As you launch or re-launch 15Five in your organization, it's vital to have an understanding of the options available to you around employee and data management so you can make the right decisions. The options you select during this phase will establish the foundation for your organization's experience with 15Five and can help pave the way to reduce administrative work, streamline processes, and gain valuable reporting insights by harnessing the power of groups and attributes.
In this article, you will learn...
- Options for adding and managing people
- Options for organizing employee data (groups and attributes)
Options for adding and managing people
There are three available options for adding your team to 15Five and continuing to manage their data: using an integration, via bulk import using a CSV upload, or manually from within account settings. Read more about each of these options below. For in-depth instructions on how to add users using each of these methods, please see our "Add new people" article.
Managing employees via an integration is the preferred option for adding users and managing employee data, as doing so reduces administrative work and the risk of error. When you integrate your HRIS or IdP, we will automatically sync user data into 15Five using data in your integration as the source of truth. View a full list of all user management integrations we offer.
There may be some employee data fields that you want to have 15Five, but that don't map over from your chosen integration. In this case, we recommend completing a bulk import after setting up your integration to populate these additional fields.
Note
If you manage employees using an integration, some fields will not be editable in 15Five, as they're sourced from your HRIS or IdP. If you make a change to a field in 15Five that maps over from your integration, employee data in 15Five will revert upon the next sync.
Note
Once you add employees to 15Five, follow the steps in our "Assign roles to users" article to grant them special permissions.
Options for organizing employee data
Once employees are added to the system, it's time to organize employee data in a strategic way that enables you to make the most of 15Five. You can do this using Groups and Attributes.
- Groups allow you to create subsets of people to organize your company based on business units, departments, locations, common interests, and more. These groups can be pulled into specific features across 15Five for segmenting, reporting, and filtering.
- Attributes are labels that can be applied to employees and typically contain sensitive information. Various reports in 15Five can be filtered by attributes to show you how employees in different segments of your organization are doing.
As a general rule, we suggest using groups to organize people into segments that you want to be able to take action on in 15Five and that are not based on sensitive information, since group membership is public. Attributes should be utilized to organize people into segments based on sensitive data.
Continue reading for more information about options for organizing employee data using groups and attributes.
With groups in 15Five, you can create subsets of people to organize your company based on business units, departments, locations, common interests, and more. These groups can be pulled into specific features across 15Five for segmenting, reporting, and filtering. Learn how to create groups in 15Five.
How groups work with different features
- Best-Self Review®: You can include/exclude a group from a review cycle or calibration session, as well as ask group-specific competency questions.
- Check-ins: You can create group-specific Check-in questions, manage Check-in options (such as due day and frequency) by group, and manage Check-in visibility settings by group. Employees can also @mention groups in Check-in answers.
- Engagement: You can filter engagement survey results by group.
- High Fives: You can give a high five to a group by @mentioning the group name.
- HR Outcomes Dashboard and Manager Effectiveness Indicator (MEI): You can filter dashboards by groups.
- Reporting: You can run any report based on group membership.
- Objectives: You can assign an Objective to a group.
Group visibility 👀
- Employees can see which groups they’re in on their account settings page and their profile page.
- Anyone in your organization can see what groups another employee is on their profile page. Because of this transparency, it's important that you don't create a group for something that should be private (e.g. demographic attributes, performance level, etc.).
Options for groups
A group type is an umbrella category or folder that's used to store individual groups in (e.g. departments, locations, divisions, teams, Employee Resource Groups/ERGs). There is no limit to the number of groups within a group type an employee can be in. Learn how to create group types in 15Five.
Here's an example: if you create a group type called 'Offices', you could create groups for each city your company has an office in: maybe Berlin, Denver, Madrid, New York, and Raleigh. Then, you'll add group members to the groups that align with their office location.
Smart Groups are groups that are automatically created and managed based on the manager, reducing manual management. As teams change, smart groups will automatically update so admins don't have to worry about assigning someone to or un-assigning them from the manager's Smart Group. Learn more about enabling and managing Smart Groups.
With Smart Groups enabled, account admins have the ability to filter any report in 15Five by Smart Group for specific manager insights. Managers can also take the following feature-specific actions:
- Check-ins: Ask Smart Group-specific Check-in questions to their direct reports. Edit group settings (including visibility settings and enabling/disabling priorities and company-wide Check-in questions) for all their direct reports at once.
- Engagement: Engagement Admins can filter engagement survey results by attributes.
- High Fives: Filter the High Five feed to show only high fives given by or received by their direct reports.
- Reporting: Filter by their own Smart Group to pull reports that are specific to their teams.
Some things to note about smart groups:
- When configuring smart groups, make sure to enable the “Show all Smart Groups to admins” option, so admins have visibility into them.
- A manager isn’t considered a member of their own smart group— they are just appointed as the group admin.
- It is not possible to create objectives for smart groups.
Attributes are labels that can be applied to employees and typically contain sensitive information. Unlike groups, attribute visibility varies based on confidentiality level or set visibility settings.
You can read more about the visibility of different attribute types, as well as how each attribute type is used in 15Five's features, in their respective sections below.
Options for attributes
By default, the following attributes are included in 15Five. Unless otherwise noted in parentheses below, these attributes are located on employees' account settings pages:
- Employee ID
- First name
- Last name
- Start date
- Hire date
- Termination date
- Job title
- Job description (Visible in Best-Self Review® and Career Hub)
- Location
- Strengths (Visible in employee profiles and Career Hub)
- Timezone
How default attributes work with different features
- User access: You can fill the ‘Smart date’ attribute for employees to ensure they don’t have access to 15Five prior to your launch date.
- Career Hub: An employees strengths and job description are automatically pulled into Career Hub so they can access their job and craft their ideal career path.
- Engagement: Engagement Admins can filter results by demographic attributes (called "hidden groups" in Engagement).
- HR Outcomes Dashboard: You can measure turnover in the HR Outcomes Dashboard by populating the 'Termination date' attribute for employees.
Visibility 👀
The visibility of attributes differs based on the attribute itself. Admins can set custom view and edit permissions for some attributes on the ‘Manage attributes’ page.
Demographic attributes in 15Five allow HR admins to report on key employee trends through the lens of their workforce’s demographics. Breakdowns by demographics and key defining characteristics of an employee are critical to helping people leaders uncover and address problems within their company before they become too big to solve. Learn about enabling and populating demographic attributes.
The following demographic attributes are included in 15Five:
- Birth date
- Ethnicity
- Gender
- Race
- Salary
How demographic attributes work with different features
- Engagement: Engagement Admins can filter results by demographic attributes (called "hidden groups" in Engagement).
- Best-Self Review®: HR admins can filter company review results by demographic attribute.
- Check-ins: HR Admins can filter the "Submitted Check-ins" and "Reviewed Check-ins" reporting dashboards by demographic attribute.
Visibility 👀
- Only HR admins and an employee themselves can see an employee’s demographic attributes. These can be viewed in the employee’s account settings.
It’s important for modern HR teams to have the ability to identify high-performing employees in their organization so they can work towards retaining top talent. That’s where 15Five’s “High Potential” attribute comes into play. HR admins can use this hidden attribute to identify employees who have the potential to make a big impact on the organization.
How the HiPo attribute works with different features:
- In the future, we plan to expand the high potential feature— allowing you to filter engagement survey results, performance review results, Pulse scores, and more to see how your high-potential employees are doing. Keep an eye out for future releases in the "What's new at 15Five?" section of our Help Center.
Visibility 👀
- The High Potential attribute can only be seen and managed by HR admins and appears on an employee’s account settings page.
- Employees, their managers, and account admins cannot see whether or not a person is rated as high potential.