The Report Room: making real use of the reports gathering dust in your drawer

The Report Room is where you can file the assessment reports you've gathered over the years, such as 360s, DISC, Insights Discovery, MBTI, CliftonStrengths, Hogan, Enneagram, Belbin, EQ-i 2.0, 16PF, performance reviews and career assessments, so that Viv can read them, compare them over time, and suggest next steps you might add to your plan. You stay in charge throughout, and you decide what gets added.

Why do so many expensive reports end up in a drawer?

Think back over the reports you've been given during your working life. Perhaps there's a DISC profile from a leadership course, an MBTI type from a team away day, a 360 that took three weeks to gather and one afternoon to read, and last year's appraisal.

Each one cost somebody real time and money, and each one told you something worth knowing about yourself. And yet most of them were read once, nodded at, perhaps discussed for half an hour, and then filed away somewhere and forgotten.

They were never joined up, so you never had the chance to notice that your 360 from a few years ago and your most recent appraisal were saying very much the same thing. That's a shame, as there's often real encouragement and real direction sitting in those pages, waiting for someone to put it to use.

What does the research say about feedback that's never used?

Feedback has to be used to help. When Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi pulled together the research on feedback in 1996, they found that feedback improved performance on average, but in more than a third of cases it actually made performance worse. What happens after you receive it makes all the difference.

The research on 360s points the same way. A 2005 meta-analysis by James Smither, Manuel London and Richard Reilly found that people were more likely to improve when they set goals in response to their feedback and took action on it.

The instruments themselves have long and interesting histories. DiSC grew out of William Moulton Marston's 1928 book Emotions of Normal People. The MBTI was developed by Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers in the 1940s. Raymond Cattell's 16PF was first published in 1949, and Meredith Belbin's team roles came out of research in the 1970s and were published in 1981. Each was built to tell you something specific, their quality varies, and the Report Room is there to help you act on whatever is genuinely useful in yours.

How does the Report Room work?

You upload a PDF, choose which kind of report it is, and tick the two agreement boxes. Your file is stored under its original name and is never renamed.

Viv then reads the report and turns it into structured information, which usually takes less than a minute. After that you can choose the kind of reading you'd like. An individual analysis looks at one report on its own. You can also tick several reports and have Viv read them together as a set, or tick two or more reports of the same kind (two 360s, say) and ask Viv to compare them over time. Every reading is saved in your analysis history, so you can come back to it whenever you like.

Each reading comes with suggested next steps, and Viv suggests where each one might go, while you make the decision. A step can become a goal in Goal Setting, an action placed on the Action Priority Matrix and the Eisenhower Matrix with suggested ratings you can move wherever you think they belong, a habit in Building Habits that's ready to track from tomorrow, or an observation for the blind square of your Johari Window.

Nothing is added to your plan until you choose it. And if you ever delete a report, everything made solely from that report is deleted along with it.

What if you've only got one report?

Then that's a perfectly good place to start, as one report is enough to see how it all works, and you can add others as you find them.

If your report happens to be a 360, you might like to pair the reading with PiViva's own 360 Feedback and see whether the people around you now are saying the same things. And if a reading brings up something you'd like to talk through, Viv is there whenever you need, and so are the verified coaches in the PiViva Coach Directory. Those reports were written to help you grow, and it's lovely to finally give them the chance.