A good weekly status report template should:

• Help people introspect - End of the week is a great time to zoom out and think about what worked and what did not. And a weekly status report should reflect this. 
• Plan for the future - Setup your template to help everyone plan their most important goals and activities for the coming week. While doing this, ensure that the report focuses on high level plans only. Don’t get lost in every minute task!
• Be run asynchronously - Don’t waste important meeting time by asking everyone to read aloud their bullet points. Those should be sent in advance, and use the meeting to only discuss important talking points. 
• Highlight learnings & failures - Introspection isn’t useful if we don’t learn from it! Make sure that your template should have space to showcase these for everyone’s benefit. 

Let’s look at the most common template for weekly meetings:

What did you work on last week?

This is a simple nudge to your team to think about the last week! Encourage them to think about their biggest achievements and failures and major chunks of activities they did. This is not about listing down every small task, but rather to focus on high level activities.

What are your plans for this week?

This is a simple one again! Use this section to encourage your team to write about what they want to achieve and work on next week. 

What is your #1 learning from this week?

I have seen that a lot of managers and scrum masters do not include this section in their template. But this is the most important aspect of a good weekly status check-in! Introspection is tough, and you should encourage that whenever you can. This is a good chance for everyone to strategise and think why something worked and why did something not. And when you share those insights with others, your whole team benefits!

Optional - Would you like to thank somebody for the special work they did this week?

Showing gratitude is another important pillar of a strong team. No project gets done alone. Every work you do has been supported by someone from your team in the past or present. Use this opportunity to recognise people’s good work. Especially the times when someone has gone above and beyond their duty. 

Optional - Any blockers? Do you need anything from other team members?

This can be a small section in your template to highlight important action items that are stuck on each other. This is a great way to remove roadblocks and ensure all projects are moving ahead with full steam!

In practice the end result might look something like this:

Content marketing person‍

• Re-evaluated historical data from Google Search Console
• Wrote 2 new articles on project management
• Next week my main goal is to remove all thin content pages from our site
• Blocker - I need SEO technical spec from engineering team

Product manager

• Shipped new feature to let users filter for past projects 
• Built spec for upcoming features of the week 
• Ship feature for searching text inside a project is my main goal for the coming week. We will also pick up two new bugs reported last week.
• Grateful for - Jane from engineering team to fix a critical bug that came up during the weekend

Software engineer

• Fixed 3 critical bugs
• Worked with product team to ship the new feature for projects 
• Next week - working on improving the app's loading speed by 10% at least

Account manager

• Did 3 new demos, and setup 4 for this week
• Sent a monthly report to 2 clients
• Next week - Onboarding 3 new customers

How to run a status report meeting remotely

• Keep it short, max 15 minutes - Ensure that you send out the template in advance to the team. Ideally, everyone should have filled out their report before the meeting begins. Which means you only get to discuss important stuff like blockers, and learnings etc 
  

• Good remote work infrastructure - Ensure that you have empowered your team to have good internet connection, and web camera etc. 
• Don’t go off tangent - You will find that a lot of times people end up discussing and debating on specific action items. That is a great thing to brainstorm, but it should not be part of this status report meeting. 
• Make the template configurable - Every team has a different culture, and every project requires a different lens to look at it. And that is why the template you finalise should be customisable to fit into your changing needs as time goes by.  ‍
• Be goal oriented - Use this opportunity to highlight goals and targets of everyone! Great way to get your entire team on the same page.