STF

Discussion: Encouraging Fleet Report Submissions

Posted Oct. 14, 2020, 3:54 p.m. by Vice Admiral Robert Archer (Vice President) (Robert Archer)

Posted by Vice Admiral Sarah Hemenway (President) in Discussion: Encouraging Fleet Report Submissions

Posted by Vice Admiral Sarah Hemenway (President) in Discussion: Encouraging Fleet Report Submissions
Hi everyone!

I’ve had a few FComms come to me to say that they are really struggling to get fleet reports out of their command staffs. I would like to pose this question to everyone here since we have a wide variety of experience and involvement levels that read Command:

How can we encourage timely submission of these reports?

Sarah
President

Hello hello,

First, I wanted to thank everyone for taking the time to provide input on this topic. It seems that responses are dying down a bit, so I wanted to take this opportunity to summarize some of the points I’ve heard.

  • Submitting a monthly report is a bare minimum requirement for COs, XOs, and GMs. It doesn’t take more than 10 or 15 minutes to complete.

  • It’s important to find out why people aren’t submitting them if it is a habitual issue. A potential reason identified is that people don’t feel like the information in them is read or appreciated at the club-wide level. Another reason identified is that everyone is submitting the same report form and that could be tedious. A survey (preferably anonymous) could help target what the issue is here.

  • FComms may not be putting out a consistent level of effort to get people to complete reports.

  • We have to be careful to balance job requirements with ruining the fun in the club with paperwork.

Hopefully that’s a reasonable summary of a lot of the perspectives presented. Rob and I have some thinking to do, but for now, our plan is as follows:

  • Email the FComms to request a standardized reminder system for the October 2020 reports. This allows us to make sure that all COs, XOs, and GMs are getting the same reminders/information from their FComms and that that is not an issue conflating things in some fleets.

  • Look into an anonymous survey to see what’s going on with this requirement and why people are reluctant to complete it. Exodus has functions to allow this, so that would likely be the platform we would use.

  • See if we can improve the fleet report form.

So, that leaves me with two questions to further this discussion:

What would we want to know on a survey?

What would we want to change the fleet report form to include? (I mean subjective measures here; I don’t want this to turn into a “how to objectively measure ship health” question.)

Sarah
President

On the second point above, for changing something akin to giving a base line of what the numbers mean would be good. In this case my suggestion (and which was taught to me when I first became XO and later CO) was that 5 was ‘ok/average’ 6-7 were ‘good’ 8-9 were ‘excellent’ and 10 was ‘perfect’, while on the flip side 4-3 were ‘poor’ 2 was ‘bad’ and 1 was ‘in trouble’

This same system is what I teach my XO’s and people who ask me questions on how to understand that part of the form. In my view 10’s should be a rarity as no ship is ever perfect in scope there’s always room for improvements (ala no awols/loas, great sim progress, quality and quantity posts for both main and side sim/character growth, etc) though my view obviously is only one angle to see things.

Ive also heard the arguement of removing the numbers. I can see this as an option too but with the caveat that then the written details need to be more inclusive then ‘ship is in good shape, did xyz in sim, etc’ and frankly even that level of detail is sometimes missing in reports!

So in the end maybe my suggestion would be we need to establish a standardized base line of info and make sure everyone then knows to include this? Just a thought.

Robert Archer


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