Small Improvements vs. Trakstar Perform

I'm honestly not sure why my company chose to use Small Improvements. We used Lattice before for the all the same use cases I mentioned here. The employee performance review feature might be a bit better in Small Improvements, but the goal-setting tool and the 1:1 tool are very weak. I may not have benefitted yet from all the features that Small Improvements have to offer, but so far it looks like a pretty basic HR tool with much better alternatives out there. If it's cheaper than the competition, that might be the only argument to go with it.

Incentivized

This is a great program if you have locations in different geographical areas. The ability to work with people at different locations is appreciated, and also there can be informal input that is requested, which Promantek can handle as well. I am at a loss to think of an area where this does not work well. There are several of our employees in the manufacturing areas that do not have computer access, and for those individuals, we simply print the review instead of having it online. This works fine but is not the forte of Promantek. However, any system these days that focusses on the online aspects of review writing will experience that as well.

Incentivized

• Goal Tracking: Enables users to chart goals, track progress, and provide details about what they want/expect to achieve.
• Praise Wall: A public place to post positive and encouraging comments about other employees.
• 360 Reviews: Users can request and gain 1:1 feedback; this can be anonymous if desired.

Incentivized

• Trakstar sends out a lot of automated reminders to participants, encouraging them to take notes and provide feedback on a regular basis.
• Trakstar generates analysis (i.e., rater bais) automatically that would otherwise be labor intensive to do manually.
• Trakstar has a feature that allows administrators to see what each individual employee sees - this is critical in ensuring that the performance review process goes smoothly.

Incentivized

• Being able to edit projects more easily (and have a documented edit history) would be beneficial.
• Possibly integrations with popular platforms (such as JIRA) to give expanded detail of project tracking.
• Gantt charts would be a nice to have for a top level management view.

Incentivized

• The reporting features are a bit weak. But you can download Excel-ready files to manipulate on your own.
• The dashboard feature (prior to June 2013) was very nice, but missing in the latest version.
• Automated reports, quarterly for example, would be nice to send to Senior Leadership (missing in the current version/requires manual input)

Very simple to use, great support.

The customer support is quick and thorough, they have access to our account to answers are tailored to our needs. They also have a good knowledge base and self-help site with some video tutorials and FAQs which saved us time as opposed to just calling or emailing support. For the times that we did reach out, it only took one response to get our issue resolved.

Incentivized

Trakstar has been very responsive to my questions and support has been able to speak with me on the phone as needed. Also, when I told Trakstar that my employees were not delighted by the product, they did a special session with me to diagnose any issues and to make recommendations for how I could improve the tool's usefulness in my job. I appreciated their support here

Incentivized

Lattice was able to link in with core OKRs whereas from my memory, Small Improvements didn't support this goal setting and tracking framework. While it was good for sentiment and management frameworks, it was unable to connect with the greater company vision as well as Lattice - that was the reason that we moved.

Incentivized

I did not make the purchase decision for Trakstar, but at a previous job I used Reflektive. Many of the outcomes of the tool are the same, even if the product interface and language is slightly different

Incentivized

• Before we had Small Improvements, personal goal setting was completely disorganized. Some managers made sure it was done, likewise many did not.
• Having past goals collected in one repository has been a blessing. I couldn't imagine not having Small Improvements or something comparable.

Incentivized

• We have had few managers dread the review writing process! Sure, no one enjoys this and we all know that it is time-consuming, but Promantek has allowed less time spent in frustration and more time actually communicating effectively. There are areas where managers can make notes during the entire review process so that when the time to write the review is upon you, it is a much simpler task. This has allowed us to free up the time with managers to a certain degree which is always beneficial.

Incentivized