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.
$7
per person/per month
PiiQ by Cornerstone
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Cornerstone’s PiiQ is an SMB offering formerly known as Sonar6. PiiQ is aimed at small-to-medium sized businesses and includes core learning management and performance management systems, including content creation, mobile accessibility, and in-product reporting.
We love the ability to recognize peers and align the High Fives with core values (and having it integrate with Slack creates visibility which encourages use of the feature) The Performance Review features are quite customizable and do most of what we'd like. The goal setting function is robust, however I wish that area was a bit less complicated as we'd like to be able to zoom out for company milestones, it just looks busy. In terms of managing an employee's lifecycle from hire on past their 30/60/90 day goals, that piece is customizable however I'd love it if check-ins were completely custom.
Enables employees to draft work goals and collaborate with their supervisors on a final version - improves mutual understanding right up front.
Combines performance goal ratings with competency ratings and provides a blended score. Simplifies the goal weighting so you don't have to do any calculations.
9-box matrix provides useful definitions and descriptions so managers can prepare development notes or plans for individual employees.
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.
Would be good to have have a virtual "top level" (eg board) user built in to allow senior execs without a direct manager to be able to be set up with KPIs instead of having to create a dummy user
Reports have difficulty downloading if pop ups disabled or in some browser environments
When competencies are updated while a cycle is open, any changes don't effect that open cycle but only future ones. Would be nice to be able to have the option to apply changes to existing "open" cycles
This program is the absolute best I've ever used in 30 years with organizations. Not only do I enjoy being a user and "filling it out" every week- but I would personally buy it if available for goal tracking in my personal life I love it that much!
It's not that CSB isn't a decent performance management system, but we have decided to go with just one vendor (Workday) for an HRIS/performance management/payroll system so we can directly relate pay to performance. We are more interested in having just one system that "talks" to the other pieces instead of having to work with several vendors. It reduces the hassle of having to communicate with different support teams, having different contracts, and so on.
It's very simple to use - not overly complicated. You wouldn't need training to use. There are some features I never use because I don't understand -- like one on ones. However we use without and still find a lot of value in it!
There are specific things within the goals and competencies that are user-friendly. For example, the rating slider isn't great in my opinion. You can slide in between ratings which can create some odd scoring (if you use scoring). It seems a better solution would be a drop down where you select your rating. There are also some glitches in the system and have been told Cornerstone is aware of them but are focused on delivering new features. There are workarounds, but that doesn't seem to be a great answer.
The saving process slows it down. It doesn’t auto save. If you leave a page, it will sometimes warn you, but not always. When you hit the save button, a window pops up that says creating/saving packets. It feels very archaic.
15Five support is quick and helpful. We work with other vendors in the people management space and performance tracking/management who offshore their support or force us into long queues to chat for support and it just doesn't support our needs very well. 15Five is responsive and speedy. We constantly evaluate our vendors for their support and have switched vendors in the past in other areas because of limited support capabilities
My assistant could better address this issue. My perception is that there is not immediate assistance, and that there can be a wait for help. That is not a negative, just a perception. I have not used support in two years.
Very helpful webinar training. They answer questions, the slides are all very helpful, and they send you the presentation once the webinar is complete so that you can share with your team.
I think we could have done a better job of rolling out the tool to our managers. We were under a tight timeline. In the training, we showed them everything and said go do it by this date. Looking back, I would have done it in pieces: for example, 2 weeks to write goals, 2 weeks to get sign-off from direct reports. I just let them go at it. Since then we’ve moved to agile development environment and are applying the technique to everything. In future would only do through change sprint. It is a big change I didn’t take it seriously enough.
I had a team of 3 project managing. You need a champion from every department to make sure you’re getting it right and to make sure what’s happening is communicated. It’s not something you can do without input from department heads
Visually 15Five blows Yammer out of the water! Yammer was easy to use as well, but it felt very difficult to get on to and was not single sign-on when we were using it. 15Five allows for easy login with single sing on feature and has less "clicks" to get to where I need to be on the program. I also love the app way more than Yammer!
Lesson.ly has been great to work with but it is a very clear and simple, user-friendly system that anyone can pick up with very little training as it is self-explanatory. It also has a great mobile interface and lots of different features that are easy to add for the admin but really impactful for the user.
It's tool and it's only as good as the person wielding it. The investment in PiiQ was accompanied by a quarterly cadence and manager feedback training. We feel like our employees are given regular feedback and bonuses are tied to objective accomplishment.
