Print Your Reports! The Underrated Tool for Employee Engagement

What's up, Empathians? Today we're going to talk about printing. You know what's underrated in the digital age? Paper. Yep. Good old-fashioned, hold-it-in-your-hand, fridge-worthy paper. And as it turns out, that might be the secret to better employee engagement. Now, before I get into just exactly why I'm talking about paper or why you watched the montage of me printing a report, let's go over what this report is and how to get to it. So as you can see, I am logged into the Empath demo tenant right now, famously full of total nonsense. And I'd like to remind you all that make sure if you use any tracking cookies or if you use any ad blockers that you do whitelist app.empathmsp.com so that nothing conflicts with tracking your course progress. But with that said, first thing you're going to need to know if you're watching this video, you need to have at least the manager role in Empath. You need this little tab that says members to show up at the top here. Right here, Members between Dashboard and Courses. I'm going to click on it right now. When we are on this members screen, we have some reports. Hooray! Who doesn't love reports? I love reports. You love reports. Everybody loves reports. That's why we're all CPAs and not MSP. Wait a minute. But you get the point. I am going to go ahead and repeat what we did in the video. I've selected a team. I'm going to pick on myself here, and I'm going to bring up a little info card about myself over here on the right-hand side, as you can see. There I am. I have the manager role, and I'm going to scroll down here. Across from the word Assigned Courses, there's a little icon right here that looks like a PDF. I'm going to click that, and I'm going to generate a report of my progress. So this report basically shows you everything that an employee has done with assigned content in the platform over the date range you've specified. In this case, I put all time, your mileage may vary, and you can see everything that I've worked on, whether I have completely gone through it at 100% or where I've only gone through it at a smaller percent or 0%. This is only gonna work with content that has been assigned to the employee, not with content they've watched ad hoc. Well, fairly straightforward. It's a report of what I did. Job's done, no reason to go any further. "Right, record scratch time. Let me meet you back in Empath." Now you could say, and by the way, you can also with this Export Team Progress button here, can pull a similar report for everyone on the team. Now you could say, "Sure, it's a report card. I get it, Dean. You file it, you reference it, you check a box." But if that's all you do with it, you are leaving psychological baggage gold on the table because when it comes to motivation, visibility matters. And more importantly, physicality matters. See, the brain doesn't just react to accomplishments, it reacts to patterns. When someone receives a physical report showing their growth like this, it engages the dopamine reward system. It's classical conditioning 101. Achievement plus an object equals positive association. The more senses involved—touch, sight, even smell, get good smell on paper—the deeper the encoding. Ultimately, we got to think old school report cards like we used to get when we were kids were summative, pass/fail, A, B, C, or D, fixed grade. But today's best educational models use formative assessment, tracking progress over time. And that's what this report represents. It's a trend line, not a verdict. Ever forget why you walked into a room? That's called the doorway effect, a perfect example of how our brain ties memory to space. And if you are my wife, it annoys the crap out of you because they will get up with purpose. Exit the door, and suddenly I have forgot where I am, what my name is, and what I was supposed to be doing. When you regularly give feedback in the same physical location— your office, if you're remote, the employee's office— holding the same kind of physical piece of paper report, your employee's brain starts associating that place and that object with a brain chemical response. In this case, hopefully success. So it's important to remember as we move through this, hold those review meetings in the same place, the same chair or corner of the office, the same Zoom background if remote. Try and keep a separate spatial memory that you use only for employee review meetings. What if this is a bad report? Because everything I said kind of makes sense if this is a good report. What if it's a bad report? Not every report is going to be sunshine and certifications and forward progress. Sometimes they can be a a little bit acrimonious. But here's the thing. If we've created a habit loop that associates the printed report with progress and positivity, even a bad report lands softer. They'll still get a hit of the dopamine or serotonin from performing the ritual that we have established is associated with success. The environment, the consistency, the physical piece of paper. Yes, our brains really are that simple. They do work like that. When emotions run high, especially if it is an acrimonious or emotional one-on-one, people need a target. And in a one-on-one situation, the target is you or it's me. And we don't want that. If we were all super high emotional intelligent, high EQ people, we'd probably have careers in other industries. We are not super high EQ people. We're doing the best we can. I mean, we fix computers. If we really wanted to fix people, we would have been doctors. So you got to remember that in that moment of emotion, especially if it's going to be a negative charged emotion, the printed report gives both sides something to focus on. I'm mad at the stupid piece of paper in front of me, not you. Even if that's just for a split second, that emotional redirect can mean the difference between a difficult conversation and a total blowup. We're just trying to stick a crowbar in there to give both of you just a fraction of a second to redirect and remind yourselves that you're probably not actually angry at each other. You're angry with where we are in our progress. If your team is remote, you might even consider, before you do a one-on-one, printing it and mailing it. And I know in 2025 that sounds almost comically ridiculous, but I'm being serious. And think about the joy you get these days if you get an actual envelope addressed to you by a person that isn't spam or a bill. It's kind of a nice feeling. It's for you, addressed to you. You get to open it. That is the ultimate tactile operation. Throw something in there like a mint or a sticker, something silly. A little moment of delight triggers the novelty bias in your brain, giving the jolt of attention and appreciation. And if the envelope from you always means good things or usually means good things, they'll open the next one with anticipation and once again reframe that entire situation under a far more positive light. Print the report. I know it's 2025 and we want to save the trees. You can afford to print this. Print the report. Hold it. Have them hold it while they talk to you. About it, repeat it, repeat it at least 5 times, and you will start to train your team's brain and yours to associate feedback with progress, not punishment. Eventually, these check-ins become something they want. And if all of this sounds like very similar to what you'd hear Alex Farling saying about how to build value in a QBR, you're absolutely right. It's the exact same concept here. If I want my employees to take me seriously, and to take their meetings with me seriously, I have to add tangible value that will also trigger a brain chemical response on a repeated basis. I am building trust, habit, and ritual exactly the same way you would if you were redoing your QBR process. So there you go. If you've mastered it with your clients, this should be easy peasy with your staff. Couple of additional tips that might be worthwhile for you. Conditioning works best whenever we have recognizable patterns. You want to try to keep things as similar as possible without being comedic or, or Wellian about it. But yes, repeating the same motions over and over again are really important here. So little things that sound silly, like the same Zoom background or the same opening line or the same room or the same chair, really do make a difference. You want to create a celebratory ritual. There's a reason when we're coaching little kids how to do something, we do the whole high five or gold sticker or like, hey, way to go, champ, when they're just practicing. That's to help build a celebratory ritual, to build a brain response to help inspire confidence and consistency in the face of occasional failure. It works the same way as adults. I know, I'm sorry. We came from the everybody gets a trophy generation. Unfortunately, your brain chemistry supports that that does work in this situation. You might even consider if your team consistently does a great job and you're not going to humiliate anyone by doing this, you might consider framing these quarterly. And I know that sounds a little goofy, like why am I going to frame basically an empath report card? Well, first of all, this is a lot of time. This is a lot of time and a lot of effort that everyone on your team is putting in. And I know they put a lot of time into tickets, but it's very hard to individually quantify and frame tickets. And we have dashboards everywhere for that, metrics and KPIs. Throw this up in a frame in a hallway somewhere. At my MSP, on the way to the first floor bathrooms, the entire both walls of the hallway were full of little dollar store frames full of stuff like this report, certifications, other things they've done. Not meant for the eyes of day or for a customer to ever see. Just for us. It was our awesome celebratory wall. And even if it feels a little cheesy and your staff is like, I don't care about seeing it up there, they'll notice. They care. It makes everybody feel a little bit better. And that's all we're going for here is a little bit of brain chemical response. And remember that small praise, small praise is most effective here. We want to build momentum. Just like they're building momentum with gradually learning and improving more and more and more on a trend line that's going to go up. We want to use small praise to build up a reward system, not grandiose gestures that are going to lose steam or won't be followed through on later. So reward the first report with small praise, set up the momentum for the next one. Keep it going. Print the report, people. You'd be amazed how much holding something really makes a difference. Have a good one. Keep learning. Hope you're enjoying Empath.