net." A figure that is thought-provoking. And which relativizes the reliability of the information on which company executives base their decisions. That would deserve a small report.
Published October 12, 2010
Posted online October 26, 2010
capital.fr
Philippe Rambeau has filled more Excel spreadsheets than he cares to remember. This former sales director at Ashland experienced a real nightmare at this American water treatment company. Every time he visited a client, his superiors asked for a report. And when he wasn't in the field, they asked for a prospecting report.
That's not all. At the end of each week, he had to produce a weekly activity report. Then, at the end of each month, he had to create a summary report of the weekly reports! Enough to drive anyone crazy. "I felt like I was being watched. And the worst part is that no one read these reports carefully," says this chemical engineer.
For executives, dashboards are a symbol of power
Reporting is, according to many executives, the scourge of modern management. A time-consuming activity, as shown by the 2009 survey by the Alexander Proudfoot firm. According to these British experts, reporting and related administrative tasks account for 40% of the activity of French managers, compared to 34% on average worldwide, which is already a lot.
In other words, they spend almost as much time commenting on their actions as they do acting. "This is done at the expense of team management, to which they now devote only 30% of their time," estimates Claude-Emmanuel Triomphe, director of the Association Travail Emploi Europe Société (Astrees).
This worrying bureaucratic inflation is also a stress factor. "The development of matrix organizations and permanent reporting contributes to the feeling of loss of autonomy, efficiency and usefulness of teams," analyze the authors of the report "Well-being and efficiency at work", submitted to the government in February 2010 by Henri Lachmann (chairman of the supervisory board of Schneider), Christian Larose (vice-president of the Economic and Social Council) and Muriel Pénicaud (HR director of Danone).
The cause is the financialization of the economy, which imposes maximum transparency on companies, but also the development of sometimes overzealous information systems. The crisis is also highlighted. When results are down, everyone tries to cover themselves. What better technique, in this case, than to demand explanations and visibility from the level below? In short, cascading reporting.
What should be done then? Should one oppose, rebel and throw the dashboards in the face of one's boss? Some managers we interviewed, exasperated, are not far from thinking so. This is particularly true in the telecommunications and IT sectors, the two sectors most affected by this scourge. The usefulness of reporting is not, however, negotiable. "I tried to talk to my management about it, but the discussion was short-lived," says Alain, marketing manager at a telephone operator. "My boss's counter-argument is that without these reports, it is impossible for him to know who is working or not."
At Altran, a firm that implements computerized reporting systems, a consultant notes that, "in the audits we carry out, we very often identify activity reports that serve no purpose, but it is very difficult to have this uselessness recognized by the company." Why? Because for a manager, receiving reports is also a symbol of power. It's hard to give that up. To stop this phenomenon, only an initiative from senior management has a chance of succeeding.
Within RCI Banque, the Renault group's subsidiary dedicated to car loans, a group of experts was formed at the beginning of the year to review all reporting procedures. Well, no less than 20% of them (or 42 models out of 215) were deemed totally superfluous by this group and will be thrown in the trash. Managers are breathing a sigh of relief. Those who don't have this chance will have to resort to Sioux techniques to lighten their burden.
The first step is to make reporting a tool that is useful to you, and not just to your superiors. Don't hesitate to suggest to your boss that you modify the indicators. This is what David Toursel, 33, did when he was sales director at Café Prestige, the distributor of Nespresso in France. "Instead of a sales-per-call ratio, which didn't bring much, I suggested breaking it down into two indicators: the number of physical appointments made per call and the number of sales per appointment," he says.
Thanks to these new indicators, the conversion rate almost doubled. David Toursel gained the recognition of his employer and, above all, valuable information for his own work. To make the pill go down, always tell your superior that it is in the company's interest that you propose new options; it must not appear as a slacker's initiative.
You can also use reporting to self-promote. Especially if you are very shy and not inclined to spend your day walking the halls and shaking hands. "Regularly, think about detailing in writing the missions that have been entrusted to you and the objectives that you have achieved," recommends Fabrice Coudray, director of the Robert Half recruitment consultancy. This is what Mathieu, a consultant at Accenture, does. In his profession, he has no choice. He constantly has to fill out timesheets to inform his superiors about his activity, hour by hour.
How many hours he spent with the client, in training, or waiting patiently for something to do. This schedule is then dissected and used to award promotions to some and push others out the door. This experienced reporter explains: "It is obviously in my interest to highlight the slightest thing I have done and thus avoid displaying too much availability." All tasks must be properly named. Half a day of reflection is transformed into "formalizing offers made to clients" or "identifying business opportunities." It sounds more serious.
Reporting can also be a weapon to keep your superior at a distance. "When I started at Deloitte and my boss kept asking me for updates, I would comply immediately. Even if it meant finishing after midnight," recalls Xavier, 30, who has been working for this audit firm for five years. A stressful period that he managed to put an end to by reversing things. Xavier proposed a weekly update to his boss.
"To avoid being surprised unexpectedly, you must establish a kind of contract between yourself and your superior," insists Jean-Louis Muller, director at Cegos. Simply go see your N+1 and tell him: "Boss, in order to better organize my work, can we agree to have a progress report once a week at this time?" There is a good chance he will accept and forbid himself from asking you to account for yourself in the meantime.
By trying to do too well, some managers make a bad impression
If you are struggling with your spreadsheets, ask for the help of a consultant. Excel is the most widely used computer tool in companies for activity reporting. Practical for financiers, it is much less so for sales or marketing departments. When shared between several departments, "their spreadsheets quickly become unwieldy with more than 20 tabs," explains Bruno Joliveau, the head of Azura, a training company for management software.
In a company where he recently intervened, a completely depressed management controller spent forty hours a month entering data from four different sources. Intern-level work done for years! And yet, it only took Bruno Joliveau half a day to automate the data entry required for his dashboard. This situation is more common than one might think.
Another tip to lighten the load: solicit your teams upstream. The problem with reporting is that you are dependent on information from your subordinates. To save time, collect this information as the project progresses. This will prevent you from having to solicit your team urgently the day before the deadline. Better yet, delegate the collection task to an assistant. Entrust him or her with the less strategic social or environmental reports. "It's a way to make him or her more responsible," says Jean-Louis Muller of Cegos.
Finally, for the most unfortunate, who can negotiate nothing with their boss and have no assistant or subordinate to solicit, there is cheating. Shocking, perhaps, but frequent. "The managers who make the worst impression are those who are slow to respond to reports because they try to do things right," points out Jean-Louis Muller. Or, conversely, those who choose to play dead, like Jean-Philippe, partner and major accounts manager at the advertising agency Edip.
For having failed, according to the Lyon-based company, to submit to its CEO his "activity and forecast reports on the progress of his prospecting," he was fired. The magistrates of the court of appeal finally sentenced the company to compensate him, but the damage is done: our man no longer has a job.
The cleverest are those managers who do rough reporting, based on estimates, to save time. There are so many reports in large companies that, ultimately, the risk of being noticed is minimal. 40% of managers would proceed in this way, according to an online survey by "Le Journal du Net." A figure that is thought-provoking. And which relativizes the reliability of the information on which company executives base their decisions. That would deserve a small report.
Published October 12, 2010
Posted online October 26, 2010
capital.fr
