Your company is now engaged in a continuous feedback practice using 15Five. How can you, as administrators and leadership, 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 🔬: Learn about the WHY behind each of these features on our Science Pages
15Five Check-in
15Five check-ins are where your people literally check in with their managers. Managers engage with their team's check-ins to provide feedback, celebrate wins, and dive deep to understand challenges and roadblocks and move work forward. You, too, can interact throughout your organization and with individual contributors. Since 15Five follows a natural drill-down order, you, can interact with the the 15Fives of anyone below you in your reporting hierarchy. Leadership and admin involvement leads to increased employee engagement and motivation.
We also highly recommend that CEOs fill out their own 15Five. This brings CEOs into the practice with everyone else, which will benefit them and set the example for the rest of the organization—double win. With their permission, your people can also follow company leaders to have visibility into their 15Fives. CEOs and leaders can also use @all mentions to broadcast important messages to the org. Now that sounds a bit more engaging than a standard email!
If you see something in a 15Five check-in that you want to take action on, there are a few actions you can take. You can pass an item up the chain or flag it for follow up. 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 or an issue that may come up.
Questions
For starters, we recommend that admins and leaders ask their people company wide questions. The standard, “What's going well?” and “What challenges are you facing?” are a great place to start and will give you insight into what is and isn't working in your organization.
An easy way to crowdsource your org and get specific feedback is to take a poll in 15Five. Ask a one-time quantitative question and use the polls dashboard to get definitive input from your team. Encourage your employees to leave comments with their answers to provide you with specific suggestions and more information on their answers. Share custom poll questions around the office, at an all hands or departmental meeting to keep the conversation both in and out of 15Five.
Reporting
As an admin, you can also leverage reporting to get greater insight into the feedback your people are sharing. Use custom reports to gain high level insights into what's going on at your company. Remember, 15Fives are real-time, pulse check-ins with employees around what's going well and the challenges they are facing. The content from check-ins will be the information that is that is available to you through reporting, and you can use reporting to analyze this feedback—and then engage in meaningful and informed communication with your people.
Pulse Report
See how your team is feeling in the Pulse dashboard. The pulse question is meant to be a general morale boost. You can filter by group to check on different teams' pulse, and be proactive if you notice any dips in morale. Use the pulse dash as an early warning indicator for when it might be necessary for you to step in or ask a manager to step in and offer additional support to their team.
Common use cases for reporting in 15Five
- Run a custom report on Priorities to get clear on tasks that employees are working on. 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 employees are doing in regards to completing their priority tasks can help inform you on 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.
- Run a custom report on a question, like “What challenges are you facing?” The report will be organized by 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 your employees 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. Run a custom report on all the wins and call out big wins publicly. Ask in a check-in before the meeting, "What question do you want answered in the next all-hands?" Run a custom report and prep to answer these questions to the company. It's all about pulling things in 15Five out and recognizing good work and feedback publicly.
Best-Self Review®
For a longer-term, formal feedback loop, you can conduct your employee reviews in 15Five. If check-ins are where feedback starts, reviews are where your managers and employees can engage in deeper reflection. Review administrators can create review cycles, question templates, and view all in progress and completed review answers. Review admins must first be 15Five admins, so managing review cycles is especially particular to you as an admin. At any time during a review cycle, a review admin or 15Five admin 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.