15Five's Check-ins feature is designed to help managers and employees stay connected and aligned on goals, progress, and feedback. With Check-ins, employees can easily share updates on their work and progress, raise any issues or concerns, and receive feedback and recognition from their managers.
We understand companies come in all shapes and sizes, so we designed visibility settings for the Check-ins feature to be customizable.
In this article, you will learn about the following visibility options:
- Traditional management hierarchy (default)
- Total organizational or group transparency
- Executive-level transparency
- Matrix-style transparency
Traditional management hierarchy (default)
By default, 15Five is set up for a traditional management model— a hierarchical structure in which visibility flows from the top of the organization to the bottom. This means that managers at the top of the hierarchy will be able to view their direct reports' Check-ins, and anyone who reports to their direct reports, and anyone who reports to those direct reports, and so on.
15Five automatically creates a hierarchy based on manager/direct report relationships and allows visibility into Check-ins based on this hierarchy. This default hierarchy visibility setting cannot be turned off— in other words, there's no way to disable the viewing Check-ins through drill-down.
Some important things to note about this default visibility:
- Account admins do not have visibility into company-wide Check-ins unless they're at the top of the hierarchy. If you'd like for certain people within your organization to have visibility into all Check-ins, please reach out to 15Five's Support Team and request that they be given Global Viewer permissions.
- If a person wants to have visibility into another person's Check-ins but isn't in their hierarchy, they can request to follow that person's Check-ins.
Total organizational or group transparency
If you want your entire organization, or a team within your organization, to have full visibility into each other's Check-ins, you can achieve it through group permissions.
Total organizational transparency
If you want everyone in your company to see each other’s Check-ins, you can set up total organizational transparency through group permissions.
How to set up full transparency
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Create a single group that includes all teammates.
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Enable Group viewing and Group drill-down for that group.
💡 Keep in mind: All Check-ins will be visible to everyone when this setting is enabled.
Group transparency
You can also create team-level transparency—allowing everyone within a specific team or department to view one another’s Check-ins.
How to enable group transparency
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Navigate to Settings → People → Manage Groups.
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Select the group type you want to use, or create a new one.
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Add the team members to the group.
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Enable Group viewing and Group drill-down.
This setup encourages collaboration and shared accountability within teams.
Executive-level transparency
If you want to set up a structure within 15Five that only allows top level managers to have full transparency, you can do this by grouping only those top level managers in a dedicated "Leadership" group. After the group is created, enable group viewing and group drill-down. This would grant members of the Leadership group the ability to see one another's Check-ins and be able to drill-down and see the Check-ins of the direct reports of all other group members.
How to set up executive visibility
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Invite leadership team members to 15Five (if they aren’t already added).
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Go to Settings → People → Manage Groups.
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Create a new group type (e.g., Leadership).
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Add your executives as group members.
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Enable Group viewing and Group drill-down.
Matrix-style organization
If you have an organization where people have two managers, for example, a manager and a supervisor, then this might be the option for you. By default, 15Five has one direct manager per person capability. Typically the person's manager would be assigned as the direct manager, which leaves us with the supervisor. In order for the supervisor to view and engage with the person's Check-ins, have that supervisor request to follow the person. This will give access to both the manager and supervisor and will give the ability to both make comments on the Check-in.
How to manage visibility in a matrix structure
1. Follow the traditional model of the setup shown above.
2. Assign the direct report to the appropriate manager.
3. Advise the additional manager to request to follow the individual's Check-ins. Here is a walkthrough on how to follow a teammate's Check-ins.