Basecamp vs. Workday Peakon Employee Voice

Basecamp is a wonderful tool for teams of varying degrees of technical knowledge, teams managing lots of different types of "agifall" and waterfall projects, and teams that are remotely distributed. It's probably less useful for more strictly agile-focused development teams, compared to other more flexible software applications like Jira and Asana.

Incentivized

Peakon is a great solution whether you are thinking of pulsing your employees weekly, monthly, or even yearly. The solution provides great dashboards, easy reporting, on the fly segmentation creation, and ways to really dive deep into your people data. I think it's a bit expensive for very early-stage companies, so I would love to see them create a startup/early-stage version or pricing because it has become an invaluable tool for any size company.

Incentivized

• Task management - It is very easy to add, organize and discuss tasks within Basecamp's interface.
• The "Campfire" function is great for communicating when you just have a quick question for someone on the team.
• Notifications - Basecamp lets you decide how often and about what you'd like to be notified. The ability to respond to messages in Basecamp directly via email saves a lot of time.

Incentivized

• Peakon looks beautiful and feels very light, which is comforting when you're (potentially) giving negative feedback and feel anxious. The emails are friendly and the survey is super clean.
• The surveys are very easy to navigate. You can answer as many or as few questions as you like, skipping forward and backward, and choosing to provide comments when you want. It's low pressure and feels flexible.
• The HR department is able to respond to your comments. You can then have a back and forth conversation while remaining anonymous. This really helps employees further explain and contextualize their survey comments without identifying themselves personally.

Incentivized

• High Learning Curve. It's true that it can be easy to use, but to use well and effectively takes some time to learn. It's recommended to have an agreed-upon system in your team of what tools to use and when.
• Notification Overload. If people aren't careful they could send a notification to everyone when only a couple people were meant to be prompted. And since emails are sent by default, you could have your mailbox overloaded with unnecessary updates. This is where it takes a bit of training in your team to have an agreed-upon system.
• Lack of organization with Archived Projects. I will often need to reference an archived project to make a new one, but there is only a list of archived projects in alphabetical order, with no way to organize by archive date, or even search.

Incentivized

• The only major issue is the integrations factor. I wish there was more integrations work from HRMS core systems or even other dashboard solutions.

Incentivized

When I bring new people onto a project, it's immediately obvious how to use Basecamp. I don't have to worry about teaching them the features or walking them through it, it's just incredibly user-friendly. For this reason, I'll continue to renew my subscription even as new people are brought onto production jobs or the client changes.

It is easy to use, even for clients who have no experience with the platform. It can only get a little cumbersome to ensure that a client can't see certain documents you might want to keep in the Docs & Files folders. And sometimes, getting a client to actually use an unfamiliar platform can be a challenge.

Incentivized

I've never experienced downtime while using Basecamp, or been unable to access it when I needed it. That's not to say they've never had downtime, but I've been lucky enough not to encounter any, and I work odd hours, including late nights when maintenance is often undertaken.

Incentivized

For the many reasons I've given, Basecamp is a very strong program. There are a few features I can imagine that might make it even better, but I don't have a basis for comparison to be able to say that there is definitely a better one out there. I've noticed that Basecamp has evolved a bit from the time I started using it until now, so that makes me think that the producer of this program values it and believes in continuous improvement. If you could use the features offered by Basecamp, I would think you could use it with confidence.

Incentivized

Decide the process before implementation - i.e. when it's due 8/9 does that mean 8am, noon, 5pm, 11:59pm? Check your to-do list frequently Set-up templates - just not with the dates (they can be funky)

Pretty good, but [Basecamp] has its drawbacks. Honestly I find the interface non-intuitive and sometimes have trouble figuring out how to change the status of a task. Perhaps it has something to do with the way it was originally set up by the admin, but I'm not sure. I liked Jira's drag and drop obvious functionality, but the project management side of the software was lacking. Smartsheet has excellent project management functionality, but the task management isn't as good.

Incentivized

SurveyMonkey is a great survey tool that also allows responders to stay anonymous, but I think Peakon is more effective for corporate feedback. It offers more reports and analytics specifically for HR and feels more professional. We often use SurveyMonkey for more lighthearted surveys (e.g., what to eat for team lunch) while keeping Peakon for employee feedback.

Incentivized

• It has saved me time when having to get the same message out to multiple restaurants
• It has helped us make smarter operational decisions because we can all collaborate on an answer in a shorter amount of time (instead of calling a meeting!!!)
• The calendar function allows us to plot out our marketing agenda for the month and add/change it together as needed. The chef will post his recipe, the managers will cost it out, the social media manager will post pictures on it, and ultimately we will get that information out on an info sheet to the staff by printing the page.

Incentivized

• When we moved to WFH due to COVID, we use Peakon a regular basis to understand what employees are thinking. We lost the serendipity of talking to people during chance encounters in the office, Peakon has replaced those conversations.
• We saw an incredible year in spite of COVID, while there are so many internal and external factors contributing to that success, we can see that having engaged and happy employees has an impact on our business. We also see what happens when they are not engaged or happy.

Incentivized