STF

Discussion: Encouraging Fleet Report Submissions

Posted Oct. 20, 2020, 2:30 p.m. by Vice Admiral Sarah Hemenway (President) (Sarah M)

Posted by Sharon Miller in Discussion: Encouraging Fleet Report Submissions

Posted by Fleet Captain Ray Branch (FComm, Black Fleet) in Discussion: Encouraging Fleet Report Submissions

Posted by Katherine Dedul in Discussion: Encouraging Fleet Report Submissions
Posted by… suppressed (7) by the Post Ghost! 👻
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

Firstly, I think the ranking system is the easiest way to do that quickly and effectively as it is now - otherwise the reports would have questions like: “What would you say your current ship’s health is?” which is far too close to what you don’t want as discussed by Sarah. As to what could be added - instead of a change maybe having a section that we can justify the reasons we give the ship the score - sort of like a “Why?” section so that others that read the reports understand where one is coming from scoring say a 7 on overall ship health. (Not worded like that though, that’s for further down the line…)

An added benefit of that is people who read the reports looking to get into their first command/GM position can more easily get an idea of what the score means, say you give a ship a 7, you can say because of x, y, or z. It may also be an idea of including ways to improve that on the report, ideas so that FCOMM and Command can see where the issues lie more directly. This could probably be achieved with one question to fill out rather than having them seperated - so if a ship is at overall ship health 6, they can say what makes them think that, and we can also have what ideas are there to improve it.

Also, having just checked through all the reports since December last year, I’ve also never scored a 10 on anything, as I’m in agreement with Rob there - there’s no such thing as a perfect ship.

Ben S

What would we want to know on a survey?

I would suggest multiple choice, if that’s doable, since if people aren’t taking the time to write a monthly report then they’re possibly not going to take the time to write out long survey answers either. Some suggestions for questions/answers might be:

How often do you submit a monthly fleet report?
- Every month without fail
- Most months
- Occasionally
- Hardly ever

If you do not submit a monthly fleet report every month, why not?
- I forget
- I don’t have time
- I don’t see the point
- Other

Do you find the monthly fleet reports useful to read and/or write?
- Yes
- No

Then perhaps you could add a comment section after each question for those people who do have more to say?

What would we want to change the fleet report form to include?

Personally I don’t really have any issues with the form as is, although as a reader I find the ship health scores so subjective that they’re completely meaningless. Although attempting to answer this question has got me thinking that maybe what we should also be asking is, for those players who don’t submit reports and instead just read them, well, firstly, DO you read them? And if you do, what do you like/dislike about them or what else would you want to see on there? I mean, after all, our audience for these reports is the wider club so I’d be interested to see if the wider club is getting what they want from them.

So at the risk of sounding obsessed with surveys here, I’m going to suggest maybe a second survey on the value of the reports themselves? Do you read them? Do you like them? What do you like? What else would you like to see on them?

Having this kind of feedback from all levels of the club would make it easier to determine whether these reports are serving a purpose and, if they are, this alone might encourage more command players to submit them when they realise there IS an audience waiting for them.

Just my two pence…

  • Sharon

Sorry, just correcting my crappy formatting!

I do not believe a general survey like this will work in this situation. If people aren’t taking the 5 minutes to fill out a ship report, why do we think they will take the time to fill out a survey about why they aren’t taking the time to fill out a ship report?

I’ve already identified to FComms in the Discord cabinet channel which reports we seem to not receive on a frequent or semi-frequent basis, and I believe what we need are the FComms to directly reach out to those people by DM or email and ask them specifically why they aren’t filling out a report until we get back an answer (if they are choosing to also ignore their own FComm as well as refusing to do a ship report, then we have other issues going on).

I don’t disagree with anything else suggested. Just the general survey idea.

Daniel

I agree with Dan that we might get a better response if the FComms are doing the work. Like I said earlier, when I was an FComm, I’d periodically look at people who weren’t submitting. I think too, having the FComm take a vested interest will also help with the theory that people aren’t submitting because they feel like nobody cares/reads them. :)

-Kat

I’ll add my two cents. At the beginning of each term, a new FComm will reach out to their COs with their expectations (usually to point out the report due dates). Every CO and XO should be aware of the monthly reports when they first start in their respective positions, so there isn’t any excuse for repeatedly not submitting one. Every job has a task that someone won’t like, but in order to keep that job, the task still needs to get done. I don’t like the idea of FComms going directly to an XO or GM for a missing report, since it’s the CO’s responsibility to ensure their subordinates are doing them. All it takes is a simple email to the CO letting them know their XO or GM hasn’t been submitting their reports. If they read the reports on the command board, they’d already know that. I know this is harsh but we all volunteered to take on extra responsibility within STF, so if someone can’t do a simple task such as a 5-minute report then maybe we need to replace them.

In short, all FComms, COs, XOs, and GMs know they must submit their reports. If they continuously fail to do so, then replace them.

-Ray

While I hate to be ‘that’ person, in an effort to keep this discussion fair and balanced on both sides, I feel I have to mention that one fleet has not published a report to command since August. So while this discussion has so far focused solely on command players not submitting their reports to their FComms, it seems there are also times when, presumably, command players ARE submitting reports but then the FComms aren’t doing anything with them. And if that happened to me, then in all honesty I’d probably stop bothering with reports altogether pretty quickly!

So out of respect for those command players who are submitting reports that are not being published, I wonder if perhaps we could add an additional failsafe in that, if for whatever reason both the FComm and the AFComm are unavailable that month, maybe a nominated third person (Prez or VP?) could publish the report? That alone might encourage more people to submit if they know for sure that it will get published?

  • Sharon

This is a very good point, Sharon, and it is one that Rob and I are already following up on. If the FComm is not available due to LOA, it is the AFComm’s responsibility to either file the report or, if s/he will also be on LOA, to appoint an appropriate aaFComm to do so.

To bring the rest of this discussion to a close with a plan moving forward, Rob and I have sent an email to the Fleet Command staffs with new and exciting questions for each command staff member to answer this month and next month, as well as a specified timeline of reminders to be issued. We plan to continue this for two months (the October 2020 report and the November 2020 report) without making significant changes and then we will discuss first with Fleet Command and then in Command regarding how these tweaks went.

Sarah
President


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