Question 1

What is a weekly status report?

Accepted Answer

A weekly status report is a quick and easy way to understand what's going on at work from a higher-level. Every week, your team will answer a few quick questions about what they accomplished during the week. The goal of this report is to provide a snapshot of someone's output & performance, and what they aim to accomplish in the future.

Question 2

Why should I do status reporting?

Accepted Answer

A weekly status report is the minimum amount of information needed to keep everyone on the same page. If you don't share information on a regular basis, people will feel out of the loop and have trouble understanding what's going on. This can impact performance and morale. Additionally, status reports helps align a team and benchmark the pace of progress over time. If you are a manager and don't have basic reporting of progress in place, you will struggle and hold unnecessary meetings to understand what's going on.

Question 3

When should I run a weekly status report?

Accepted Answer

We recommend running a weekly status report on Friday. Typically, most companies we work with ask their employees to do this on a Friday morning or afternoon before they leave for the weekend. If you use Friday, you can customize the day of the week with our builder.

Question 4

What questions should I ask?

Accepted Answer

We recommend the following questions in your weekly status reports: What did you accomplish this week? (open-ended) What priorities do you have for next week? (open-ended) Any blockers? (open-ended) As you roll out this process, you can add and remove questions over time. If you use the Friday workflow builder, you can customize a variety of questions, like emojis, open-ended responses, and more.

Question 5

Can I customize the weekly status report in Friday?

Accepted Answer

Yes, this is completely customizable. For example, you can change the following options: Who should fill it out - choose people who need to give an update Questions - pick from a variety of types like sentiment, emojis, yes/no, open-ended, and more Timing - day of week, time of day, etc Notifications - where should the status update responses be sent? Prompts - ask people for updates over Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email. The Friday workflow builder makes it easy to run virtually any communication habit you can think of - weekly reports are one of unlimited options you can choose. You see other examples on our templates page.

Question 6

Who can see the responses?

Accepted Answer

It's up to you! Unlike other reporting apps where everything is visible to HR (which feels like big brother), we let you choose who can see the reports. For example, you could select one of the following options: Just you (the team leader) Everyone on the team Everyone in the company

Question 7

Status reports are boring and I'm nervous my team won't do them

Accepted Answer

Correct! Most people dislike filling out status reports. That's why we have power-ups. Power-ups make it easy to boost your updates and make them more fun. For example, when filling out a status report, you can say thanks to a coworker, offer an idea for improvement, and more. Employees love this functionality and it dramatically improves the number of people who fill out updates as a result. This won't happen if you use a document. Don't worry, power-ups are optional so you can turn them on or off as you see fit.

Question 8

What are best practices when running weekly status reports?

Accepted Answer

There are a few best practices to make the most of this information sharing event at work. We've shared our top tips below: 1.) Use these reports to save time in meetings - meetings are great for collaboration, not basic information sharing. Use a weekly status report to guide discussion in your Monday staff meetings. 2.) Roll up responses at employee level - after a few months of reporting, rollup the responses per employee and see exactly what someone's contributions were over a given period of time. It's like a work log. 3.) Document output, not activity - encourage the team to document output vs. activity. This is a major lesson we learned in the book, High Output Management. It's not useful to see a list of activities someone completed for the week.  4.) Keep it simple - Don't reinvent the wheel. The more questions you ask, the more likely someone is to not complete the update. Limit the report to 3-4 questions. 5.) Map work to a higher-level goal - how did the day-to-day work contribute to a higher-level purpose, goal, or company strategy? Make sure to document why you are working on a particular item. 6.) Pull in work from third-party tools - if you use project management tools like Asana or Jira, make sure to link to the appropriate activity if someone wants to learn more.

Question 9

How much does this cost?

Accepted Answer

You can get started running status reports for free. We are a business, so we can't give everything away, so premium features are $6/person per month and include: Sending according to someone's timezone (great for remote teams) See more than 3 weeks of data Integrations (automatically pull the work in from tools) Easily run reports and track completion rate over time Export data to CSV/PDF Roll up responses to an employee profile We are confident that Friday can save you hours every week and help you understand what's going on at work.

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Weekly Status Report FAQ

What is a weekly status report?

Why should I do status reporting?

When should I run a weekly status report?

What questions should I ask?

Can I customize the weekly status report in Friday?

Who can see the responses?

Status reports are boring and I'm nervous my team won't do them

What are best practices when running weekly status reports?

How much does this cost?

You don't need a meeting to share updates

Sprint Retrospective

One-on-Ones

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Amy VanHaren, CEO @ PumpSpotting

Automated weekly status reports

Stay in sync, without another boring update meeting.