TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

15Five

Score8.3 out of 10

94 Reviews and Ratings

What is 15Five?

15Five in San Francisco offers their employee performance management platform, which emphasizes employee engagement via pulse surveys and an emphasis on frequent feedback, fast one-on-one meeting planning, objective tracking, and other related features.

Media

Celebrate wins, tout progress, and give good feedback where good feedback is due.
15Five Home Dashboard
Connect managers with their teams through regular Check-Ins that lead to actionable insights.

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Top Performing Features

  • Multiple review frequency

    System supports multiple review types including annual, quarterly mid-year and anniversary reviews.

    Category average: 8.4

  • Review reminders

    System can generate reminders to ensure review completion timeliness.

    Category average: 8.5

  • Performance plans

    Supervisors have ability to build individual performance plans including, goals, competencies, etc..

    Category average: 9.1

Areas for Improvement

  • Performance tracking

    Performance tracking allows managers to track individual progress against goals as a component of overall performance.

    Category average: 6.8

  • Reporting

    Reporting capabilities provide dashboards, ad-hoc reports and custom reporting capabilities.

    Category average: 6

  • Line-of sight-visibility

    Line-of-sight visibility is the provision of line-of sight visibility for each goal to see how goals support overall corporate objectives.

    Category average: 6.1

Great tool for HR teams to track workers performance

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use this platform to give feedback to our managers, it's allowing to track what are our current progress in some tasks depending on the period of time you are reporting. For instance, we have a weekly scope and are 4 tasks in progress may be completed in the upcoming days, so in 15Five we push the latest updates around the current status of each one. The weekly report also includes other useful metrics like level of happiness or level of difficulty trying to solve the pending tasks.

Each report includes the expectation about the task completion and what of the current work will remain open until next report, you can add new task for the following weeks/reports.

Pros

  • The track of worker metrics like level of satisfaction with their job.
  • Bring a easy way to put a list of highlights occurring in the current week
  • Based on the reports, a manager can have a visual track around the worker performance and take decisions in consequence.

Cons

  • Each task can be attached to an alarm, if you doesn't complete it after some weeks or let it opened then the system should remind you about the issue.
  • Can add more fields to track other metrics like hours expended, level of difficulty by task or the capability to add subtasks if the current one cannot be closed due news founds.
  • In general the worker cannot access to their proper metrics, might be useful if not only the manager can get the historical performance

Return on Investment

  • This tool is good for managers but doesn't retrieve details about the real job done by the developers. It doesn't bring a way to corroborate the reports there.
  • From the developer perspective can be a waste of time being reporting updates about the same thing in many management tools, including this. The missing feature to link with other tools like DevOps or Atlassian is a big milestone to take in account.
  • The real value that can be obtained from this tool will depend on how well the company is doing in terms of data literacy, because this will brings a lot of good information but still is too manual.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Azure DevOps Services, Rippling and Atlassian Jira

Other Software Used

Rippling, Harvest, Azure DevOps Services

15Five review

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently utilizing for performance management, including review cycles.

Pros

  • 1-on-1 feature helps keep managers and employees accountable.
  • Objectives helps keep transparency on projects and timelines

Cons

  • Wish 15Five's compensation feature was more built out with customizations. Currently, the integration with Comprehensive is very limited in terms of questions available.

Return on Investment

  • Employee engagement has increased and positively impacted employee experience
  • Performance reviews are more objective with 1-on-1 and check-in data
  • Makes reviews faster for managers and employees.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Lattice

Multiple functionalities in one tool

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use 15Five company wide for goal setting and measurement, one-on-ones, performance reviews, and recognition.

Pros

  • High Fives - this is an easy way to integrate with slack to recognize teammates quickly, and allows calling out core values as well
  • Performance Management is fully customizable, you can set up an individual or company wide review cycle, customize questions and rating systems, timeframes, and reviewers
  • Goal Setting is simplified, trackable and can be customized to team or individual
  • One on Ones are super useful and easy for employee as well as manager to use

Cons

  • The type is small, and when displaying Company wide OKRs it is a bit busy and hard to see in a company wide zoom and back to team or individual
  • We'd like to have the ability to customize a bit more i.e. change OKRs to simply "Goals" to keep things simpler at our small size.
  • We would like the ability to set up a dedicated 30/60/90 day goal cycle or a customized 90 day onboarding achievement cycle
  • We would like to be able to customize Check Ins for example the "How did You Feel At Work This Week" and rating we'd like to customize that banner

Return on Investment

  • With implementing 15Five we have moved from zero usage of core values, to implementation and usage of our core values which we can now incorporate into high fives, performance reviews and also outside of 15Five, in our hiring process.

Alternatives Considered

Lattice

Other Software Used

Slack

Some half-useful features but buyer beware--they will nickel and dime you!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We originally chose 15Five to help us track employee goals and satisfaction. With thought its OKR platform would help employees focus on our most important metrics. We also thought the weekly check-ins would help us track employee engagements.

Pros

  • High Fives allow employees to recognize their colleagues
  • Check-Ins allow managers to get weekly feedback from employees regarding how they feel at work

Cons

  • I think 15Five dashboards can be quite clunky and difficult to use
  • I think their One-on-one management feature makes it difficult to track action items or search histories across time or multiple employees--a simple Google Doc is much more effective or Notion if you want even more functionality
  • In my opinion, 15Five's customer service is among the worst I have experienced from a software company. They will nickel and dime you and use hidden fine print to wring as much money as they can from you.

Return on Investment

  • The more we learn from our employees about their perception of 15Five, the more we learn that they hate it. It feels like just one more thing they have to do and it can feel alienating and impersonal to interact with the software instead of with their human colleagues.
  • I think the software wants to do many things, but it does not do any of them particularly well. Its design is clunky and unsearchable. Just finding what you are looking for is often very counterintuitive and frustrating.

15Five has Significantly Contributed to My Ability to Fine Tune and Optimize My Performance!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use 15Five to align our personal OKRs with our manager/director objectives which funnel up to our larger organizational goals. This ensures that I, along with my team and the entire company, remain dedicated to the individual tasks necessary to hit our targets. I also use "check-ins" at the end of every week to review my accomplishments/challenges which provides insights to support my one-on-one meetings, track my progress towards my OKRs, and identify key priorities for the upcoming week.

Pros

  • Tracks OKR progress easily
  • High Fives - a great feature that recognizes teammates who have made an impact on our performance
  • Check-ins - an easy place to keep notes for 1-on-1s which helps make those meetings more impactful/organized

Cons

  • The more business units and teams you adopt consistently using 15five, the more you see the full value.
  • Reporting - it would be helpful to see an entire org chart breakdown of the goals hit/missed at the end of each quarter.
  • Recommendations - focus points/alerts on OKRs that aren't progressing and auto-generated action items you should take would be really useful functionality.

Return on Investment

  • Has helped increase company engagement