To: Amy Yung, Team Writer
From: Jojo (Syau-jing) Huang, Team Editor
Date: December 9, 2019
Subject: Peer Review of Formal Report
Hi Amy, thank you for submitting your formal report draft about “Increasing Communication between Employees at Siegle Properties B.C. Ltd.”, please see a list of comments about your report:
Overall Impression
The sections of the report are concise and tidy. The introduction part clearly introduces the background, purpose, and methods of this report, while the conclusion briefly discusses the key finds and suggestions, both of which are described in a friendly tone. Meanwhile, the data analysis section uses many figures based on the survey results, which makes the formal report persuasive. Overall, the reports leave a good first impression to the readers.
Introduction
The introduction section introduces the issues about customer complaints and employee communications, as well as the methods of investigation in this report, which provides a clear opening for the report. However, the relationship between the customer complaint issue and employee communication issue may be a little confusing when people read this report for the first time, since the target reader, Ms. Ma might have not been aware of the communication issue. Adding a conjunction similar to “One possible reason for the numerous complaints may be the issue of communication between the employees” at the beginning of the “Purpose of Study” section may make the introduction clearer.
Data Analysis
The data analysis section makes many detail discussions about the answers to the key survey questions and major interview results, which not only provides many good pieces of evidence about the importance of the communication between employees but also makes the final recommends persuasive. At the same time, there might be a few suggestions that can make the data analysis section even better. For example, the beginning part of this section describes the constitution of the senior staff and new employees in this study. And it may also describe the percentages of the staff from the strata and rental departments since most of the figures in this section are divided into two diagrams about the two departments. Besides, in the interview result with senior staff, adding more descriptions about the example customer claim for a leak in the unit may help to explain why reviewing other people’s work will make the senior employee work overtime. Also, changing “Eighty-nine percent” to “89%” in the discussion of Figure 2 might also help make the report more professional, since it can help to maintain a consistent format of all the number related discussion in this report.
Figure Design
The figures used to explain the survey results are clear and well-designed. For example, the legend colors of all the diagrams are consistent, which makes the whole report professional. Moreover, many diagrams merge related survey options into the same region, which also makes them neat and straightforward. At the same time, there are a few things about those diagrams that may be improved. For example, in Figure 1, the legends items include “Above 3” and “Below 3”, while the report does not explain whether the option “3” belongs to one of them or has been excluded from this diagram. Also, the legend item of “Assigning a mentor to each new employee” in Figure 4 is missing, which can be solved by make the figure a little wider. Meanwhile, while the paragraph below Figure 7 discusses the result of the fifth question of the New Employee Survey, while there is no figure or detail results about this question. Maybe the figure about question 5 is missing.
Grammar
Overall the grammar in the report is good, while some minor improvements may be applied. For example, in the “Purpose of Study” section, the “have a vague understanding of their work environment” may be changed to “have a vague understanding of their working environment”. Also, in the “Results from the Interview with a New Employee” section, “he is received with a vague answer” may be changed to “he received a vague answer”. Meanwhiles, it may be more suitable to use the past tense when introducing the interview results as the interviews happened in the past.
Conclusion
The conclusion of the report makes a summary of the key findings, recommendations and expected outcomes for the whole report, which is quite straightforward and usefully to the reader Ms. Ma. Moreover, the description of the recommendations does not contain any imperative verbs and avoids the use of “you”, which is a good demonstration on the “YOU Attitude”.
Overall, the formal report was well written. It investigated the root causes of the customer complaint in Siegle Propertie provides many valuable ideas on how to solve this issue, which is quite helpful to Ms. Ma. At the same time, there may be some possible improvements in figures, grammar, and organization which can make the report even better. Your questions about the review comments are very welcome, please feel free to contact me at xiaojing@alumni.ubc.ca.
Link to Amy’s formal report draft: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99a-2019wa/2019/12/04/assignment-3-2-formal-report-draft-3/
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