Halogen TalentSpace (discontinued) vs. Weekdone

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

• 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

• 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

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

• 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