15Five vs PiiQ by Cornerstone

• Goals/To-do lists: 15Five is a great tool for creating to do lists or establishing goals for the week. Employees can add them easily, and check them off when completed. For me, this has provided a helpful visual of what needs to be accomplished that week.
• It's easy to send information out to anyone in the organization - tagging individuals or @all is an easy way to share information within the platform. Our president is a big fan of 15Five, and she has utilized it as a way to disseminate information throughout our organization. Information can be uploaded in an easy-to-read, easy-to-access manner.
• Reminders - it's easy to set up reminders within the program, to ensure employees are completing their portion. As an employee, the reminders are helpful in encouraging completion.
• Customizable questions - direct supports/supervisors can set up different questions to be asked of employees from week to week. This is helpful if there are questions that are needed to be asked weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Being able to change questions regularly is great.

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• 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.

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• Although I mentioned customization as a positive aspect, it could use some improvements. The backend process of updating the questions, and setting them to a certain schedule, can be a bit confusing. This process could be streamlined.
• The commenting process can be a bit confusing. If a person is tagged/mentioned in a comment, they are typically sent an email notifying them. However, it can be difficult to locate where you can reply and continue the conversation. Although a simple issue, it seems it could be easily rectified.
• I would like to see more integration of the team portion of 15Five. It seems this feature is not as prominent, so you can easily get stuck in just your specific 15Five information.

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• Setup and ongoing maintenance can be frustrating, needs more options for customization. We have to call their help line almost every day when we're setting up the system for the next appraisal period, and a lot of our requested features
• Needs better user management, should be much more user-friendly, process on handling terminated employees doesn't make the most sense (ex. it's unfortunate that we have to pay an extra fee to download data if we would want to delete users in the system. I wish we would "hide" terminated/inactive employees so they don't show up with giant Xs across their chest - it's really weird and it looks like they're on a hit list.)
• Reporting is very limited. If there is a manager with four direct reports and I, as an admin, want to see how much of each review the manager has completed so far, I can't. The numbers are only reported in the aggregate. If CSB added more in-depth reports, the system would be greatly improved.
• I think it's silly that you need to click "Save" and that the data entered does not save automatically. I shouldn't have to remind employees to always click on "Save" every few minutes.
• I wish the "Share" feature was more pronounced and obvious. This is probably the number one question we get - "how do I share my review with my manager?" Also, managers are never notified via e-mail upon successful completion of a self-appraisal. More notifications would be great and would remove lots of guesswork or missed time. We are on an extremely tight schedule for performance reviews and want to make sure people have enough time to complete the process.
• It's ridiculous that Admins cannot download employee data and reviews directly from their Admin accounts. We shouldn't have to sign in as an employee's manager to read or download their reviews. Imagine doing this for 300+ employees.

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• 15Five has positively impacted the information provided to our leadership team. Our direct supports feel more connected to their department and are able to resolve issues as they arise, or even beforehand.
• It has provided a positive impact on the 'kudos' or positive reinforcement our employees can provide to one another.

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• We have been able to create a culture of continuous feedback and conversations.
• Employees finally have a clear view of what is expected of them with real SMART goals to adhere to each year.
• Management is able to see the company holistically and how teams are stacking up against one another.
• We have made some adjustments in staff due to results and feedback that we would not have been able to track with an antiquated paper process.

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