The challenges of managing the annual report during lockdown and how to overcome them (extracted from Trust me, I’m listed)
By Claire Bodanis
If you’re a March year-end reporter, a late December year-end reporter, or anything in between, you’ll have experienced the challenges of lockdown and remote working, and the additional burden it places on getting the annual report done at all, let alone done well. A freelance proof reader who works on many UK plc annual reports said that, during the 2020 season, he was having to make twice as many corrections as usual in some reports he was reading, and the general standard of copy was much lower.
There are all sorts of reasons why working on reports from March onwards in 2020 was particularly difficult, which had nothing to do with reporting itself. The experience of total homeworking was unfamiliar to many. Workloads were heavier because of furloughed colleagues, and the new task of managing Covid-19 comms; many people had the added pressure of homeschooling children; and to varying degrees we all felt the stress and worry of social isolation. As the situation comes under control, many of these challenges should disappear of their own accord – but unfortunately, even in January 2021, that control still seems a way off.
It’s clear that office working as we know it is not going to return any time soon, and that various forms of remote working will remain the norm for some time. This poses particular challenges for reporting. So how we can make the experience work better for us and for reporting as a whole? It’s very important that we do, because, with so much uncertainty in the world, high quality, open and honest reporting is more essential than ever.
This extract is by no means a comprehensive study or guide to remote working. What we’re aiming to do is share the main challenges we faced in reporting in 2020 that arose from remote working, and give some practical suggestions for how to overcome them. The first thing to say, though, is that the five key stages covered in chapter 3(1), and the absolutely critical role of planning, are even more important when trying to manage a report at arm’s length. And everything takes longer, which is why it’s no surprise that our proof reader colleague found so many more errors in the 2020 reports he was reading.
Let’s look at the technical and practical challenges first. Many are IT-related, and the problems are compounded for those used to working in offices because at home they often lack the internet bandwidth and the hardware and software available in most corporate offices. More significantly, they also lack the immediate support of a member of the IT team who knows their system inside out.
Challenge 1: the technology for dealing with long documents
Many annual reports today run to hundreds of pages. Reading a document of that length on screen is not easy; try comparing lots of pages at once, and it becomes almost impossible. The most you can probably do at a size large enough to read easily is two or three pages; perhaps a few more if you’re lucky enough to have lots of screens. Some people may live close enough to the office to have copies printed and couriered out by skeleton maintenance staff, but many don’t – and this will add time to an already shortened process, which is also why posting overnight may not be an option either.
If you’re properly set up for homeworking you may have printers and scanners good enough to print that number of pages, and to deal with the scanning too, but most people don’t. The usual recourse for the homeworker of getting your local print shop to do it for you is also off the list for corporate reporting, given the sensitivity of the documents.
Many people don’t have the right software to deal with adding comments and suggested edits to PDFs either. And most people who work for listed companies can’t just go online, buy and install software – or even install free software – but instead have to negotiate the minefield of IT departments and purchasing, which often takes too long and gets so complicated that it becomes impossible. Some of our 2020 clients had to resort to taking photos of marked-up pages on their mobiles and sending each page as a JPEG file, which takes both them and the agency ages to manage (see more on costs below – challenge 7).
What to do
It’s all in the planning. Work out at the start who is going to need access to printers, scanners and proofing software, and get it set up before you start. Depending on companies’ budgets and locations, you may consider a combination of the following (noting that you may need time to get expensive printers through procurement):
Get people set up with a high-quality printer and scanner for their home
Make sure everyone has the necessary editing software on their work laptop
Don’t forget that marked-up scans become very large files, so people will need high-speed broadband and enough bandwidth to manage them (more on that in file storage below)
Ensure you have someone in the office at the right times to print and courier copies when needed.
Challenge 2: version control and file storage
Many companies will have filesharing systems set up already, but remote working makes these systems more important than ever, for a number of reasons.
First, version control – when people aren’t together in an office, they often don’t know what each other is doing, and we’ve seen many instances where different people have been working on the same file, creating multiple versions, with resulting chaos and comments getting lost. This of course can happen when everyone’s in the same office, but it becomes more of an issue when working remotely. It’s really important to be rigorous about who’s working on what and when – and perhaps to use a filesharing system so that everyone can always see what the latest version is.
Second, security. Many companies do allow emailing of sensitive information and documents, but many don’t; while some companies’ firewalls block large file transfer systems like zip files or WeTransfer.
What to do
Set up a cloud-based filesharing system, or a secure project folder within your company’s existing system that’s accessible only by the report project team. A (secure!) filesharing system means you can send people a link when documents are ready to be shared, rather than emailing them – and it also circumvents the problem of enormous files clogging up email systems.
Remember to make sure the system allows sharing by people outside the company, so that your agencies, auditors and so forth can access them.
Create a protocol for file naming and working on the various documents, and make sure everyone’s aware of it and follows it to avoid version control problems.
If you want (and are allowed) to email files, make sure you password-protect sensitive ones, and always share the password in a separate email.
Find out what the broadband speed and bandwidth is at people’s homes, and upgrade if needed or invest in back-ups like dongles. This is particularly important when more than one person is working remotely from the same house (or managing virtual school), which can cause problems with connectivity.
Challenge 3: editorial (and proof) reading remotely
We’ve always thought that reading out loud(2) is best done together, in pairs, with your colleague in a room. So we were pleasantly surprised to discover in 2020 that it actually works quite well over a platform like Zoom, as long as you get yourself properly organised in advance, and people’s home broadband can cope with it.
Bear in mind that it can be more tiring to do out-loud reading online, so you may need to allow more time. There’s also the added time and process of getting any handwritten comments (if that’s the preferred method) to whoever is implementing them if it’s a different team. But again, with good organisation and planning this can be done.
What to do
Plan more time in your schedule for the various reads to allow for the extra time remote working requires.
Agree in advance who’s marking up amends, whether on paper or via PDF sticky notes, and how they’re going to be passed to whoever is implementing them. In person you can just swap piles of paper, but of course you can’t virtually, so it’s more efficient if one person marks up, even if the reading itself is shared.
If people want to read off paper (with long documents, many people do), arrange delivery of hard copy proofs, or ensure people have the ability to print them off at home (see challenge 1, above).
When reading over something like Zoom, consider switching off cameras and only turning them on to say hello and goodbye, and when you need to discuss things or are having a tea break. This makes it less tiring, minimises distractions and takes up less bandwidth.
The final point about online rather than in-person meetings being more tiring is an important one, and has wider implications for the project as a whole, as discussed in the next couple of points, which are more about personal rather than practical challenges.
Challenge 4: engaging and managing people you can’t see
One of the most common complaints from people working remotely is that you can’t just pop your head round someone’s door and ask a question about, say footnote 3 on page 92. And because you can’t see them, you don’t know what they’re doing, whether they’re free to speak, what kind of mood they’re in – so things that are usually quick and easy take more thought, more consideration of others, more planning, more time.
It’s harder to get people together in an ad hoc way, and the understanding of what’s going on that happens by virtue of everyone being together just doesn’t happen. This means you need to communicate much more – ideally with conversations rather than yet another email adding to an overflowing inbox – about what’s going on in the project, so things don’t get missed.
All this means more virtual meetings – but these tend to be harder work than those in person. You can’t read the room in the same way as you can in person, so you need to concentrate far harder on what people are saying, while also looking out for any physical cues that it is possible to see. Similarly, you need to be much more careful yourself about how you come across so that others understand you. You also don’t get the individual interactions between people that are so helpful in a meeting room, and take the pressure off the group. All this, plus having to look at yourself while you’re looking at others, can make virtual meetings more tiring, while also taking longer to get the same things done.
Some people do of course prefer virtual meetings, but the general consensus we heard during lockdown was that not being able to meet in person was much harder and more tiring over the course of the project as a whole.
What to do
Communicate more – schedule more catch-up calls or meetings, and include time at the start to catch up with how people are in themselves, since you can’t see that for yourself, all while respecting people’s time. Not everyone wants to chat.
Manage amends by scheduling group calls with everyone involved. ‘Page turns’ of the report with key content owners are standard practice, but you may want to schedule extra ones to bring people together to discuss amends. This might seem like it would take longer, but in practice it saves time and avoids the frustration of seemingly endless emails as wording goes back and forth.
Take the pressure off the visual – if you all know each other well, audio-only calls can be less tiring, so alternate with those, while remembering that if you can’t see people you can’t pick up the visual clues of how they are.
Think about your setting for a video call: simple things like making sure you’re sitting in good light, and are looking straight at the screen, rather than in front of a window with the top of your head cut off, for example, make the experience much easier for everyone else, who may find it distracting.
Challenge 5: attention from the right people at the right time
Another challenge a number of people mentioned in 2020 was getting senior people’s attention at the right time. This was no doubt a result of corporate leadership needing to deal with the immediate problems of Covid-19, but it’s an issue that may well continue while things remain so uncertain. This goes to the heart of one of the key problems of poor reporting, which is the lack of senior leadership engagement. And it’s something that only gets worse when more urgent things come onto the management agenda. Working remotely makes this more challenging, because it’s far harder to get senior people’s attention (particularly those who are uninterested in reporting) when you can’t see them and can therefore time your question by catching them on the way to the lift, or as they go between other meetings.
What to do
Unfortunately, there’s no practical way to address this challenge. It just emphasises the importance of the points discussed in stages 1 and 2 of the main part of Chapter 3, about getting your leadership involved, and early. The more convinced they are of the importance of reporting, the higher up their agenda it will go. And the more they understand about the process, and the costs and other consequences of not engaging when needed, the more likely they are to give you their attention when you need it.
Challenge 6: keeping focused
Reporting requires concentrated effort and focus over long periods, particularly when it comes to drafting and proofing. And maintaining the laser-like focus needed to get the report over the line was the biggest challenge of all during the 2020 lockdown. Working from home in less constrained circumstances should ease the pressure somewhat, but it can still be difficult to focus for hours at a time without the support of the office environment and colleagues around you.
What to do
Everyone’s home circumstances are different, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution here. Being aware of what helps you to focus and what distracts you should enable you to plan what’s going to work best for you. For example, if the only time you can get sustained hours of concentration is late at night or early in the morning when other people are asleep, plan for it, and give yourself the time to sleep at the other end of the day.
Or, as some people who work remotely all the time do, you could create your own ‘office’ with a colleague or two, by connecting over Zoom or Teams, and work with them virtually sitting next to you on mute, with a check-in every hour or so as agreed in advance. That way you get the feeling of being in an office with colleagues, even though you’re not actually interacting – and seeing each other focusing on work can really help you do the same. Note that this generally only works well if you have two screens – one for the ‘meeting room’ and one for working.
The final challenge covers the implications of all of these things for how you work with your agency (see Chapter 5 of the book for more on working with your agency, including a discussion of budgets).
Challenge 7: added costs
Because remote working means longer hours for you, it will usually mean longer hours for your agency as well – and for agencies, time is money. More corrections because messaging keeps changing, and people find it harder to focus; more meetings to keep communication going; extra tasks given to your agency, such as text corrections or content management that would usually be done by someone in your team.
What to do
Increase your contingency! As discussed in Chapter 5, you should always factor contingencies in the budget into each stage of the project, but, with remote working continuing, it’s a good idea to increase this to avoid surprises at the end of the project.
And a potential challenge: developing ideas together, virtually
There are some stages of the report which are very hard to do virtually because getting round the table together works so much better – coming up with ideas for content and design for example. This was something we knew to be true before 2020, and, sadly, as borne out in practice. It’s therefore worth thinking about how to create an environment that’s conducive to this kind of creative thinking, and the intense mental focus and energy that’s required to get the best out of it. Some suggestions:
Find the right time of day and book the meeting for more time than you’ll need. People have to be able to focus so discuss with the team when would work best for them, and also allow extra time so that you can allow a period of time at the beginning for people to switch off from what they were doing before, and get into the right frame of mind.
Have a ceremonial start – and close off all other communications. If people are keeping an eye on the phone, on emails, on other things, they simply won’t have the clarity of mind to give the best input. Some kind of ceremonial start to the meeting when people switch off everything else except their meeting connection might help here.
Appoint someone to run the meeting and be comfortable with periods of silence. This kind of session often doesn’t have an official ‘chair’, but when you’re working virtually you need one. Silence for thinking is essential in creative development and occurs naturally when you’re in a room together, but can feel unnatural in a virtual meeting. A good chair will help this happen smoothly.
Be efficient with time, and if you finish early, stop! People are always grateful to get time back in their day, so keep the session focused on the task in hand, and when you’ve got as far as you can, stop. Don’t feel you need to use all the time set aside if people have run out of steam.
In summary
This may all seem rather daunting – and it’s true that reporting, along with many other corporate projects, is much easier when you can work with people in person. But our experience in 2020 revealed some positives.
Enforced homeworking, in our experience, prompted people to be more open and honest with each other, and to get onto a closer, more personal level more quickly. After all, we’re literally seeing inside others’ houses and, sometimes, ‘meeting’ their children (and their pets!), and that brings people together and helps with the single-team mentality that’s so conducive to working well together.
What’s more, technology means we can talk to each other face to face, individually and in groups, even if we’re not in the room. It means we can do mark-ups and scans of proofs, even if it’s more difficult and complicated. It means we can share files, even enormous ones. It means we can still do the essential out-loud read with each other, even if we can’t share the chocolate biscuits. It means we can get the job done. And now that we know it’s a scenario to contend with, we can plan it into our annual report process from the beginning.
I hope this has been helpful – if you’d like to read more, please buy the book!
(2) If you’re not familiar with the concept of the out-loud, editorial read, this is when the writer (or writers) reads the report out loud in pairs with another member of the client team. It is by far the best and easiest way to check the readability as well as the accuracy of the language. It’s usually done on the penultimate proof before Board sign-off, ie so that it’s late enough to have incorporated the majority of comments and changes, but not too late to rewrite parts that don’t read well.