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

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.

Integration

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.

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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.

Bulk Import CSV
Our bulk import option allows you to add or edit user data (including group and attribute data) using a CSV file. As you complete the upload process, you can preview what data will change as a result of your upload. Learn more about completing a bulk import.
Manually
The final option is to add employees to 15Five one-off from the "Manage People" page. Once employees are in 15Five, you can also make changes to an individual's data and settings using this method. This option is great for making small changes that may not warrant the creation of a bulk import CSV.

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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.

Groups 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.
  • EngagementYou can filter engagement survey results by group.
  • High FivesYou 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

Group types

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.

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Smart Groups

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:

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.

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