Writing a Business Report That Gets Read, Not Filed

Natalie Canavor and Claire Meirowitz

Do you sometimes feel buried by requests for reports? You’re not alone. With fewer and fewer face-to-face meetings taking place, and so many collaborations to manage, report writing has become a big staple of office life. It’s a basic way to keep everyone updated, and therefore needs to be treated as a major business skill. Most organizations require a constant flow of reports: progress and project reports, survey reports, budget reports, committee reports, technical reports, and more.

In general, reports follow some pretty standard patterns: They introduce the subject and explain the reason for writing them; provide “the meat” (what happened, what was learned); in some cases, explain how results were obtained; and usually offer recommendations (where do we go from here?).

In the business world, a successful report is easily defined: It’s one that is read and results in action. The role of good, clear, concise writing is obvious—if the right people don’t read your report, you’ve wasted your time. Write to be read.

Your plan of action—As an example, let’s say you’re a marketing director and must report on whether your company should venture into emerging international markets. For a high-stakes challenge like this, it helps to put your strategy “on paper” early on to guarantee the right substance—you may discover some missing components that require research. Think step by step:

Goal—To persuade management to market the company’s tennis racquets or golf clubs in India, Laos, and China and to open offices in two of the countries. Writer’s sub-agenda: To position himself for the director’s role in the new marketing ventures.

Audience—Chief executive officer, company president, board of directors: a sophisticated group with their eyes right on the bottom line.

Tone—Business formal; objective with understated enthusiasm.

Content—The writer should ask, “What will it take to persuade management to my viewpoint?” Possibilities:

• Overview of the immediate options in specific countries

• Analysis of how selling each product would coordinate with the company’s current marketing and production plans

• Financial predictors, such as statistics from a consultant’s survey of emerging markets; government forecasts; five-year sales/investment cost projections

• Analysis of each country’s political and economic climate

• Balanced recommendations for/against opening the offices

Organize the material—Starting with the overview is necessary and natural. To make the rest flow logically, you could organize by product—tennis racquets and golf clubs—or by country. Because the basic issue is whether to open offices in each place, organizing by country is probably best. A section for each would cover, first, economic and political climate because strong negative factors here could make the rest irrelevant. Then you’d go on to cover the various predictors of success, fit with company marketing and production, and end with conclusions/recommendations—next steps.

Writing the lead—some options:

• Start with an anecdote that emerged during your research, such as another company’s remarkably profitable experience.

• Start with a rhetorical question: “Is it time for ABC Inc. to bring its products to the emerging Asian markets?”

• Start by putting the new ventures into a broader perspective. For example, “ABC Inc. has led the industry for a century by capitalizing on just the right time to make dramatic marketing moves. Now it is time to consider...”

Follow through on writing the middle, based on the organizational plan, section by section. And at the end, summarize your well-reasoned, balanced recommendations and outline the next steps needed to implement your thinking. The end might also include an inspiring statement or a vision of a great future—but don’t raise hopes to unreasonable levels.

Write a table of contents for any report that’s more than a few pages long.

The executive summary—This is best done after the document itself is finished. You are likely to need executive summaries for business plans and proposals, as well as reports. The executive summary has a bright future because the more time-pressured everyone in business feels, the less people want to read long, complicated documents. Because managers and colleagues may read the executive summary and nothing else, it needs to be self-contained: a piece of writing that can stand on its own if separated from the report itself. Think of it as a call to action. Communicating a sense of urgency may be appropriate.

Start by carefully reviewing the report. Then shape the piece in its own right, aiming for:

• A good title (not just Executive Summary)

• A strong lead, which makes the subject’s importance clear and perhaps introduces the recommended action

• A middle section that explains what was done and the main points that support your recommendations

• Conclusions and recommendations

If your report is directed at more than one audience, consider creating different executive summaries for each that take account of their varying “what’s in it for me?” viewpoints.

How long should an executive summary be? The classic advice is to make it no more than 10 percent of the document’s own length. It can be shorter than that, providing it does the job of defining the subject and its importance, presenting your findings or actions, and offering your conclusions and recommendations.

Review and edit—Always edit your work to sharpen the writing and check for a good level of detail, meaning one that makes the writing interesting and credible, but doesn’t interfere with its flow. Statistics, charts, graphs, and other supporting materials can be added in an appendix. If the report was prepared by a team, it’s critical to edit for consistent style, tone, and so on. As always, you make your best case when you deliver writing that moves well and engages the reader, even within a formal business framework.

Aiming for the Right Audience

Elaine, assistant manager of an environmental services company, was handed a challenge: a dense, disorganized, and meandering “white paper” (a report on a major issue) that dealt with an important aspect of the firm’s work, remediating polluted lakes and ponds. Her assignment: “Fix it.” Where to start?

It’s always easiest and most efficient to plan a substantial writing project in advance, before plunging into the research and actual writing. But sometimes a project just grows out of hand. At other times, you’ve already accumulated masses of information on the subject and, paradoxically, knowing so much can be paralyzing. And sometimes, like Elaine, you’re handed a half-baked document and asked to clean it up.

The step-by-step writing method that enables you to plan and follow through on a complicated writing assignment helps in a retrieval effort as well. The process is similar. Here’s how it can work—with variations, of course, according to the nature of your subject.

Clarify goals and audience—With a major project, this often demands a team approach. If you’re dealing with complicated technical information and a morass of possible content that needs to be translated for a general audience, you’ll need help from the subject experts. If you are the subject expert, you’ll find it helpful to get input from people who communicate effectively. Use team thinking to brainstorm goals in relation to audience.

In the water pollution example, the original focus of the confusing paper was to report on a regional survey the company had done to identify contaminated bodies of water. A think-tank session revealed that even some participants were unclear on basic aspects of the problem, and that many members of the target audience—government administrators, civic leaders, developers, and the general public—would have minimal understanding.

This led to a decision to refocus the paper as a “Water Pollution 101” education piece. The agreed-upon goal was to make people care about the problem, present an analysis of the roadblocks to fixing it, and promote exploration of solutions. The sub-agenda—raising the company profile as a relevant service provider—could be kept unobtrusive so the paper would be perceived as done for the common good.

Content mapping—The articulated goals and better sense of audience made it fairly easy to figure out what content would work. Agreement was quickly reached that the paper should include the following:

• History of why the problem exists

• Clear explanation of why it matters to everyone in the region and demands attention

• Rundown of current relevant laws

• Analysis of what’s wrong with the laws

• Analysis of why little progress has been made toward fixing the problems

• Recommendations toward solutions

• Organization’s credentials to validate its viewpoint

• Examples of successful processes and outcomes

Research and analysis—With a contents hit list in hand, the already written material was reviewed rather easily to see which sections might be used or adapted and what was missing. The content holes were filled through research and discussion with the subject experts. Keeping the content areas in separate files, and developing each one separately, sidestepped the confusion of having to deal with so much information.

Organization—With all the pieces at hand, it was quickly agreed that it was logical to begin with “why care?”—the “what’s in it for me?” concept: If readers didn’t see the importance of the subject in the first 10 seconds, they would read no further. From there it was natural to move on to why, given the situation’s seriousness, so little progress had been made.

Next, to set the stage for making recommendations, the organization’s expertise should be established. The rest of the sequence took shape naturally. When it came to presenting an analysis of each major problem, it seemed most effective to cap each element with the recommended solution. Thus, the final sequence:

1. What defines a polluted body of water, how many there are in the region, and why it matters

2. Reasons why little has been done regionally to clean them up

3. The sponsoring organization’s credentials for addressing the problem briefly

4. History: Where did the problem come from?

5. The relevant laws: each briefly summarized

6. Analysis of what’s not working and recommended initiatives toward solutions

7. Conclusion: Recap of what healthy ponds and lakes can mean to the region, how the organization can help, vision for the future

8. Appendix:

Three case studies of successful programs

Details on the company’s regional survey

Glossary/definitions

More detailed backgrounder on the company and its services

In sum, attack big challenges by being clear about who your audience is and what you want to accomplish...break down the elements into specific components...figure out a logic to your argument so you can identify what’s missing, as well as how to sequence your material...and adjust the organization to make the best use of your material and to make the most powerful argument. Put supplementary material that might slow the flow into an appendix.

These ideas apply directly to proposal writing, reports, and other long documents.