Most advice about weekly reporting is about the document. Make it shorter. Put the exceptions at the top. Lose the charts.
All true, and it misses the reason these things die. A GM who has appeared in the weekly email nine times with a rising complaint rate, and has had no conversation about it, has correctly worked out that appearing in the email is not an event. After that, no amount of formatting will make them read it.
The document is downstream. What makes a report real is a ladder — a written, boring, pre-agreed set of thresholds where each rung has a different consequence, and the consequence happens.
The four rungs
Four is enough. Fewer and everything collapses into "mentioned" or "crisis"; more and nobody can remember which rung they are on.
| Rung | Threshold | What happens | Who |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Noted | Above peer mean for one week | A line in the email. Nothing else. | Nobody acts |
| 2. Asked | Above peer mean three weeks running, or any theme at 2× peer | GM writes two sentences back by Wednesday | GM |
| 3. Called | Four weeks running, or a theme at 3× peer | Fifteen-minute call, diarised, with a named action and a date | Area manager |
| 4. Visited | Six weeks running, or any severity trigger | Half-day on site with a specific thing to observe | Area manager, logged |
And one rung that sits outside the ladder entirely, because it does not wait for a threshold: any review alleging physical harm — an allergic reaction, a foreign object, illness after a meal — goes straight to a same-day response regardless of what week it is. The sequence for the first hour is its own procedure.
What each rung is for
Rung 1 exists to be ignored. This is the part people get wrong. If everything in the email demands a response, the email is an interruption and gets filed. Most weeks, most sites, nothing is required — and that is what makes the email safe to open. The noted rung's only job is to establish a record so that rung 2 is not a surprise.
Rung 2 is a reply, not a meeting. Two sentences from the GM, in writing, by a named day. "Rate's up on pace. We've been two down on Fridays since Jo left, cover starts 3rd." That is a complete and excellent rung-2 response, and notice what it did: it moved the problem from the GM's shoulders to yours, correctly, in twenty seconds.
The requirement to write it down is the whole value. A GM who has to articulate the cause each week either names something structural — which you then own — or discovers they cannot explain it, which is itself the finding.
Rung 3 is a call with a diary entry. Fifteen minutes, and it ends with one action, one owner and one date. Not a conversation about how things are going. The diarised part matters more than the call: the thing that kills escalation ladders is a call happening and nobody writing down what was agreed, so that next month's call starts from scratch.
Rung 4 is a visit with a question. By the time a site reaches six weeks you should know exactly what you are going to look at, because five weeks of email, two written replies and a call have told you. Arriving to have a general look round is how a visit becomes a coffee with the GM — the version that is not starts from a specific thing to observe.
Setting the thresholds
Two principles, and both are about restraint.
Thresholds are relative to a peer group, never to the estate. A transit site and a destination pub do not share a baseline, and a ladder built on estate-wide means will have your travel sites permanently on rung 3 and your quiet pubs permanently invisible. Peer groups before thresholds, or the ladder generates noise and gets abandoned in a quarter.
Pick numbers that put about one site in five on rung 2 in a normal week, and a site on rung 4 roughly once a quarter. That is the calibration that works. If half the estate is on rung 3, the thresholds are too tight and you have invented a lot of calls you will not make. If nobody has been visited in a year, they are too loose.
Set them once, on a quiet Thursday, and then leave them alone for at least two quarters. A threshold you adjust whenever it inconveniences you is not a threshold.
Why the consequence is what does the work
Something slightly uncomfortable sits underneath all of this: the ladder changes behaviour before anyone reaches rung 3.
A GM who knows that three weeks produces a written reply and four weeks produces a call will generally deal with the thing in week two. Not out of fear — out of the ordinary human preference for not having a scheduled conversation about a problem you could have fixed. That is most of the value of the system, and it only exists if the rungs are known in advance and are actually honoured.
Which gives you the one rule that matters more than every threshold in the table: if you skip a rung, the ladder is over. One site that hits four weeks and never gets a call teaches the whole estate that the ladder is decorative. It is better to have a two-rung ladder you always honour than a four-rung one you honour when you have time.
What does not belong in the email
Keeping the document skimmable is a solved problem and worth being brief about. Report only what crossed a threshold. No charts. No sites that are fine. No average rating — it moves too slowly to be weekly. No full review text; one quoted phrase if it is genuinely illustrative.
If you want the format itself, a real weekly report rewritten until someone would read it does that job, and four lines is genuinely enough for a single site. This piece is about what happens after it is sent, which is the half that gets left out.
How ladders fall apart
It needs an owner with authority. A ladder administered by someone who cannot make a rung-3 call happen is worse than no ladder, because it documents inaction. If nobody owns rung 3, build a two-rung version.
Small sites will bounce. A site doing 300 covers a month can clear a threshold on two complaints and drop below it the next week, which generates a sawtooth of pointless rung-2 requests. Use a rolling three-week rate for anything under about 400 covers a month.
It can become a scorecard war. The ladder is about rates relative to peers, and the moment GMs start managing the number rather than the operation — discouraging reviews, chasing favourable ones — you have built the wrong incentive. Watch for review volume falling at a site whose rate is improving. That combination is the tell.
Rung 2 replies can turn into theatre. If the two sentences become a weekly formality, drop the rung rather than tolerate it. Three honoured rungs beat four performed ones.
The thresholds take an afternoon to set and the ladder costs almost nothing to run. OMMU tracks rate against peer mean and flags which rung each site is on, so the email writes itself and nobody has to decide in the moment whether four weeks counts. A spreadsheet and a Monday does this perfectly well — what cannot be automated is making the call when the sheet says to.