Your company is now engaged in a continuous feedback practice using 15Five. How can you, as account administrators and leaders, leverage 15Five to provide feedback and communicate with your team, too? There are several ways you can stay in constant communication with your team and use 15Five to not only stay aware of employee progress toward work goals, but also provide them and their managers with timely, effective feedback to improve performance and morale.
Science 🔬: The WHY behind 15Five's features
Video 🎥: 15Five Fundamentals for account administrators (emphasis on admin capabilities)
Check-in
Check-ins are where your people literally check in with their managers on a regular cadence. Managers engage with their team's Check-ins to provide feedback, celebrate wins, and dive deep to understand challenges and roadblocks. All of this allows work to move forward. You too can interact with your organization and individual contributors. Since 15Five follows a natural drill-down order, leaders can interact with the Check-ins of anyone below them in the reporting hierarchy. Leadership and admin involvement leads to increased employee engagement and motivation.
We also highly recommend that CEOs fill out their own Check-in. This brings CEOs into the practice with everyone else, which will benefit them and set the example for the rest of the organization—win-win. With the individual's permission, people can follow company leaders to have visibility into their Check-ins. CEOs and leaders can also use @all mentions on their own check-in to broadcast important messages to the org. Now that sounds a bit more engaging than a standard email!
If you see something in a Check-in that you want to take action on, there are a few actions you can take. You can pass an item up to your manager or flag it for follow up as a reminder to take action at a later time. You can also @mention another team member in your comment to make sure the right people are collaborating or are aware of each other's efforts/issues.
Questions
For starters, we recommend that account administrators and leaders ask their people company-wide questions. The standard, “What's going well?” and “What challenges are you facing?” questions are a great place to start and will give you insight into what is/isn't working in your organization.
An easy way to crowdsource your org and get specific feedback is to take a poll in 15Five. Start by asking a one-time, quantitative question on Check-ins. Then use the Polls dashboard to get definitive input from your team. Encourage people to leave comments in addition to their answers to provide you with specific suggestions and more context. Share custom poll data around the office, at an all-hands or departmental meeting, to keep the conversation both in and out of 15Five.
Reporting
As an account administrator, you can leverage our Reporting feature to get greater insight into the feedback your people are providing; AKA to gain high-level insights into what's going on at your company. Remember, Check-ins are real-time, giving you a look into what's going well and the challenges your people are facing at the moment. Content from Check-ins, as well as 1-on-1s and Objectives data is all available to you through Reporting. You can use the Reporting feature to analyze all feedback and progress—then engage in meaningful and informed communication with your people.
Pulse Report
See how your team is feeling on the Pulse dashboard. The pulse question is meant to be a general morale boost. You can filter by a group to check on different teams' pulses and be proactive if you notice any dips in morale. Use the Pulse dashboard as an early warning indicator, signaling when it might be necessary to step in, or ask a manager to step in and offer additional support to their team.
Common use cases for reporting in 15Five
Check out the Priorities Dashboard & Reports to get clear on tasks that people are working on from Check-in to Check-in.
Priorities are employee-driven to-do lists, and you can run a report on them to see what percent of tasks they are completing. Being aware of how people are doing in regards to completing their priorities can help inform you when you or a manager should step in, or when you could take the opportunity to celebrate them! For longer-term goal tracking, report on Objectives to see the progress your team is making on bigger goals.
Report on a specific question, like “What challenges are you facing?”
The report will be organized by an individual, and you can, and should include comments. You can interact directly with the original question/answer right from this page! Go in and leave comments. Let people downstream know that they have been heard and that you are taking steps towards a solution (or let them know the reasons why you're not taking steps- which is also the case at times)." Encourage your people to continue to be candid in sharing their insights by letting them know you hear them. You can also loop in other people or groups who can help with solutions. For example, loop in a whole team and leave a comment, “Let's discuss more about this.”
Use 15Five in your upcoming company all-hands meeting by looking at your High Fives dashboard to see who sent/received the most high fives in the last month.
Run a custom report on High Fives and see who received the most meaningful one. Ask in a Check-in before the meeting, "What question do you want to be answered in the next all-hands?" Then check out the Questions report: answers for that question and be prepared to answer these questions to the company. It's all about pulling data from 15Five and recognizing good work and feedback publicly.
Best-Self Review®
For a longer-term, formal feedback loop, you can conduct your performance reviews in 15Five using the Best-Self Review® feature. If Check-ins are where feedback starts, reviews are where your managers and direct reports can engage in deeper reflection. Review administrators can create review cycles, question templates, and view all in progress and completed review answers. Review administrators must first be account administrators, so managing review cycles is especially particular to you as an account administrator. At any time during a review cycle, a review administrator or account administrator can run a progress report. The report includes all participants, a participant’s peers, a participant’s direct reports, submission dates, a participant’s answers, and multiple other fields.