Managers are the #1 driver of employee retention, engagement, and performance. With 15Five's Manager Effectiveness Indicator (MEI), you can easily see which managers are excelling and which managers need support in specific areas, and take action before issues impact the organization. MEI offers a holistic view of how effective your managers are, how they are impacting bottom-line metrics, and what you can do to help them improve.
In this article, you will learn...
- What is the Manager Effectiveness Indicator (MEI)?
- How it works
- Benefits
- Key components
- Roles and visibility
- FAQs
Access and availability
⛔️ Required access to the Manager Effectiveness Indicator.
👥 This article is relevant to roles and individuals assigned access to the Outcomes Dashboard and MEI.
📦 This feature is available in the Total Platform pricing package.
What is the Manager Effectiveness Indicator?
The Manager Effectiveness Indicator (MEI) is a tool designed to get a holistic understanding of your managers' effectiveness, using data from 15Five to examine the skills, behaviors, and outcomes a manager and their team achieves. Admins can configure the indicator to reflect the aspects of manager effectiveness that most align with their organization.
With the MEI, admins can...
- View how effective managers within their organizations are by measuring skills, competencies, and behaviors through review cycles, engagement surveys, and 15Five usage data;
- Always see the current state of manager effectiveness, as the MEI is calculated daily and includes weekly trend data;
- Configure weight and inputs to customize the indicator specifically for your business and culture;
- Gain insight into how effective each manager is, how managers are impacting bottom-line metrics, and how they can improve.
The MEI looks at competencies of manager effectiveness, as well as key behaviors of effective managers.
Manager competencies and behaviors
Through conversations with HR leaders, we developed the following competencies and behaviors that are top-of-mind in determining manager effectiveness. Measuring and having awareness around these competencies and behaviors provides an avenue for HR Leaders to take action on providing training and support to their managers to drive performance, engagement, and turnover efforts.
- Demonstrating Business Acumen: Effective managers analyze complex situations, anticipate future trends and possibilities, and develop plans that take into account various factors and contingencies across a business environment.
- Setting Goals: Effective managers prioritize work and define measurable objectives that an individual or organization wants to achieve. Identify the desired outcome or results and develop a plan to reach that goal.
- Enabling Productivity: Effective managers create an environment or provide resources and tools that allow individuals to work efficiently and effectively toward achieving their goals. Identify the factors that may hinder productivity and find ways to eliminate or mitigate them.
- Giving and Receiving Feedback: Effective managers provide or get information about performance, behavior, or actions with the intention of improvement or the continuation of doing something well.
- Influencing Others: Effective managers affect people's beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Have an awareness of people, their values, and their needs, and use this knowledge as a means to drive organizational impact.
- Supporting Career Growth: Effective managers help individuals to develop the knowledge, skills, and experience they need to achieve their career goals. Mentor, train, coach, and provide opportunities for learning and growth.
- Building Strong Teams: Effective managers foster their team to work well together, be committed to a common purpose, and achieve their goals efficiently and effectively together.
- Developing Yourself: Effective managers stay organized, focused, and productive while also managing their teams effectively.
- Prioritizing work
- Meeting 1-on-1
- Recognition
- Setting and meeting goals
- Performance feedback
How it works
- Configure the MEI. Manager effectiveness is both objective and subjective. In your organization's MEI configuration, you can choose to pull in both objective behaviors in 15Five and subjective 360-degree feedback through manager effectiveness assessments, allowing for a full picture of effectiveness. You can also use our default configuration. The configuration can be updated at any time to meet your organization's current needs. Learn how to configure the MEI.
- Pull in relevant data. The MEI is calculated based on 1) manager effectiveness assessments and 2) behaviors in 15Five. Once you decide on your configuration, launch a manager effectiveness review cycle or manager effectiveness engagement survey. Alongside that, make sure that managers are aware of expectations around 15Five feature usage and ensure they're trained on these features. The more data you have, the more accurate and actionable the MEI will be.
- Assess data regularly. The MEI calculates on a weekly basis, giving you a snapshot into how it's changing week-over-week. Remember to track MEI as you launch manager effectiveness initiatives to see how your work is moving the needle. You can also use built-in reporting to filter and sort through managers and uncover how every manager or department leader is impacting engagement, retention, and performance. Identify top performers, so you can put action plans in place to keep them. Identify bottom performers and use built-in reporting to pinpoint where they're struggling, so you can coach them, get them into a role that's better suited, set clearer expectations, or coach them out of the org (if they're not a good fit). Learn more about how to use the MEI.
- Take action steps to develop managers. As you continue to collect and analyze data, use your insights to create data-driven action plans and initiatives that will drive managers up to high levels of effectiveness.
Benefits
- Monitor manager effectiveness at a frequent cadence. While engagement surveys and review cycles are a great way to assess manager effectiveness, they typically only take place a few times a year. The MEI is calculated weekly and includes trend data so HR leaders can always see the current state of manager effectiveness.
- Easy-to-use. Incorporate multiple data points to reflect the scope of manager effectiveness without work needed by HR to export multiple reports and compile data.
- Customize weight and inputs. Can be configured to represent the aspects of manager effectiveness that most align with your organization.
- Understand each manager's impact. Gain insights into how effective each manager is, how managers are impacting bottom-line metrics, and how they can improve. Data can be filtered to better understand manager effectiveness across various cohorts of managers.
- Connect data to action steps. Use the MEI alongside 15Five's HR Outcomes Dashboard to see how managers are impacting employee engagement, performance, and turnover. Pinpoint areas of opportunity and use them to coach up your managers.
Key components
The Current MEI shows you what your organization's current MEI is and includes benchmarking so you can see how you're performing in comparison to other organizations with similar feature usage. This MEI is updated weekly.
The MEI trend graph allows you to track how your organization's MEI changes over time.
The MEI Factors Insights section surfaces the highest and lowest factors included in your organization's MEI configuration that are impacting MEI— so you can target efforts on the areas of manager effectiveness that have the most opportunity for your organization.
The breakdown table gives you a visualization of how many managers fall into MEI ranges and how those numbers change week-over-week.
The manager list provides admins with valuable context about the current state of their managers.
In your organization's MEI configuration, you can choose to pull in both objective behaviors in 15Five and subjective 360-degree feedback through manager effectiveness assessments, allowing for a full picture of effectiveness. The configuration can be updated at any time to meet your organization's current needs.
You can use the MEI Calculation Guide to see what behaviors in 15Five are used to calculate each factor included in your organization's MEI configuration. Learn more about these calculations and how to configure the MEI.
Roles and visibility
By default, account admins and HR admins can view and interact with the MEI. Account admins can remove access for account admins or HR admins, as well as add additional individuals they want to have access to the MEI in configuration settings (in-app link). Read more about configuring the MEI.