One of my favorite business communication and accountability tools is the weekly team update email. As simple as it sounds, when done well, it helps align everyone in the company and provide visibility into the most important metrics. Here’s a simple template for a weekly team update email:
- Intro
- Quick paragraph summary of last week
- Annual Goals
- Current metrics for the annual goals straight from the One Page Strategic Plan
- Quarterly Goals
- Current metrics for the quarterly goals straight from the One Page Strategic Plan
- Quarterly Priority Projects
- Percent complete and any updates to the most important projects straight from the One Page Strategic Plan
- Sales
- The top three weekly metrics for the sales team, or for smaller teams, the top three metrics for every person on the sales team (e.g. calls, appointments, deals won, new recurring revenue, etc.). By having every sales rep listed with their metrics, it provides transparency and peer-pressure to hit their numbers.
- Comments or highlights from last week (e.g. the name of a big customer win or story from the team)
- Marketing, Services, Support, Engineering, Operations, etc. (each has their own section, just like the Sales section)
- The top three weekly metrics
- Comments or highlights from the week
- Culture Highlight
- A story or example from the week that exemplifies the company culture and recognizes one or more people
In more sophisticated companies, not only will the CEO send out a weekly team update email to the entire company, but the leader of every department will send a department-specific update to their respective team.
One weekly email, while not trivial to make, is incredibly valuable for accountability, alignment, and visibility throughout the company. And, it’s also good to include investors, advisors, and mentors on the email.
For entrepreneurs thinking about 2016 New Year’s resolutions, add weekly team update email to your list and become a better leader.
What else? What are some more thoughts on the weekly team update email? Also, let me know if you want more details on our process to auto-generate these emails.
David Cummings on Startups 
This is a great idea. While I write something like this for our company, I have made the weekly email more of a values communications tool. Thanks for challenging me to make it more goal-focused. Thanks too for all your blog posts this year. I haven’t commented much, but I am an avid reader and am often provoked to improvements by what you share.
This is indeed a new year resolution worth taking, I am very grateful for your thought provoking ideas. The weekly team update e-mail will ultimately align and re-focus the team towards the overall corporate objectives. Thanks for your effort.
15five is a great short fix for this rhythm. Streamlines by department. Issues flow up the hierarchy. You can ask spot questions to the whole company while maintaining a heartbeat of steady inquiry on key issues.