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Small Improvements

Small Improvements

Overview

What is Small Improvements?

Performance Reviews & 360sProvide employees with structured opportunities for reflection and assessment through performance reviews and peer feedback. Customize the questions, define who participates, establish a cadence that suits an organization’s schedule, and run reviews for different departments at the…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Small Improvements is a versatile tool that caters to various needs within an organization. Users have found it incredibly useful for 360 …
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Making check-ins easy

8 out of 10
September 21, 2019
Incentivized
Small Improvements holds our org chart, records employee goals, performance, and is a platform for employees to give each other public …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Popular Features

View all 15 features
  • Performance plans (7)
    9.8
    98%
  • Review status tracking (8)
    9.7
    97%
  • Performance tracking (7)
    9.1
    91%
  • Individual goal setting (8)
    8.9
    89%
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Pricing

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Engagement and Retention Add-on

$2

Cloud
per user, per month

Performance Starter Pack

$5

Cloud
per user, per month

Feedback and Performance Suite

$7

Cloud
per user, per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.small…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Features

Performance and Goals

Goal alignment is the practice of ensuring that all employees have clearly defined goals in support of the overall corporate strategy.

8.1
Avg 7.7

Performance Management

Performance management is the process of ensuring employees meet pre-determined objectives and goals through regular check-ins and appraisals.

9.3
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

What is Small Improvements?

Performance Reviews & 360s
Provide employees with structured opportunities for reflection and assessment through performance reviews and peer feedback. Customize the questions, define who participates, establish a cadence that suits an organization’s schedule, and run reviews for different departments at the same time.

Ongoing Feedback
Praise coworkers for a job well done and request feedback at any time from anyone. Prepare for 1:1s and share notes afterward to make sure you are aligned.

Objectives
Keep employees accountable and help them grow by setting objectives and tracking key results. Objectives can be shared with managers, the team, or the entire company, so it’s easy to understand everyone’s priorities, communicate progress, and receive valuable feedback from others.

Pulse Surveys
Gather real-time employee feedback through frequent Pulse Surveys to improve employee experience year-round.

Retention Analytics
Quickly identify teams or employees that might need your attention. Retention Analytics predicts which employees are most likely to leave so you can take action before they do.

Small Improvements Features

Performance Management Features

  • Supported: Performance plans
  • Supported: Manager note taking
  • Supported: Review status tracking
  • Supported: Rater nominations
  • Supported: Rater nomination workflow
  • Supported: Review reminders
  • Supported: Workflow restrictions
  • Supported: Review transfer
  • Supported: Multiple review frequency
  • Supported: Reporting

Performance and Goals Features

  • Supported: Individual goal setting
  • Supported: Non-hierarchical goal setting
  • Supported: Performance tracking

Additional Features

  • Supported: 360-Degree Feedback
  • Supported: 1:1 Meetings
  • Supported: Praise
  • Supported: Feedback Requests
  • Supported: Pulse Surveys
  • Supported: Retention Analytics

Small Improvements Screenshots

Screenshot of Provide employees with structured opportunities for reflection and assessment through Performance ReviewsScreenshot of Decide whether or not you want manager to approve nominations for 360 FeedbackScreenshot of Share agenda items, meeting notes, and follow-up discussions with 1:1 MeetingsScreenshot of Create templated 1:1 meeting agendas for your managersScreenshot of Identify goals, set success measures, and track the results with ObjectivesScreenshot of Give public kudos to your colleagues with PraiseScreenshot of Use our Slack integration to create 1:1 meeting agendas and publicly share Praises and ObjectivesScreenshot of Track completion rates and nudge participants directly from our reportingScreenshot of Track employee engagement over time with frequent Pulse SurveysScreenshot of See who is likely to leave soon with Retention Analytics

Small Improvements Integrations

Small Improvements Competitors

Small Improvements Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesGlobal

Frequently Asked Questions

Lattice, 15Five, and Reflektive are common alternatives for Small Improvements.

Reviewers rate Manager note taking and Review reminders highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Small Improvements are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(22)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Small Improvements is a versatile tool that caters to various needs within an organization. Users have found it incredibly useful for 360 feedback, allowing them to easily send personal feedback to co-workers across the organization. This feature fosters a culture of continuous improvement and open communication. Additionally, Small Improvements serves as a reliable resource for conducting regular reviews and keeping track of personal and company goals. With the ability to request feedback, provide 1:1 and 360 reviews, and display positive comments on the praise wall, employees can engage in interference-free reviews where managers review them while they review themselves.

Moreover, Small Improvements acts as a goal tracker and feedback tool, facilitating quarterly self-assessments. The platform enables users to create recurring 1:1 calendar events for regular meetings, ensuring that catch-ups between employees and managers occur regularly. It also tracks the progress of major projects throughout the quarter, thanks to its flexibility for ad-hoc work. Small Improvements further supports end-of-year performance reviews and future goal setting. The program's functionality and user-friendly interface make it easy to operate, providing employees with a satisfactory platform for self-assessments and manager reviews. By recording employee goals, performance, and public praise in one centralized location, Small Improvements ensures that all team members are aligned and recognized appropriately.

Users have shared a variety of recommendations for Small Improvements based on their experiences. They suggest integrating Small Improvements with Slack, making it a valuable tool for Talent Management. This integration enhances communication and collaboration within teams.

Another recommendation is to use Small Improvements to effectively track team progress, enabling easier monitoring of individual and collective performance.

Users also highly praise Small Improvements for its usefulness in facilitating 360 feedback and serving as a platform for documenting 1:1 meeting notes. This feature greatly improves communication and enables thorough documentation of feedback and discussions between employees and managers.

To maximize the benefits of Small Improvements, users advise conducting training sessions to ensure the entire team is proficient in using the tool. They find it particularly valuable for note-taking during meetings, goal setting, creating templates, and providing positive reinforcement. Additionally, running demos of the tool can help consolidate initiatives, track progress, and customize features based on specific needs.

While users find Small Improvements to be superior to Workday in terms of functionality, they do recommend some improvements to the user interface for a smoother user experience.

Users suggest trying the trial version of Small Improvements to assess its compatibility with the company's requirements. However, they do note that pricing might be higher for smaller teams.

Furthermore, users emphasize the importance of providing genuine feedback through Small Improvements, as managers appreciate this format. It is also recommended to assess the organization's needs before deciding if Small Improvements is the right fit, especially considering potential growth and the need for more advanced features and HRIS integration.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-10 of 10)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Small Improvements (SI) at our organization to:
  • Manager 1-1 meeting (it's a space to take notes, followup on action items)
  • Create 1-1 calendar events that repeat weekly
  • Manage 360 peer reviews and formal performance reviews
  • Give praise to teammates
  • Take shared or private notes tied to each week's 1-1 meeting
  • Remind each other of open action items until they are checked off
  • Manage the performance review cycle
  • Google Calendar integration. This works well to sync notes and 1-1s calendar events but has limited functionality. This is not a deal-breaker!
  • 1-1 management
  • Tracking simple action items, but less appropriate for complex project management
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
This tool was used for checking in on employee sentiment and facilitating reviews. It was intended to give the management team a quick overview of how all of the team members were tracking at any given point in time. All team members were given access to it to answer their regular questions and 360 degree feedback as well as 1:1s were recorded in it.
  • Easy for team members to add sentiment ratings.
  • Good integration with Slack.
  • Nice and easy to record meeting outcomes and goals.
  • Didn't link with core goals for the company.
  • We've gone out of favour with 360 degree feedback.
  • Wasn't able to fully outline why it was better than competitors or what its core benefit was.
  • Price.
This would be useful for a business that was growing and wants to keep track of the sentiment of their employees in an easy to use way. It would be especially useful if the company was happy to record their overall objectives somewhere else. I believe it would also work well for logging KPIs - if not OKRs, unless that has changed recently.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sojern used SI to manage "Critical 3s" for our analytics department (80-100 people), which is a simple way to track three major projects we'd work on throughout the quarter. Our company was pretty flexible with projects and most of our work was ad-hoc, so being able to have very loose guidelines is a great advantage of SI.
  • Very simple and readable tracking of employee projects.
  • User interface is easy to use.
  • The ability to append with updates is a great way to document changes over time.
  • 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.
I've only used Small Improvements as an official project tracking solution; however it is a great platform when compared to the alternatives of Excel and Google Sheets, which is what my past companies used to track employee projects. Incremental tracking via an all-in-one solution is most appropriate as an additional resource to Kanban style systems such as JIRA.
Ryan Spaulding | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My company has Small Improvements for all the departments in the company. Primarily, it is used as a goal tracker and feedback tool. We also use it for quarterly self-assessments.
  • Simple to use.
  • Easy to make goals, track progress and refer back to past goals.
  • The "Your Company" directory is very useful.
  • Since the goals are tied to individuals, it does not allow for departmental goals.
  • Goals cannot be updated to show how much progress has been made. It is either 0 or 100%.
  • The software needs more reminders and nudges.
I love how easy the software is to use. It requires little training if any. With that said the simplicity is also a problem. Some of our departments such as development use a different software solution to track group goals. It is redundant to have two goal trackers, but it is necessary because small improvements are individual-focused.
Dmitry Pashkevich | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Small Improvements across the whole organization. We use the following features for the corresponding activities: 360 feedback; quarterly goals for individuals and managers; 1:1 tool; employee performance reviews.
  • The 360 feedback tool is straightforward to use and does exactly what it's meant to do: collect private and public feedback across peers (managers can use it too, of course).
  • The 1:1 tool automatically detects 1:1 meetings on your connected Calendar, automatically creates entries for these meetings in the system and reminds you of the upcoming 1:1s.
  • The 1:1 tool allows both parties to create a checklist for agenda items and notifies you when the other party added agenda items or general notes.
  • While the structured agenda format in the 1:1 tool has advantages, it also limits formatting options that you would otherwise have if you used a plain Google Doc shared with the other person.
  • 1:1 tool doesn't let parties add inline notes/comments under each agenda item, which makes it hard to organize notes during the actual meetings.
  • 1:1 tool lets you mark agenda items as done, but surprisingly doesn't let you copy or move "unchecked" items to the next meeting if you didn't have time to go over them. Lattice does that.
  • 1:1 tool only seems to create an entry for the next meeting on the next day after the current meeting happens. This is inconvenient because I might want to add notes for the future meeting right after my 1:1 happened.
  • The goal tool makes people's goals private by default, and there's no way to change that setting. Not good if your company embraces transparency and uses a framework like OKR for goal-setting (which prescribes that everyone's OKR is public).
  • The goal tool doesn't automatically compute the overall goal progress based on key results progress.
  • The goal tool doesn't seem to support departmental and overall company goals, it only ties goals to individuals. That means you have to keep track of the former somewhere else.
  • The goal tool doesn't support setting non-binary progress for key results inside an objective. You can only check or uncheck the entire key result. Not good for OKR. Lattice has much stronger goal-setting features compared to Small Improvements.
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Small Improvements in three majors ways within our organization. The first is for on the stop recognition of a peer, we have four main values which we live by at our company and whenever someone does something around one of those, they're recognized at our daily stand-up call and it is also recorded in Small Improvements. For this alone, Small Improvements has been an outstanding tool given how easy it is to use. The second way we make use of the tool is to track 1:1 meetings between employees and managers. I meet with my manager every two weeks and we just enter the scheduled call into the Small Improvements site and both my manager and I can add items we'd like to discuss during the call. The outcome of the call is that we track what was discussed and any deliverables. The third major function within our organization is for quarterly and yearly performance reviews where employees can seek 360 feedback, enter their self-assessment and receive their review from their manager. The tool is easy to use for this function, everything is in one spot and easy to track for follow-up and progress reports.
  • Instant on-the-spot employee and peer recognition
  • 1:1 Meeting tracker
  • Yearly performance reviews
  • Interface can be cluttered at times
  • There isn't a lot of help or knowledge readily available when first using the tool
Small Improvements is well suited in any sector or organization given that it tracks employee performance, 1:1 meetings, employee recognition and so on. I've used other tools previously like ones built in-house, Excel spreadsheets and even competitors like Workday but Small Improvements is leaps ahead of those other tools in its ability to execute well on employee performance tracking, recognition and meetings.
September 21, 2019

Making check-ins easy

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Small Improvements holds our org chart, records employee goals, performance, and is a platform for employees to give each other public praise across the business. It is owned/admin'd by the HR team and used by all employees. We use it to track and ensure regular catch-ups between employees and managers are occurring, for individuals to track their progress against goals and to encourage positive reinforcement with praise.
  • The organization chart is really well designed, easy to use, and navigate.
  • Tracking 1-1 to meetings between employees and their managers.
  • Giving praise to fellow employees for tasks well done - Giving a framework to make this easier.
  • Being more mobile-first would be great!
  • More nudge reminders.
It's well suited for a growing business that wants to track goals, ensure 1-1's are happening, and recognize other employees.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Small Improvements is a basic tool that my company uses for end of the year performance reviews and future goal setting. The program is functional and easy to operate. It helps delineate when an employee should put in their self assessment and when the manager should complete their review. It is totally sufficient for what it needs to provide.
  • Prompts users with questions to assess their performance
  • Reminds people who haven't filled out their reviews
  • Keeps record of past reviews and goals in one place
  • The interface could use an update
  • Doesn't do much more than let employee and manager share reviews with each other, so it could be considered unnecessary
Small Improvements is well suited to end of year performance reviews (which is how my company uses the service) and next year's goal setting. I am not familiar with other performance review tools in this space, but this one appears quite basic beyond providing a centralized service for submitting and receiving performance reviews.
Dustin Hovey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Small Improvements as a way to send personal feedback to co-workers across the organization. Furthermore, we use Small Improvements to request feedback, provide 1:1 and 360 reviews, there is also a praise wall for users that want to make their positive comments visible to everyone. The tool also keeps track of personal and company goals, it serves as a resource when conducting regular reviews.
  • 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.
  • The UI is slow, clunky, and sometimes lags when navigating to different menus.
  • When inputting personal reviews many of our users have complained that their content gets removed/deleted while inputting it into the answer boxes.
  • Small Improvements is slow on alerting users of updates (i.e. 360 reviews feedback is completed, someone made a comment on the Praise Wall, etc).
The product is passable and does the job but it doesn't seem to represent the gold standard or be the market leader in anything, it also seems very outdated in terms of aesthetics and functionality. I have used numerous products that serve a similar purpose that seem to offer many more features and ease of usability.
Austin Voigt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Small Improvements is a great way for us as a company to engage with each other, give and receive feedback, get one-on-one support, meet our personal goals & objectives, and go through performance reviews. It is especially helpful for the review process, as it allows employees to review themselves while managers review them, and keep both reviews free from interference with each other.
  • Small Improvements makes it easier to set and achieve professional goals
  • Small Improvements helps keep the review process pure and free from bias
  • Small Improvements provides an interactive, easy-to-navigate tool for goal setting and reviews
  • The employee review platform can be a bit difficult to understand, as it is very different from other tools or review processes
  • It's not convenient to remind yourself to log into the platform constantly to review goals, progress on goals, etc.
  • Small Improvements should have a way to integrate personal professional goals & areas of improvement with the entire organization, so that others can provide feedback for their peers - or even managers
Small Improvements is great for the internal review process in our company. The employee fills out their own personal review of their performance, the manager fills out theirs, and neither has to see the other one before submission. I think this is great, as employees and managers can sometimes allow each others' reviews to skew their own reviews, so employees may be afraid to rate themselves too low or high, for fear that it would influence the manager's review.
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