Your Focus Brief arrives on the day and time your admin set, weekly or biweekly, in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email. It synthesizes what is happening across your team and each direct report, grounded in real data from 15Five and connected work tools.
The brief is a private coaching signal. It is not a status update, not a performance report, and not a message to your manager. Only you can see your brief. Its content is never shared with anyone else in your organization.
Your direct reports' briefs are private to them. You cannot see them, and your brief is not built from them. Sources stay visible only to people who already had access to them in the original tools.
A privacy statement appears with every brief: in the 15Five app home in Slack and Microsoft Teams, above the actions in the brief message, and under the date in the email version.
Where to find your brief
- Slack or Microsoft Teams — the brief arrives as a message from 15Five on the configured schedule
- Email — if Slack and Teams are not connected, the brief is delivered via email
- In the platform — select Agents in the left navigation, then Focus Briefs. Every brief ever delivered is here, filterable by date.
Your welcome message
If you are newly added to Focus Briefs, you get a one-time welcome message before your first brief. It explains what the brief helps you with as a manager. It confirms that only you can see your brief and that it supports your judgment rather than replacing it. It ends by asking what you want help with. Your answer is context for future briefs.
What your brief contains
This week
A theme for the week — a specific read on what is happening with your team right now based on what the context layer is seeing. Not a recap of last week, but what matters this week.
What needs your attention
The highest-priority items for you to act on, each with context explaining why it matters this week.
What I'm seeing across your team
A synthesis of team-level patterns — what is going well, what is building, and what to watch. Includes one concrete, high-leverage action you can take this week.
How to support each person
A card for each direct report with:
- Summary — what that person is working through this week
- Worth recognizing — a specific win or pattern worth calling out
- Risk to watch — something that could become a problem if not addressed
- How to show up — a concrete action or suggested question for your next interaction with this person
Each card shows the data sources it drew from (for example, Asana, Slack, or Meeting Assistant). Each source links to the item itself, including objectives and 1-on-1s in 15Five.
When a direct report is out, the brief says so in that person's section. This keeps time away from being read as disengagement. See Why didn't I get a full Focus Brief this week?.
Themes worth noticing
Cross-team patterns the brief has identified — trends that span multiple team members and may require a team-level response rather than individual conversations.
Actions you can take from the brief
From each brief delivery in Slack or Teams:
- Take action — act on individual items: edit, add to a 1-on-1 agenda, or start a conversation directly in Slack/Teams
- View sources: open the item each insight came from, such as a Slack thread, a Jira ticket, an objective, or a 1-on-1 in 15Five. If your company has Salesforce connected, deal counts (won, opened, lost, and pipeline movement) each link to the deal in Salesforce.
- Add context — add information that can improve future Focus Briefs.
Make your brief more relevant
- Add My Context: tell the brief about your team priorities, how the team operates, and what you are focused on. Context you add anywhere in 15Five shows in the My Context tab of Agents Hub. See Add and manage My Context.
- Encourage direct reports to add their context — the more individual context employees add, the more specific the brief becomes for each person.
- Connect more integrations — ask your admin to connect additional work system integrations. More data sources mean richer, more specific insights.