---
title: "Marketing Supervisor Talk (7) – What to Do When Employees Complain About Too Many Reports?"
description: "Report management is one of the most important management tools, but frontline employees often complain that there are too many reports, they are too complex, and lack practical content. A sales manager, after observing and analyzing the situation, made bold reforms by using flexible methods like case-based training, business meetings, and linking reports to key performance indicators, reducing unnecessary reports and improving management effectiveness."
author: "谭长春"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2016-10-08"
categories: "Brand Marketing, Management & Methods"
language: "en"
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markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/marketing-supervisor-talk-7-what-to-do-when-employees-complain-about-too-c63114dc.md"
original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/2xYkMKFCMSXeXtYUx7D_dQ"
translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E8%90%A5%E9%94%80%E4%B8%BB%E7%AE%A1%E8%B0%88-%E4%B8%83-%E5%91%98%E5%B7%A5%E6%80%BB%E6%8A%B1%E6%80%A8%E6%8A%A5%E8%A1%A8%E5%A4%AA%E5%A4%9A%E6%80%8E%E4%B9%88%E5%8A%9E-c63114dc.md"
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citation: "谭长春. “Marketing Supervisor Talk (7) – What to Do When Employees Complain About Too Many Reports?.” New Distribution, 2016-10-08. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/marketing-supervisor-talk-7-what-to-do-when-employees-complain-about-too-c63114dc/"
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---

# Marketing Supervisor Talk (7) – What to Do When Employees Complain About Too Many Reports?

> Report management is one of the most important management tools, but frontline employees often complain that there are too many reports, they are too complex, and lack practical content. A sales manager, after observing and analyzing the situation, made bold reforms by using flexible methods like case-based training, business meetings, and linking reports to key performance indicators, reducing unnecessary reports and improving management effectiveness.

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> Report management is one of the most important tools for management. Frontline employees work in the field for long periods, and the most direct monitoring tool is mainly reports. However, employees do not feel that report management brings them much sales growth or helps them attack the market and respond to competitors. They always complain that there are too many reports, they are too complex, and lack practical content. In other words, for them, it is basically meaningless.
**As a frontline sales supervisor, you are aware of this situation, or you yourself think that this kind of purposeless, endless report submission is unreasonable. What should you do next?**
Manager Zhang is a sales manager at a company, fighting in the market every day. However, he simply cannot find time to go to the market to communicate with distributors and terminals and understand the situation. Because whether at 8 a.m. or 5 p.m., there are constantly faxes or emails from headquarters asking him to gather materials, sign, report, and confirm. His subordinates are even busier, as in addition to handling their own business and filling out their own reports, they also have to go to the market to find information and materials for the reports that managers need to fill out. In short, although he cannot complain, we can see that he is indeed very frustrated.
If Manager Zhang is like this, his salespeople are even more so. Whether it is sales reports, channel reports, price reports, market dynamics, competitor information forms, orders, merchandising performance, inventory forms, promotion tracking forms, new product distribution forms, market share survey forms... every day, the salesperson's briefcase is basically full of various forms that company leaders call "management tools." As a result, salespeople have to spend one to two hours a day just filling out forms!
Is the main or only way for enterprises to manage and supervise employees to make them fill out reports? But these reports, although frontline salespeople fill them out painstakingly, how many are actually used for corporate decision-making in the end? Are reports just to give salespeople more things to do, or to show that the company's management department is indeed helping frontline employees, making them more effective and methodical in handling things? Manager Zhang doesn't believe that. Although he hasn't studied management science, as a frontline sales manager, he feels that having to fill out so many reports every day is unreasonable. So, he observed and analyzed his employees' work content and the current reporting situation for a long time. Finally, based on the actual situation, he made some bold reforms and improvements to the original report management.
**1. Business management tools are not just reports. He prefers to first use the cognition and thorough understanding of rules and regulations to achieve the goal of letting employees discipline themselves.**
Every enterprise has rules and regulations, but not every enterprise can truly implement them or constrain employees in advance. Many companies' rules and regulations are purely decorative; employees may never have looked at them, and the company has never communicated them.
Manager Zhang's approach to instilling rules and regulations is not as rigid as people think—he doesn't just read them verbatim. His experience is actually the "case-based teaching method" that frontline salespeople like most. First, he has everyone brainstorm with him to discuss and formulate the rules and regulations themselves. Then, he takes time to have each salesperson annotate each item: which ones should be followed, which ones might cause problems in their future work, which are most important relative to themselves, and which are less important. In this way, everyone has a set of rules that are both common and tailored to their own actual situation, fully achieving the goal of making the rules serve them. Finally, Manager Zhang requires all employees to summarize a case each month to support the practical interpretation of one of the rules, allowing all employees to gradually deepen their understanding of each clause. This turns serious rules into real-life case versions, truly implementing the rules into actual work.
**Rules and regulations do not necessarily have to be formulated by the enterprise; they can also be formulated by employees themselves to follow. Whether it is meeting formats, visit processes, customer communication discipline, account handling, work discipline, etc., employees can set their own rules to manage themselves.**
**2. Management reports are static, but business meetings are dynamic.**
Manager Zhang was promoted from an ordinary salesperson, so his management style is to blend in with everyone, without deliberately creating a hierarchical sense. He prefers to discuss and negotiate issues together with everyone. In the process of equal communication, he successfully completes his management process and also builds a very effective team. Therefore, he likes to use flexible methods like business meetings for management, rather than just rigid, boring management reports.
**His business meetings are also very distinctive. He only acts as a host, an orchestra conductor, and lets the salespeople take turns convening meetings, helping him with analysis and management.** He guides, corrects, and encourages during the meetings, forcing everyone to prepare thoroughly for such an equal communication meeting. The best way to prepare is to execute seriously and analyze carefully in specific work (which is an important goal of report management!). At the same time, each salesperson must not only do their own work well but also consider specific issues in other colleagues' work. This not only promotes seriousness in everyone's specific work but also greatly improves their analytical and management abilities, broadens their thinking, and eliminates communication barriers between employees. This form of meeting management provides an excellent way for Manager Zhang to cultivate supervisors.
At the same time, if business meetings are held well, the content of management reports becomes alive. Those boring numbers and constantly changing competitive dynamics can be turned into vivid decision-making analysis materials through flexible business meetings, and even decision results can be given on the spot. This makes reports truly produce management utility.
**3. Report filling should be linked to key performance indicators.**
Reports are one of the most important management tools, everyone knows that, but the application of reports is indeed very poor in many enterprises. Because many enterprises only treat report filling as a task that employees must complete, and at the same time, many enterprises do not have key indicators in assessment, motivation, and management processes. They just "grab everything at once," so employees fill out reports with the attitude of "better to have too much than too little," expressing all conceivable work items in reports. This way, market information cannot be missed, and market management and personnel management are definitely in place!
Manager Zhang does not think so. He believes that management should grasp the key points. Moreover, filling out reports is not just for management; it is more to achieve sales goals. Management goals are also to achieve sales goals, and one should not put the cart before the horse. A salesperson's daily work cannot have too many priorities. Salespeople are generally only responsible for sales volume, product coverage, merchandising performance, etc. So, reports should only show the key content of these factors. Therefore, after discussion with everyone, **he abolished many original tables that were numerous but useless, and only kept three types of tables: daily visit progress table, sales situation table, and market information table.**
Report filling does not require covering everything. Covering everything means "not covering anything," and all the materials filled in painstakingly by employees become superficial and useless waste paper. However, as the monthly work focus may differ, or the assessment focus may vary, the important content of reports can be appropriately adjusted. Or, when employees fill in fixed reports, they can add a monthly key work item report based on the month's focus. In this way, even over the whole year, people will not be exhausted from filling out forms, nor will any work assessment and tracking be missed.
> Report filling is not the whole of management. It is too rigid and inflexible, and it greatly restricts people's subjective initiative. At the same time, it is easy to make employees feel tired and weary. Therefore, using other methods, reducing unnecessary reports according to key assessment indicators, and using more flexible methods that can give play to subjective initiative often achieve better management results. In this way, whether leaders, supervisors, or frontline staff, they no longer have headaches over report filling or management!
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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 谭长春
- Published: 2016-10-08
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/marketing-supervisor-talk-7-what-to-do-when-employees-complain-about-too-c63114dc/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/2xYkMKFCMSXeXtYUx7D_dQ

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