I'm a director. I developed an easy test for whether my status reports mattered. One week I simply stopped sending them. It was mentioned to me once, about 3

I'm a director. I developed an easy test for whether my status reports mattered. One week I simply stopped sending them. It was mentioned to me once, about 3 months later, so I sent one that week. And then never again, for about the past year at least. It's not like I didn't have weekly 1x1s with my boss, in addition to our hallway conversations, so what we were doing was already communicated. The only time I asked members of my team to write them was when I needed certain individuals to really think about their work and focus on what was important vs low priority. We talked about it, but then I had them write status each week for a while mostly to force them to stop and think about the connection of their work to the larger business objectives. I really value developers who have some level of business acumen and ability to understand the "why" of their work at a more strategic level - and if someone doesn't have that I'm going to coach it. That's just one way that works for some people. More of a coaching tool than an actual status report, though.