15Five vs. Halogen TalentSpace (discontinued) vs. Weekdone

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.

Incentivized

I think it's a good platform for tracking and monitoring goals, feedback, and development. We don't use the 1:1 meeting feature, however, I can see how that would be valuable for many organizations. I do like that it is very customizable, however, that also presents problems in that sometimes forms and/or processes can be a bit challenging to create easily and quickly.

If the company...

• Wants to replace a painful status reporting process.
• Has stated company, department, and team SMART goals.
• Wants to connect daily work to long term individual/team/department/organization goals.
• Is concerned about company culture and employee satisfaction.
• Wants to facilitate better communication and alignment without adding more meetings.
• Believes in the OKR method for planning and prioritizing work items to be done.
• Is digital.

Incentivized

• The Pulse Check feature is both easy to use and allows staff and management to gauge how team health is.
• The metric and key performance tools are very well designed.
• Automated reminders and reporting are great features.
• I find the customer services to be best in class.

Incentivized

• 1:1 agendas are easy to create, add comments to and prompt excellent conversation flow on the topics that truly matter to the manager and the employee.
• The system can be easily customized to reflect your company's language and culture. We did this in several areas of the platform (goals, development, learning), and it made a world of difference in the understanding and adaptation of our users. One example is that in each learning module, we added 3 questions in the course description so that managers would be automatically prompted to ask to follow up / learning transfer questions when their employees enroll and take a learning course.
• Halogen support is outstanding. Any question I have had has been answered upon the first contact or within 24 hours.

Incentivized

• Creating plans, tracking progress, and logging potential problems on one page is very nice.
• The company dashboard allows colleagues to stay up to date on quarterly progress.

Incentivized

• 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.

• My organization does not use all of the functions/modules that Halogen offers, but I find that those modules still appear on the Halogen main page. I think a great area for improvement is to hide these functions so as not to confuse employees.

Incentivized

• User setup and management and team/department creation is not a trivial effort. Requires some deliberate planning.
• The deadlines for plans don't connect to the due dates for tasks in systems of record. That can get confusing when Asana says a task is due next week but Weekdone still has a due date of tomorrow.
• I'd love to see more contextual support for sections like employee feedback. Maybe a sentence or two suggesting feedback based on the report's weekly entry. If a person had three Problems and only one Progress, Weekdone could suggest some corrective action to make it easier for the management to mitigate problems before they get ugly.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

Implementing a new system and process company wide is never an easy task. We moved so quickly in such a short period of time that we were able to learn quickly but also have the opportunity to improve the Halogen experience. We will more than likely will renew our use of Halogen as we already are seeing a small impact which hopefully in the long run will lead to a greater impact

Incentivized

The platform is too easy for use, you will find by hand all the main tools and the interface put in front of you what you need without enter to define or open complex options to add things.

No, you just need to open a new report and start to type things, the system automatically will start to add fields or show the desired options based on your current context.

Incentivized

Halogen is very intuitive and provides very clean work-space ... lots of white space and modern layouts. There is more than one way to accomplish your action, too!

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

Incentivized

We only purchased the appraisal module and without the other modules offered, you are really limited in what you can do and the process becomes much more involved with needing to maintain information across multiple platforms. We found that they charge for everything and call it "consulting." We poured so much money and time into a system that was just overkill for what we really needed.

Incentivized

We have a lunch and learn session with Weekdone next week so they can share their tips and tricks for making the most out of the platform. Since we have been using the platform for a while already, this will be helpful so we can ensure we are making the most of the tool.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It is very easy to use and I can do my own programming instead of paying a technician and waiting sometimes days for them to program the changes.

It was very easy and support was super helpful!

Incentivized

Get to know your CAM - Customer Account Manager! They are a lifesaver! (Thanks Jorie Basque!)

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!

Incentivized

I have used other systems in the past and I like that Halogen provides everything in one space. I would like to see a more developed way to report training, not in the LMS, but I think that for the most part that Halogen is a robust system that is superior to its competition.

Incentivized

Weekdone started as a pilot within a single team so we didn't have a formal evaluation and selection process. When the pilot was over, we had developed a skill and affinity for the tool with no clear objections, so no other tools were considered. Our process for regular evaluation of incumbent technology at renewal time asks us to consider the cost to value ratio and user adoption/satisfaction. I don't anticipate there being any reason to consider alternatives, other than the long term viability of small software companies.

Incentivized

• It holds each employee to a certain standard by having them select their own list
• Gives them the opportunity to reach their list of goals
• Being able to accomplish each set goal and/or priority gives a sense of pride in each person's work as they are able to check off what has been done
• On the negative, it can also show what the employee is not being done and may show poorly if there is a consistent pattern of not completing tasks

• We are able to get our reviews done in a quicker amount of time. Instead of 4-8 weeks we were able to get it done under a month.
• Halogen has gotten better at given us a heads up when the system will be down. Most patches are done overnight so we can at least verify it was done, but their success rate of a patch not breaking something is not at 99%. So we do lose productivity when the system is down.
• The tool is easier to do so there are fewer questions from users outside the core team.

Incentivized

• Using Weekdone has helped us meet our quarterly business objectives by tracking each employee's progress.
• We have been able to shift resources based on the progress tracked in Weekdone. If we find that a particular project is taking too long or costing too much, we are able to evaluate as needed. We were not able to see this as easily without Weekdone.

Incentivized