cod'ead wrote:Prior to me being promoted to UK Sales Manager, the incumbent, who I reported to, insisted on endless reports. Sales Reports, Fleet Reports, Competitor Intelligence Reports etc etc etc. Half of my bootspace was taken up by reams of NCR paper forms, all having to be submitted each week.
One day he called me into his office and informed me that he hadn't seen any Fleet Reports from me for quite a while. I told him I stopped sending them in when I realised that he never read them anyway. He was insistent that he always read them in full and acted on them accordingly. I managed to blow his argument when I asked him to dig out my last report and read it in front of me. He was almost apoplectic when he got to the bit "Company Directors". The company in question was Rainbow Transport of Nottingham, I had listed the directors as: Zippy, Bungle & George.
When I got his job, I burned a storage cabinet full of his forms, replaced them with one, rigidly enforced, Weekly Itinerary and the message that if any of the guys had anything to report, they should do so by fax or phone.
I know there are lots of times where paperwork and forms/reports are a waste of time and not used. I now refuse to write any marketing or training documents because for 6 years everything I've done has been a waste of time and never seen the light of day. My American counterpart differs from me spectacularly in that respect and the US team have to write reports pretty much every time they break wind. Pointless and I don't require it.
However, we have to share information about what we have done somehow. For example, when one of the team works on a particular bioassy, that we don't sell as a kit, with a customer we have to capture what was done, what reagents were used and what was learned. We have a report template that we then supply (in certain circumstances) to the customer as a professional document and a sales tool. The reports (even if they don't go to customers) are all uploaded to a searchable database on our intranet so when a potential customer walks up to me or sends me a request for a human soluble CD40 ligand assay (like happened today) I can find out if any of the 22 guys out in the field anywhere in the world over the last 6 years has done any work on that with a customer. I use this database many times a day. So you can imagine if someone who I know has done a dozen assay development projects in 2011 had only uploaded one report that would be a little annoying.
Our sales database is critical for us to work out where we need extra resource and when I need to hire someone (like now we probably need someone in scandinavia), it also tells us what applications people are developing. We also need to track how much time we spend on training - especially software - because we earn no money from this and it costs us a fortune in man hours. Christ knows why we don't charge for training, but I am not banging my head on that one again.
This database and calender has to be filled in and it has to be accurate or what comes out is garbage.
Needless paperwork is truly awful though and I have experienced how demotivating that can be. Because of this I will happily sit and discuss in person with anyone in my team why they think they don't have to do what I've asked them to do. If they can give me a good explanation then I'd be happy for them to do it their way. I'm completely confident they can't.
