15Five - The Progressive Performance pulse checker

Background

Founded in 2011 by David Hassell, 15Five aims to improve the performance management of a company by utilizing the potential of individuals to the fullest. The idea of 15/5 reports was communicated by Brad Oberwager (CEO of Sundia) to David who was using these reports in his multinational business to streamline the performance management. Inspired by the concept, David founded 15Five with the aim to "become the communication backbone for thousands of companies where employees could be supported, where transparency and trust would thrive, and everyone could show up more empowered, creative, and committed." - as per the 15Five website

Analysis

As per Gallup polls, 50% of the employees who quit, cite their managers as the reason. Unequivocally, the manager-employee relationship is highly correlated with employee engagement.

As per Forbes, a good manager and a bad manager are defined as:

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Clearly, the summary from the table above is:

1. Transparency is appreciated by employees
2. Goals communication is the key
3. Continuous feedback is imperative for employee's growth and development
4. The success of the team contributes to the success of the company.
5. The communication gap leads to ambiguity and mistrust.

Why Employee Engagement has a direct impact on your Business?

As per another report by Gallup, "Nearly 70 percent of employees were not actively engaged in their work. These employees cost employers approximately $500 billion in lost work, money, and time every year."

Problems associated with the annual and semi-annual review system

1. They Cause Stress and Anxiety for Managers and Employees
2. They are infrequent
3. They are subjective
4. They do not account for qualitative work
5. They are ambiguous

Solution - Introducing the 15Five initiative of putting people back into people analytics

Weekly Check-in - This tool helps to set weekly communication between managers and employees. This Tool addresses the communication gap problem and replaces long email questions with customizable feedback check-ins. This helps to spark curiosity, innovation, and inclusion among the employees and keep them motivated to accomplish their goals.

High Fives - This peer review and appreciation tool let you appreciate and recognize your peers who have helped you during your day-to-day work. It helps to increase your visibility across the company and recognizes your efforts.

Objectives-

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It's often hard to align the team's objectives with the company's objectives and employees lose track of the completion of their team's and company's objective leading to loss of performance and engagement. 15Five's OKR tool helps to create, track and manage the objectives and key results.

1-on-1s - The 1-on-1 tool helps to track the continuous communication between the manager and the employee by setting an agenda for the meeting and learning about the roadblocks or achievements.

Best Self Review - Helps employees capture and reflect upon their yearly performance and improves transparency by letting the employee know about their 360-degree feedback. This also helps the managers and executives to spend less time on admin tasks and reminds them of their pending tasks.

My Recommendations

Strength Finder Test Integration (Hyper-personalization of success path) - There are a number of online tests that help people find their strengths and weaknesses. The integration of these tools in the profile of an employee would help the manager to layout the personalized development path for an employee.

Mentorship platform - There is always a barrier between high-level executives and entry-level employees and this leads to disconnection and lack of communication channels. A young employee walking into a company may want to take leadership lessons from the executives. Therefore, there should be a tool to break the ice between the mentor and mentee in an organization. This will help inculcate a culture of learning, inclusion and will also help prepare the leaders of the future.

Gamification of Appreciation - I loved the High-Fives tool which helps peers recognize the effort of others in a team and thereby increasing the team harmony and improving the engagement index. But, sometimes peer reviews are given out of personal friendship and there should be a way to backtrack the authenticity of the review. This could be done by various cognitive mapping techniques that could authenticate the subject matter experience or relevant knowledge of a person being appreciated. Also, the High Fives tool could integrate with amazon, best buy to issue gift cards to reward the person being appreciated.

Integration of Online Learning/ Self Learning -Many employees pursue online courses and participate actively in research topics to expand their subject matter experience. These efforts are not recorded and hence the companies are not aware of the true potential of an employee. For example, A developer working in a backend develops an interest in machine learning and completes a difficult online program. Hence, if the company is looking to start a department on machine learning it will be easier for them to harness the in house talent rather than looking outside. Therefore saving cost and improving the employee experience.

Integration with JIRA/Trello/GitHub - The idea of 15Five is to reward the tangible and intangible efforts of employees in a company. Building on that, 15Five could integrate with JIRA, Trello to record the updates and proactiveness or approach of an employee to complete his/her task. An ideal use-case is the comments given by a developer to another developer on a pull request on GitHub. These comments often help your peers to optimize the solution and pursue perfect delivery. Recognizing the effort of the reviewer would help them engage more and reduce friction.

Platform (Building a moat) - As per the Blue Ocean Strategy, an organization should increase its capability to beat the competitors. Hence, I would recommend the integration of the disjoint parts to create a platform that could be beneficial for the customers as a one-stop solution. Hence improving customer satisfaction by providing benefits and reducing the total cost of ownership.