Small Improvements vs. Weekdone

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

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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

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

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

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

• 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

• 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