Problem with building team communication, stubborn direct and other stories...

Hello all

First I would like to apologise for possible mistakes you might find inside my posts - english is not my first language. I'm founder and president of small building company from Poland ( (60 employees, 7M $ annual sale).

I found MT podcasts this year and I really like it. After some preparation I'v launched O3 and this week starting positive feedback - both this  tools seems to work great. I'm also following M&M advices on establish good communications within the company.

At the moment we have 2 major building sites. Each site is managed by one manager engineer with the help from 2 other engineers - they have aprox 20+ our own company employees and 50+ subcontractors employees. Both sites are supervised by technical advisor (no idea if I made it clear but translating job names seems the most difficult to me). I should also mention that all 6 site engineers are fairly young people with almost none experience at work and at managing people especially - for most of them, work at our company is their first work after studies. 

 Beacuse I realised how poorly our internal communication looked, I've decided to try M&M's advices on running virtual teams - I've started :

• weekly staff videoconference - for HQ+both sites
• weekly O3 - I run them at sites offices  - cause it's impossible to get folks leave site and travel to HQ - it's inefficient and too expensive, and also I'm visiting each site weekly
• I asked to write weekly reports by each engineer that should be sent by email to each member of team on site, technical advisor and me 

And here is the problem I'm recently facing - weekly reports. I asked  them to be like a weekly summary of the most important actions by every team member, folks should spend max 30 mins writing them in body of email, send by 2 pm on Friday. After 4 weeks I'm surprised that those reports seem to be treated like unnecessary burden by most of directs. One of them - technical advisor - the most experienced guy in company who works for us (25 years of working in building industry) even refused to write them! I talked to him about this raports during our O3 but he said that :

• he works as "freelancer" - well it's kind of true - he has work contract rather than "typical" direct
• according to his contract he doesn't have to follow all company rules - well technicaly yes
• he already made an exception and agreed on aour weekly O3 (sic!)
• and he thinks that "captain in army doesn't have to raport to sergeant" - means he won't write about his work/duties/results to site engineers .... M&M could certainly add few cents to this attitude ;)

So after such long description of my fight for developing folks in my company, what would everyone suggest?  Am I doing OK with MT tools usage or should I modify things according to specific of my industry?

Thanks in advance for all replies

Maciek

p.s. Sorry for such long post and probably many mistakes.