There are quite a few words tossed around in 15Five that you might not know the definition of. Some are commonly used, like account administrator. Some are less apparent in app, but are still important to understand. Check out the below terms that you may run into when using 15Five.
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- Account admin: Account admins are usually the main point of contact for managing billing, inactive/active employees, feature setting, and user permissions. You can view a full list of your company's account admins, or manage account admins. Account admins privileges do not affect viewing privileges, but you can give someone view-all permissions by contacting 15Five's Customer Support Team.
- Answers: Answers are responses to Check-in questions. Most answers are visible to everyone that has permission to view your Check-in, but you can also mark answers as private between you and your manager by clicking the lock icon next to any answer. Learn more about filling out your Check-in.
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- Billing admin: Billing admins are administrators who have visibility and permissions to manage billing information. This includes pulling invoices and updating payment information. Billing administrators do not have to be account administrators. Permissions are limited for these administrators.
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- Check-in period: The period of time that is reflected on in a Check-in. For example: your next Check-in is due on Friday, Sep 10. The "check-in period" would be from Saturday, Sep 4 - Friday, Sep 10.
- Comments: Comments are responses made on answers to questions on Check-ins. Comments can be made by anyone who has access to read your Check-ins. If you want to make a comment private you can review the tutorial on private comments. Comments may also be left on 1-on-1 agendas, Objectives, and High Fives.
- Custom Reports: You can create Custom Reports by group, by individual, or for everyone. This option gives you the ability to print out custom reports in both print format or a CSV for spreadsheets. You can pull custom reports on all of our features including Check-in answers, High Fives, and Pulse scores and comments.
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- Direct manager: A direct manager is the main person responsible for reading and reviewing Check-ins. Each person who submits a Check-in is assigned a direct manager. This could be a manager, supervisor, or team member that works closely with other employees. A direct manager has the ability to ask questions and invite reporters.
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- Feedback: Feedback is a common term used to describe any response to a question: could be specifically referring to the Request feedback feature or as broad as feedback received from a peer in a review cycle. Regardless of where the feedback is appearing or coming from, here is an article to help you give the most effective feedback possible.
- Followers: Other people can request to view your Check-ins, regardless of their grouping or position within the company. These people are referred to as ‘followers’, and have commenting and liking privileges for your Check-in just like your direct manager. If someone requests to be a follower for your Check-ins, you will need to give them approval before they can see anything. You can also grant direct access for someone to view your Check-ins without them requesting first. To learn more about this process refer to our tutorial.
- Follow-up: Need to take action or have an offline conversation about something? Flag it for follow-up and it will be saved under your 'Follow Ups' tab on the 'Check-ins' page.
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- Group administrators: Group administrators can manage all settings for their group including due days, visibility settings, and group members. These group administrators may or may not be 15Five administrators and may or may not be a direct manager. Group administrators do not have to be members of the group themselves. It is important to note that group administrators do not have access to group member's Check-ins by default—they would have to request to follow.
- Group drill-down: Group drill-down enables all members within a group to view the Check-ins of people that are directly underneath their fellow group members. For example: If John reports to Mary, and Mary reports to Lisa, with “drill-down” enabled, Lisa can see John’s reports even though she isn’t his direct manager and is down the line from him. Warning: If you include C-levels in a group with managers and enable drill-down, the managers will be able to see the C-levels Check-ins and anyone below the C-level, even though they are technically up the line from the manager.
- Group viewing: Group viewing is a feature that enables individuals within a shared group to view and comment on each others' Check-ins. Turning on group view is a good option for teams that want more visibility and collaboration, encouraging more of a forum-style conversation for generating ideas and surfacing issues. This is a great option for teams with a more transparent communication model.
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- High Fives: High Fives are a great tool that allows employees to show each other appreciation whenever they do something awesome. You can celebrate wins and let someone know you appreciate their help by giving them a High Five.
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- @mentions: @mentions gives you the ability to bring in another team member on your Check-in, Objective, High Fives, etc within the comments. Simply type in the @ symbol and then select the name of the person or group you want to include. To see how this feature performs you can view our guide.
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- Participant: The term 'participants' refers to our Best-Self Review® feature. When a review administrator creates a review cycle, the people who were included in the review cycle are called participants. Participants are the subject of all reviews. For cycles with Self & Manager reviews included, participants will be asked to write a self review. Participants are also the people responsible for nominating peers when peer reviews are included. The term 'participant' does not refer to people who have to write a review in a review cycle—they are called 'review writers'. It is possible for someone to be a participant and a review writer in a cycle.
- Pass it up: Want to share something from your direct report's Check-in with your direct manager? You can pass up answers so that they are included in your current Check-in as a reminder to talk with your direct manager.
- Polls: The Polls dashboard allows you to ask one-time quantitative metric questions and see the results.
- Priorities: Priorities make 15Five an easy way to hold yourself accountable and feel progress on a daily basis. Use it as your work journal and receive weekly notifications to remind you of your goals. Your priorities should be a limited number of tasks that you plan to accomplish between now and your next Check-in. Think of it as a to-do list at work. Try to limit the number of priorities you list on your Check-in to avoid overwhelm!
- Pulse: When completing a Check-in, reporters will be asked to provide a pulse score and comment. The answers from this Pulse question are pulled into something called the Pulse dashboard. The Pulse dashboard aggregates the data, giving you insight into how your team and organization are feeling, so you can help them feel their best.
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- Question template: Question templates are used for Best-Self Review®. You can select a 15Five default template, or create a custom template for your Best-Self Review™. These templates often include 'Growth & development', 'Company values', and various 'Manager' or 'Self' assessment sections.
- Question queue: Question queues allow you to set a single question to rotate automatically weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly on Check-ins. You can also choose if you want the question to repeat. You can set up a single question queue to be visible company-wide, one queue per group, or one per individual.
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- Reporter: A reporter is anyone that completes a Check-in. If you have a Check-in to complete you will find it here: My Check-ins. Reporters are often the same thing as direct reports. The terms may be used interchangeably, depending on whether we are talking about the act of filling out a Check-in vs the relationship between a direct manager and a direct report.
- Review cycle: 15Five's alternative to your average performance review. A review cycle is what review administrators create that contains settings, questions, participants, etc. Review cycles contain all the information regarding performance results. Review cycles typically happen 2-4 times a year.
- Review writer: Review writers are responsible for writing reviews about participants; could be manager, upward, and/or peer reviews. Review writers do not have to be participants themselves. You can filter by review writers on each cycle Overview page to better understand who your review writers are.
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- Survey: Refers to a collection of questions being asked in the Engagement+ feature. Also includes the settings for those questions and the dates that the questions are available to be answered.
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- Trends: The Trends dashboard instantly visualizes the answers to your team’s quantitative Check-in questions over time.