Action Plans: Tool Overview

Action Plans in 15Five are strategic plans that HR teams use to organize and measure the work you're doing to improve HR outcomes (employee performance, engagement, and/or retention) in your organization. In this article, you'll learn the ins and outs of our Action Plans tool.

In this article, you will learn...

• What are Action Plans? 🚀
• How they work 🧑‍💻
• What actions can I assign in an Action Plan? 🎯

What are Action Plans? 🚀

HR plays a pivotal role in shaping the culture, performance, and overall business health of their organization. HR leaders are continuously seeking ways to improve key outcomes such as employee performance, engagement, and retention. However, achieving these goals often requires coordinating a series of actions across various individuals and teams in the organization. Enter: Action Plans.

Action Plans empower HR leaders with a way to more effectively design, execute, and measure strategies that drive tangible improvements in performance, engagement, and retention. Using this tool, leaders can...

• Easily draft targeted plans based on organizational insights gathered from the HR Outcomes Dashboard, which they can share with internal stakeholders before launching to gain buy-in
• Access AI-generated recommendations for Action Plans based on your organization's unique dataset
• Maintain accountability by measuring how individuals are progressing with assigned actions and nudging those with outstanding tasks in your flow of work
• Continuously track the key metrics that indicate success, allowing for iterations along the way

Let's explore how it works.

How they work 🧑‍💻

15Five is designed around a philosophy we call the HR Outcomes Flywheel, which connects all the things HR does in a continuous, accelerating flywheel to improve the outcomes that matter most to your company. The HR Outcomes Flywheel approach enables HR leaders — in partnership with managers — to act on measured outcomes at scale and in a way that demonstrably impacts the business.

The HR Outcomes Flywheel follows these phases:

• 🔍 Diagnose: Create a shared understanding of what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus.
• 📝 Plan: Implement strategic action plans that are clear, accountable, and trackable.
• 🚀 Act: Scale your strategy by activating and enabling your people managers.

Action Plans are an imperative tool in the "Plan" and "Act" stages of the flywheel. Here's how it works:

1. Draft an Action Plan: Once you've diagnosed key areas for focus, you can easily draft an Action Plan from scratch, or use 15Five's recommended Action Plans, which are generated based on your organization's unique data mix using responsive AI. During this process, you'll select which cohorts of employees you want to target, the outcome(s) you want to drive (performance, engagement, and/or retention), and the specific metrics you want to impact with the plan.
2. Add actions to your plan: From there, you'll assign actions to individuals in your organization that contribute to the plan's overall success, focusing on manager actions that will help you scale impact across the organization.
3. Share your plan: When you're done adding actions, you may choose to share the plan with colleagues for their feedback. This collaborative step ensures that your plan is well-rounded and tailored to your team's unique challenges and goals.
4. Launch your Action Plan: Next, it's time to launch your Action Plan. At this point, action owners will receive a launch email, and their tasks will appear on their homepage. You can easily revisit any launched Action Plan to make updates, add participants, or adjust deadlines as needed
5. Track the progress of assigned actions: As action due dates approach, you can easily track the progress of assigned actions and send reminders to employees who may be falling behind, helping to keep the plan on track and drive results.
6. (COMING SOON) Measure impact: As your plan progresses, you can use built-in reporting to see how the plan is impacting the metrics you selected during plan creation, allowing for iterations along the way.

What actions can I assign in an Action Plan? 🎯

When assigning an action as part of an Action Plan, you can select from the following action types:

• Action Item: Assign a task for individuals to complete.
• Discussion: Assign a talking point for individuals to discuss in 1-on-1 meetings or async.
• Best-Self Kickoff: Assign the task of holding a Best-Self Kickoff meeting.
• Coaching Session (1:1 or Group): Assign the task of scheduling a 1:1 coaching session or group coaching session, which assignees will complete with one of 15Five's certified coaches. Your availability to these options depends on your Transform package.
• Complete Course: Assign a course for managers to take from Transform's on-demand course library.
• Complete Microlearning: Assign a Microlearning for managers to take from our on-demand Microlearning course library. Microlearnings are bite-sized training content designed to help managers master skills necessary to enhance employee engagement, performance, and retention on their teams.
• Create Objective (Company, Group, Individual, or Self-Development): Assign the task of creating an OKR (Objective and Key Results).
• Give Individual High Five: Assign the task of giving a high five.