The Resourceful Reporter, Part 14: Audit Reports

When I began training auditors to write high-quality reports more than 20 years ago, the senior team member approached me with a smug smile. "Teach us something we don't know" he said loudly enough for his teammates to hear. "We already know the Big Four points of an audit report are the criterion, condition, cause, and effect."

I answered, "Should we talk about the other 17 points?" The auditor's upturned lips descended into a puzzled frown. "I'm all ears," he said, returning to his seat. Once I covered the 21 points of an audit report, I found the less experienced auditors offering a twenty-second or twenty-third legitimate point.

By the end of the day, the senior auditor to his credit said, "I guess our boss made us take this seminar because auditors need a checklist. Not one written in stone, but a flexible one that works as a starting off point to ensure we are writing a complete report."

"That's right," I said. "Maybe you'll need only 17 of those points, and maybe you'll need 26. That depends on the audit type, the auditee, and your firm's preferences. But use the checklist!"

Here are the 21 points of an audit report:

1. Point – What policy or procedure is being audited?
2. Authorization – What law, policy, or group requires the audit?
3. Objective – What is the goal of the audit?
4. Business – What is the nature of the auditee’s business
5. History – What relevant events preceded the audit point?
6. Method – How was the audit performed?
7. Scope – What areas did the audit cover?
8. Limitations – What restrictions prevented a complete audit?
9. Finding – What is the judgment about the audit point?
10. Criterion –  By what measure was the finding assessed?
11. Condition – What situation did the audit reveal?
12. Cause – Why does the condition exist?
13. Effect – What is the business impact of the condition?
14. Conclusion – What does the condition imply about best practices?
15. Recommendation – What should be done to fix the condition?
16. Benefit – What advantage will be gained by fixing the condition?
17. Response – What is the auditee’s required next step?
18. Follow-through – What is the auditor’s planned next step?

 Other reports in this series:

1. Meeting Reports
2. Incident Reports
3. Investigation Reports
4. Inspection Reports
5. Procedural Reports
6. Scopes of Work
7. Test Reports
8. Course Reviews
9. Conference Reviews
10. Contractor Appraisals
11. Staff Appraisals
12. Self-Appraisals

The Resourceful Reporter, Part 13: Self-Appraisals

What do people say about writing a performance self-appraisal? It feels like bragging. I don’t have anything new to say. I don’t want to expose a weakness that management can hold against me. The self-appraisal doesn’t reflect the real me. Management doesn’t take my self-appraisal seriously. I resent when my self-appraisal is not considered for promotional purposes. Oh, the gripes, squawks, murmurs!

What ridiculous things to say! As if management doesn’t already now about your shortcomings! Besides, if you were passed over for a promotion or a given a lower-than-expected raise, you’d scream, “After all I’ve done for them!” Don’t even think about having not accomplished anything lately; if that’s true, then you deserve to be fired. As for not knowing what to write about or not reflecting the real you, that’s why you’re still reading: to get an approach to writing the self-appraisal. Here are some pointers.

1. Settle into yourself. Start with the mindset that you are not bragging but documenting your performance. Then consider the big advantage you have over your manager in documenting that performance. Your manager might be able see what you’ve done lately, but no one knows your aspirations and intentions as you do. That makes a big difference in knowing how to spin the self-appraisal. 

2. Look to the future. Before writing about your accomplishments, which you should have been noting throughout the performance period, think about those aspirations and intentions. Regardless of where and in what capacity you are working, do you want to improve your communication skills? Perform more analysis? Master project management? Move into a supervisory role? Write from that angle.

3. Connect yourself to the business. Next reflect on the organizational mission, core values, and business objectives. Let your language mirror the company’s but push toward your objective. For instance, if you have no intention of increasing your writing workload, don’t dwell so much on how your writing has improved. But if you want to become a team researcher, focus the writing improvement on anything you’ve composed of an analytical nature.

4. Balance the scale. Look to your strengths as opportunities to overcome your weaknesses. If you are a decent writer but fall short as a public speaker, which may be or will be an important job skill, explain how you are committed to writing out presentations just like you would deliver them verbatim as a means of practicing your presentation skills.

5. Highlight the improvements. If you are piggybacking on a previous performance appraisal, show how you’ve refined your strengths and addressed your challenges as described in that report. This commentary is especially critical where performance evaluations are taken seriously. 

Other reports in this series:

1. Meeting Reports
2. Incident Reports
3. Investigation Reports
4. Inspection Reports
5. Procedural Reports
6. Scopes of Work
7. Test Reports
8. Course Reviews
9. Conference Reviews
10. Contractor Appraisals
11. Staff Appraisals

WORDS ON THE LINE: Seventeenth Anniversary

On January 4, 2005, I started WORDS ON THE LINE. Seventeen years to the day and  1,004 posts later, I still have a lot to say about the writing landscape, thanks to the writers I read, the writing I do, and, most important, the writing students I teach. My aim remains the same: to improve the quality of written messages in all professions.

You can get a helpful overview of this blog by reading the thousandth post, which links to 34 series on a wide range of writing topics. A better way of getting information is by searching your topic in the search window on the upper right.

Here's to another 17 years of WORDS ON THE LINE!

The Resourceful Reporter, Part 12: Staff Appraisals

Staff appraisals frustrate both their writers and subjects for many reasons. Among them is the feeling that with sections like Areas of Strengths, Areas for Improvement, and Action Plan, performance appraisals force a potentially false narrative in which obvious strengths and irrelevant faults are revealed, and useless improvements are sought. Writers lament that appraisals are repetitive, time-consuming, repetitive, and insincere; readers complain that appraisals accentuate the negative, fail to describe the real them, and breed resentment. Those are quite a few obstacles to overcome.

Yet you can contend with these hurdles by employing these five steps.   

 1. Look to the organizational mission and core values. Start the appraisal process by connecting the desired objectives and skills to the corporate mission statement and core values. You'll get a lot of support there. For example, Apple mentions its mission as "to bring the best personal computing products and support to students, educators, designers, scientists, engineers, businesspersons, and consumers in over 140 countries around the world," and some of its core values as innovation, uniqueness, significance, simplicity,  collaboration, and excellence. Building from the mission statement, those values should be at the heart of every listed skill, performance level, and evaluative measurement in the appraisal template. If they are not, rewrite the appraisal to reflect them.  

2. Focus on the employee's development. The appraisal should exist for one reason only: to support employees in developing their skills. If the area of strength offers no clue to cultivating the employee's competence, exclude it from the report. Likewise, if the area for improvement does not tie into the mission and core values of the business, scratch it.

3. Seek multiple sources. To bring more validity and value to the appraisal, seek feedback about the employee from teammates, direct and indirect reports, managers, executives, interdepartmental staff, vendors, and internal and external customers. These parties may notice qualities and behaviors that you might disregard, devalue, or overlook, and they might provide deeper insights into the employee.  

4. Integrate the skills. The appraiser should embed into the narrative the employee's areas of strength and improvement. The listed strength should enable the employee to overcome the weakness. The strengths should be maintainable, the weaknesses should be surmountable, and the goals should be attainable—all from the perspective of the clearly described skill.  

5. Write plainly. This means ensuring the description represents the numerical assessment, if you're using one. Avoid hyperbolic words on the positive side (great, extraordinary, etc.) and the negative side (abysmal, appalling, etc.) Use the whole scale, not shying from the upmost or bottommost numerical value. This is  why I prefer a simple scale of 1 to 3. But use the upmost score as a means of modeling excellent behavior and the bottommost as a means of developing, not destroying, the employee.

Other reports in this series are:

1. Meeting Reports
2. Incident Reports
3. Investigation Reports
4. Inspection Reports
5. Procedural Reports
6. Scopes of Work
7. Test Reports
8. Course Reviews
9. Conference Reviews
10. Contractor Appraisals

The Resourceful Reporter, Part 11: Contractor Appraisals

Contractor appraisals assess the performance of a hired contractor or vendor to help a business decide whether to continue a relationship with the product or service provider.

• Overview – Products or services vendor provides to business, duration of service, relevant contractor data (e.g., number of employees, physical locations, annual sales, market reach).
• Scope – Framing of appraisal in terms of contractor-business relationship (e.g., geographical or practical areas, offered services, delivery). 
• Standards – Criteria for measuring contractor (e.g., quality, communication, delivery). 
• Performance – Contractor's achievement level in each category.
• Evaluation – Qualitative (e.g., satisfactory) or quantitative (e.g., 4 of 5) assessment for each category and summary assessment.
• Recommendation – Decision of whether to continue, terminate, or modify business relationship with contractor.

Other reports in this series are:

1. Meeting Reports
2. Incident Reports
3. Investigation Reports
4. Inspection Reports
5. Procedural Reports
6. Scopes of Work
7. Test Reports
8. Course Reviews
9. Conference Reviews

The Resourceful Reporter, Part 10: Conference Reviews

Conference reviews are similar to course or seminar reviews since they concern reporting on the value of a learning experience to business's operations. Therefore, you can use the course review template as a rough outline for a conference review. Just keep in mind at least five notable exceptions:

Purposefulness. Courses aim to target specific learners' needs; therefore, learner participation is not only encouraged by required. The trainer should focus not only on learners' knowledge but on their behavioral change, for instance, to present better executive briefings or to increase their number of deal closings. On the other hand, conferences generally have set agendas, compelling attendees to come prepared with their own business aims for appearing at the conference. 

Decorum. Courses tend toward informality and stress comfort level to maximize participation. But every conference detail from the registration process to the individual events to the luncheon to the post-attendee survey has a greater level of formality than the course or seminar.

Depth. While a course review covers one specific training event offered to an organization, a conference review may cover multiple talks, symposia, panels, workshops, and clinics, all of reportable value.

Variety. The topics course will be limited to a specific topic, whereas a conference may cover a broad range of topics of industry interest, ranging from the employee to equipment to materials to products and services to vendors to clients to the environment to regulator factors and so on.

Participation. Course attendees participate in discussions and assignments, and they are often evaluated based on their performance. Conference attendees are less active in their participation. They act mostly as knowledge receptacles for the conference speakers.

Other descriptive reports in this series are:

1. Meeting Reports
2. Incident Reports
3. Investigation Reports
4. Inspection Reports
5. Procedural Reports
6. Scopes of Work
7. Test Reports
8. Course Reviews

The Thousandth Post: WORDS ON THE LINE

I started WORDS ON THE LINE nearly 17years ago, on January 4, 2005, when my plan for it was to write casually about my passion for writing and to help people write better.

A thousand posts later, my passion and objective have not changed. The content in this blog will keep you learning tips for writing at work, school, and home. I will follow this post with part 10 of a 25-part series on The Resourceful Reporter. Other topical series in this blog, in chronological order, include:

• The Employment Application Process (2005, 5 parts)
• Summarizing Successfully (2006, 8 parts)
• Logical Fallacies (2006, 20 parts)
• Constructive Criticism (2007, 6 parts)
• Tips for Better Email (2007, 20 parts)
• Grammatical Guidelines (2007-2008, 7 parts)
• Breaking Writer's Block (2009, 12 parts)
• The Virtues of Reading Your Writing Aloud (2010, 5 parts)
• An ESL Guide (2010, 7 parts)
• Voice (2010, 11 parts)
• Getting Creative (2010, 7 parts)
• Staying Creative (2011, 7 parts)
• 120 Influences (2011, 14 parts)
• Why and How I Teach Writing (2011, 12 parts)
• Finding Inspiration (2012, 5 parts)
• Punctuation Pointers (2012, 4 parts) 
• Five Things I Learned from Teaching in China (2012, 5 parts)
• Style Standards (2013, 4 parts)
• The Reading-Writing Continuum (2014, 11 parts)
• Why We Get Words Wrong (2015, 10 parts)
• Writing in Plain Language (2016, 9 parts)
• Things Writers Do (2016-2017, 21 parts)
• What Writers Say (2017, 25 parts)
• Starting with What Matters (2017-2018, 20 parts)
• Tone Tips (2018, 14 parts)
• Splendid Sentences (2018-2019, 15 parts)
• Do You Know How to Argue? (2019, 3 parts)
• On Taking Notes (2019, 8 parts)
• On Writing for the Web (2020, 4 parts)
• Improving Style Through Syntax (2020, 20 parts)
• Improving Style Through Diction (2020, 20 parts)
• Using the Writing Process Effectively (2020, 4 parts)
• Surprising Sentences (2021, 18 parts)
• The Art of Writing (2021, 6 parts)

And many more standalone pieces in this blog will surprise, stimulate, and inspire you to becoming a better writer. Happy reading—and learning!