Serial entrepreneur, currently co-founder of Weekdone https://weekdone.com/ team reporting and status updates service.
As a CEO and top manager for 20 years from startups to large companies happy to share my experience. Currently focusing on improving internal communication in teams.
We've been now running Weekdone.com weekly team status updates and reporting service for over 3 years. Here is my experience.
First decide if the information you want to get is task-oriented or more about open-ended feedback questions. First is more item oriented (our standard template is PPP as used in Ebay, Skype et al meaning Plans, Progress, Problems). The second is based on questions to have employees open up. Here is one blog post I did on 10 questions I've seen that work well among our users: https://blog.weekdone.com/10-questions-to-ask-your-employees-today/
The key to get the process working well is by the way feedback and replies from you to employees, based on what they report. If you make it a one-way black hole from employees to managers it rarely works. It has to be 2-way communication. That's where many leaders fail. Without that employees take the attitude that nobody reads the updates and no changes are made by you and other managers.
