Before implementing 15Five, ReUp Education, an EdTech company helping adult learners complete their degrees, was working on their management structure. They wanted a consistent process for one-on-one meetings, since most felt a bit more informal and reactive. As one director stated, meetings often began with, “What are we gonna talk about?” leading to struggles consistently providing feedback and connecting  employee performance to broader company goals.

What did this challenge impact?

• Accountability: without a documented record, managers questioned whether they had been clear in their instructions, making it challenging to hold employees accountable for their work and professional development.
• Mental Energy: Managers had limited focus, trying to remember key points and take notes during conversations rather than being fully present with their direct reports.
• Coaching: Without a more formal coaching framework, these sessions became unquantifiable and subjective, leaving managers without a clear way to track their own growth and effectiveness and understanding the impact on their direct reports

The Solution: 15Five’s Kona Coach

ReUp implemented 15Five’s AI coaching feature, Kona, first as a pilot program and now to all managers across the company. Kona automatically joins one-on-one meetings, transcribes the conversation, and generates a concise summary, complete with key topics discussed and suggested action items.

Kona also provides managers with proactive, real-time coaching and feedback before and after each session. The coaching and feedback are based on areas where they would like to improve, as well as data inputs from engagement surveys, previous one-on-one conversations, business system inputs, and other data sources accessed by the AI agent. 

This AI transformative approach provided managers with:

• Automated Note-Taking: By delegating note-taking to Kona, managers could focus entirely on the conversation and be more “attentive” and “present” with their direct reports.
• An Unbiased Source of Truth: Kona’s unbiased summaries provided managers with objective evidence of what was discussed, eliminating “they said” disputes.
• Proactive Coaching Insights: The platform provides managers with timely reminders and suggestions to ensure they consistently address essential topics, such as professional development and aligning work with company objectives.

A Seamless Change Management Process

ReUp’s implementation of Kona was designed to be low-friction and was highly successful. The technical setup took only a few minutes and was done seamlessly. In terms of change management, that was also simple, quick, and easy. Managers were provided with pre-written language to introduce the new tool to their direct reports, addressing potential concerns about privacy and recording. 

For most employees, the initial apprehension quickly dissipated, with Jennifer Sobocinski, Senior Director of People & Culture, recalling one manager noting that Kona “just became like wallpaper” in their meetings: ever-present but no longer a distraction. The ability to pause the recording for personal conversations also helped build trust and comfort over time.

The Results: Empowered Managers and Streamlined Workflows

With 15Five, ReUp’s managers now have a powerful tool that has fundamentally improved their leadership.

Improved Managerial Habits

N’Digo Kali, Director of Learner Services, found that Kona’s insights led to better outcomes for her team:

“Because of Kona, I make sure at the very end to recap. Are you gonna do this by this date? I’m gonna do this by this date. Next week we’ll talk about this. So it just makes more structure, and it makes it…it feels more effective and efficient.”

Enhanced Confidence

For Mercedes Taylor, Integrated Campaigns Marketing Manager, Kona acted as an unbiased mentor that boosted her confidence in difficult situations:

“Kona really helped validate for me that okay, hey, I was doing a good job, and that was great to hear…It kind of felt like a little extra mentor that like… my boss can’t hear what I’m saying to this individual. Nobody else is hearing it. And so how do I know I’m actually doing what I need to do and growing in that regard.”

Seamless Workflow and Action

Joanna Costello, Director for Analytics, appreciated how Kona’s insights seamlessly integrated with her existing workflows to provide value:

“Out of the feedback from Kona, I have developed an internal checklist of things to do in one-on-ones… It’s just helpful to have that in the back of my head in every one-on-one of like–those are 3 things that I should be doing regularly.”

Ryn Blecke, a Manager of Learner Services, noted that the AI’s guidance influenced her behavior even when it wasn’t actively listening:

“Even when I wasn’t using Kona, Kona trained me to be more focused in my one-on-one.”

With 15Five, ReUp has transformed an informal process into a streamlined, data-backed system that empowers its managers and strengthens its organization.

Learn how 15Five can help you empower managers. Book a demo.

The post ReUp Education and 15Five Kona AI Coach: Empowering Managers for Measurable Impact appeared first on 15Five.

SINAI Technologies, an AI-powered platform for carbon management, operates in one of the most specialized and competitive talent markets: climate tech. Recognizing the critical importance of retaining highly skilled professionals, Dominique Geroulis, Head of People Operations at SINAI, identified an opportunity to strengthen engagement and build a more connected employee experience.

The challenges:

• High-cost recruiting made retention pivotal. Hiring experts in SINAI’s niche field was expensive, making employee retention a top priority.
• No clear path for growth. Without a consistent framework for feedback or development, employees lacked visibility into career progression.
• Low engagement scores reflected structural gaps. Scores revealed that employees weren’t feeling supported or developed, signaling the need for more intentional people systems.

While employee engagement scores indicated room for improvement, Dominique understood that the underlying issue wasn’t culture, it was structure. Recruiting and onboarding experts in this niche field came with significant costs, making retention a strategic priority. Before adopting 15Five, SINAI lacked a consistent framework for employee feedback and career growth, which made it harder for team members to see a clear path forward.

Dominique set out to change that by creating a more intentional people strategy centered on communication, trust, and development to ensure SINAI could continue attracting and retaining top climate talent.

The Solution

SINAI chose 15Five to transform its company culture and address these challenges. The solution centered on a proactive, data-driven approach to employee feedback.

Dominique implemented quarterly engagement surveys using 15Five’s dashboard and people analytics to track trends and identify areas for improvement. This regular cadence and focus on transparency, sharing scores and action plans with the entire company was a breakthrough.

The “A-Ha!” Moment

The visual and user-friendly nature of 15Five’s dashboard was a significant “a-ha!” moment for Dominique. The ability to present a visually appealing dashboard in leadership meetings, which showed the progress of engagement scores and a breakdown of the teams, empowered her to influence strategic decisions and strengthen leadership alignment around people priorities.

This visual, data-driven approach replaced cumbersome spreadsheets, allowing leadership to pinpoint precisely where to focus their efforts without relying on guesswork.

What Sinai Said about 15Five

“Partnering with 15Five has given us the tools and insights to take meaningful action, strengthen our culture, and empower our people to thrive. It’s not just about measuring engagement—it’s about empowering people to grow, connect, and contribute to something bigger. That’s what’s helping us strengthen our culture and drive real impact. 

— Dominique Geroulis, Head of People Operations at SINAI Technologies

The Measurable Results

• 150%+ Increase in Engagement Score: Within one year of using 15Five, SINAI’s engagement scores improved from “negative” to positive. Dominique was able to bring the score up by 150%+.
• Reduced Turnover: The company’s voluntary turnover rate was reduced due to a more engaged and satisfied workforce.
• Structured Career Paths: Using 15Five’s insights, Dominique was able to pinpoint a critical area of importance to the employees: career growth. With this precise insight from the engagement surveys, she implemented career levels and paths within the company.

This transformation built a culture rooted in trust, transparency, and collaboration. By retaining top talent, SINAI can now channel its energy toward advancing its core mission—accelerating global decarbonization—instead of navigating constant recruitment cycles.

Learn how 15Five can help you increase employee engagement. Book a demo.

The post SINAI Technologies Achieves 150%+ Increase in Employee Engagement with HR Software, 15Five appeared first on 15Five.

Before we can credibly roll out AI-powered tools to managers or employees across the business, HR leaders need to ensure something more fundamental: that our own HR teams understand, believe in, and feel empowered by AI. Without that, we risk rolling out change with shaky foundations. With it, we unlock the confidence and advocacy needed to help the rest of the organization embrace what’s possible.

Every HR leader knows adoption is built on trust. Whether it’s a new benefits program, a manager training curriculum, or a performance management tool. Success depends on clarity of purpose, transparency of intent, and confidence in execution.

AI is no different. If your HR team is confused or skeptical, they will not be able to lead others through the change. If they feel informed, included, and inspired, they will become your strongest champions. That is the cultural readiness you need before any tool rollout.

Fear Is Normal. Address It Directly

Let’s be honest: AI feels intimidating. It is powerful, fast-moving, and comes with no shortage of hype. For HR teams already under pressure, the natural reaction is fear. Fear of job loss. Fear of bias and ethical missteps. Fear of higher expectations on an already burnt-out function.

Ignoring these fears doesn’t make them disappear. Addressing them head-on builds trust.

• “AI will replace me.”
  No—it will replace the repetitive tasks that consume your time and diminish your growth. What it cannot replace is your judgment, your empathy, your ability to design meaningful employee experiences.
  
• “AI will just add more work.”
  If AI only increases workload, then we’ve failed in implementation. The point is to reduce noise, not add to it. That’s why leaders must carve out time and space for experimentation, even if just 30 minutes a week. Let people play, discover, and build confidence.
  
• “AI isn’t ethical or fair.”
  This concern is precisely why HR should lead AI adoption. Who better to co-create ethical guidelines, monitor fairness, and build safeguards than the very team entrusted with equity and culture? Here, AI becomes not a threat but an opportunity for HR to expand its influence.
  

Make the Business Connection Clear

AI isn’t an experiment in novelty, it’s a lever for impact. HR teams will feel empowered when they can see the line between AI adoption and outcomes that matter.

For example, if your function has committed to improving manager effectiveness by 25%, show how an AI-powered assistant can accelerate feedback, streamline reviews, and provide real-time coaching prompts. When the “why” is anchored in a clear business goal, the “how” feels far more relevant and motivating.

Treat AI Adoption Like a Cultural Shift

Too many organizations treat AI like a tech rollout. It isn’t. This is a cultural shift that requires exposure, dialogue, and co-creation. HR leaders can borrow from product thinking to make it stick:

• Educate and expose. Highlight practical use cases your team already touches—engagement surveys, compensation planning, or performance reviews. Show how AI is already improving the tools they trust.
  
• Invite feedback. Run focus groups. Ask tough questions. Act on the feedback you receive. Adoption thrives where people feel heard.
  
• Co-create use cases. Don’t hand down AI workflows from above. Invite your team to experiment, test, and shape their own. Ownership builds confidence.
  

Lead with Language, Celebrate with Wins

Words matter. Frame AI as an assistant, an amplifier, an enabler. Tie its use to work, not people. Say, “AI automates scheduling tasks,” not, “AI automates recruiters.”

And don’t underestimate the power of small wins. Create space for your team to share how AI saved them time, solved a problem, or sparked a new idea. Recognize those moments publicly. Tie them back to business impact. Over time, these wins shift AI from the unknown to the everyday.

Your Role as the HR Leader

At the heart of this shift is leadership. Your team will look to you not just for permission, but for example.

• Model curiosity. Show how you’re using AI in your own work.
  
• Create space. Protect time for play and learning, even in the busiest weeks.
  
• Connect the dots. Always link AI back to business priorities and outcomes.
  

When you lead with transparency, empathy, and confidence, your team will follow. The future of HR with AI is not about replacing humans. It’s about elevating the human role. Done well, AI strips away the work that drains us and doubles down on the work that defines us.

Adoption will not come from slick demos or abstract promises. It will come from understanding and belief. From building psychological safety alongside technical capability. From ensuring that the very people responsible for leading organizational change feel empowered in the change themselves.

AI is not just another tool, it’s a cultural shift. Treat it that way, and your HR team won’t just adopt AI. They’ll lead your organization through it.

This is part 4 in our series about AI in HR. Check out the guide to AI Readiness, what to think about when Crafting your AI in HR policy, and How to Convince Your Legal Team and CEO to Get Started With AI.

Disclaimer: This document is meant to be for illustrative purposes only and does not constitute professional and/or legal advice. Always discuss use of AI tools with your legal department and other stakeholders prior to using AI tools with employee data. 

The post Elevate, Not Eliminate: How HR Leaders Can Bring Their Teams Along on the AI Journey appeared first on 15Five.

Over two packed days, we heard from thought leaders, industry experts, and bold practitioners who are shaping the future of HR. Here’s a quick look back at the moments that made this year’s event unforgettable. 

A Reset and a Vision for the Future

The event opened with a powerful keynote conversation between 15Five CEO David Hassell and Chief Operating Officer Dr. Jeff Smith. Back at the helm as CEO, David shared reflections from his first 90 days and outlined a renewed vision for 15Five that’s focused on empowering HR leaders as architects of performance and culture.

Their conversation touched on everything from the evolution of HR to the rising urgency around meaningful data and product direction. They announced upcoming AI-powered products designed to turn insights into action. 

Big Impact at Any Size

Next, 15Five VP of People Karina Young and Ethena CPO Melanie Naranjo discussed how HR leaders at small and mid-sized companies can claim strategic influence without needing a big team. The most impactful HR leaders bring clarity, conviction, and a strong business lens to everything they do, no matter the size of their team

AI Is Only as Smart as Your Data

In the next session, Anthony Onesto and Nelson Spencer, founder of efora.io, dove deep into why AI is only useful if your HR data is high-quality and well-organized. The session delivered actionable advice for leaders eager to leverage AI without amplifying existing messiness.

A Fireside Chat with Dunder Mifflin’s Former CFO

Yes, that happened. Andy Buckley, the actor famously known for playing David Wallace on The Office, joined Karina Young for a warm, reflective chat on work, career pivots, and the value of kindness and grit. It was a delightful way to wrap up the first day of Thrive. 

Day 2: Strategy, Compensation, and a Whole Lot of Heart

Day 2 of Thrive 2025 was designed for our customers, and it delivered real-world stories, sharp insights, and plenty of moments that reminded us why HR matters so much right now.

We kicked things off with a conversation between Karina Young and David Hassell, who returned to explore the mindset of the modern HR leader. They talked about what it means to lead with clarity, own your influence, and show up with strategy and self-belief.

Next, we got into one of the most complex areas of people strategy, compensation. 15Five’s Jeff Smith sat down with Roger Lee, CEO of Comprehensive.io, for a conversation on what fair, motivating, and scalable pay really looks like today. From pay transparency to AI’s impact on performance-based comp, they made the case for moving past legacy “total rewards” models and toward systems that treat compensation as a true investment in people.

Building better

Karina Young and Jennifer Sobocinski, VP of People, ReUp Education, explored how HR leaders can use AI to scale decision-making without losing the human touch. The takeaway? When built intentionally, AI can help HR drive clarity, not confusion.

After celebrating some of our incredible customers during the Thrive Awards, we closed out the event with a keynote from Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky, who spoke about belonging, bravery, and what it really takes to build meaningful connections in a disconnected world. It was the perfect reminder that no matter how advanced our tools become, the human element will always be our greatest asset.

A huge thanks to everyone who made Thrive 2025 an amazing success. See you next year!

The post Thrive 2025 Recap appeared first on 15Five.

Turning values, feelings, and beliefs into data you can use to improve everyone’s sense of belonging, their productivity, and your culture as a whole sounds like a tall order. But culture surveys can help bring some order to the chaos. These surveys ask employees to describe your culture, share how they feel about it, and suggest areas of improvement.

Why are these surveys so valuable? According to Flex Index’s Flex Report Q2 2025, only one in three employees is expected to be in the office five days a week. Getting a read on company culture is already difficult enough with everyone in the office. When you’re working with people who are remote at least some of the time, that difficulty magnifies. Culture surveys give you clear, up-to-date data you can use to get a clear picture of your company culture and how to improve it.

Performance management tools like 15Five have built-in culture surveys, allowing you to automate, streamline, and schedule most of the work involved. In this guide, you’ll learn how you can use a tool like 15Five to plan, create, and deploy culture surveys and analyze the results.

Key takeaways:

• A culture survey is essential for understanding and improving your workplace environment.
• Culture surveys differ from engagement surveys.
• Using 15Five simplifies the process of designing and distributing effective company culture surveys.
• Effective culture surveys are built around clear goals and customized questions.
• The most useful surveys include both quantitative and open-ended questions.

What is a culture survey?

First, let’s define company culture.

Company culture includes a company’s beliefs, values, and norms. Anything from a belief in the importance of diversity to how a company treats lateness can contribute to its culture. Company culture is built over time, through intentional decisions made by leadership and the prioritization of actions and beliefs.

Culture surveys that offer insight into how employees experience company culture and reveal how closely that matches with what leadership intends. It may ask questions like “How clear is the organization’s mission to you?” or “Do leaders and managers act in accordance with the company’s values?”

Understanding how your employees see your culture—and if it’s actually reflected in their day-to-day—is essential, especially in times of change. A mismatch between how leaders and employees see company culture can cause problems, like backlash to a decision leaders thought would go over smoothly.

A culture survey is similar to, but distinct from, the employee engagement survey. The former measures sentiment around company culture. The latter measures employee engagement on an individual basis. Employee engagement describes how motivated and driven an employee is, which ties directly into how they feel about their employer.

Company culture can be an important element in employee engagement, but the two are measured separately.

Benefits of a company culture survey

A workplace culture survey gives you a clear idea of how employees see culture and if they feel it’s accurately reflected company-wide. With these insights, you can then work to create a culture that more closely aligns with what your employees value. This comes with significant benefits:

Improved alignment

Achieving alignment on company culture leads to a trickle-down effect that affects everything else an organization does. Culture should be the primary reference point from which processes are built and decisions are made. When employees have a clear idea of company culture that matches leadership’s intent, collaboration becomes far easier, communication is far smoother, and results throughout the organization are better.

Increased retention

About 25% of employees worldwide are either actively searching for a job or about to start looking, according to SHRM’s 2024 Global Culture Report. For employees who rate their company’s culture as “good” or “excellent,” that rate drops down to 15%. Culture surveys uncover how employees feel about your culture, giving you a path towards improving it and creating a better workplace.

Higher employee engagement

According to that same report from SHRM, 87% of engaged employees rate their company culture as good or excellent, compared to only 50% of disengaged employees. Engaged employees are aligned with a company’s mission and can draw a clear link between their day-to-day work and that mission. They’re motivated to take on extra tasks and take initiative to solve complex problems. It’s much harder to keep employees engaged when they aren’t clear on—or don’t align with—your company’s culture.

Better performance

Human beings aren’t machines, and their productivity isn’t a linear transformation of resources into finished products. They need to feel positively about the work they’re doing, feel like it has a purpose, and see its impact on the company as a whole. Culture surveys surface any obstacles to that, improving productivity.

Greater trust

Culture surveys allow leaders to transparently ask employees for feedback. When they take in that feedback and turn it into action that visibly improves culture, employees are more likely to trust those leaders in the future.

How to use 15Five to create an effective culture survey

While you could potentially use a form-builder tool to create your culture survey and log the responses in a spreadsheet, it’s far from the most efficient or effective solution. For most teams, a performance management tool is the best platform for managing these surveys.

That’s where 15Five comes in.

15Five is a performance management tool that allows managers and leaders to handle everything from employee engagement surveys to performance reviews and upskilling employees through e-learning. It’s a one-stop shop for gathering, analyzing, and acting on data about employee engagement, performance, and more. That makes it a natural tool for your culture surveys.

Let’s break down how you can run your own company culture survey and how 15Five can help.

Step 1: Define the survey goals

Before you start, you need a goal for your survey. Are you trying to establish a baseline? Diagnosing a specific culture problem? Or are you responding to a big change, like rapid growth or an acquisition?

Clearly name your goal and tie it to broader business objectives, like improving employee retention, supporting DEI, or evaluating leadership effectiveness.

Step 2: Choose the right questions

There’s a wide variety of questions you can ask, but here are some things to keep in mind:

• Use mixed formats: Not all company culture survey questions should be multiple-choice. Use scales, yes/no answers, and open-ended prompts.
• Cover multiple areas: Questions should cover leadership, communication, DEI, accountability, innovation, and purpose.
• Use built-in templates in 15Five Engage: With 15Five, you don’t have to start from scratch. Use proven templates to get your survey done faster.

Step 3: Build your culture survey in 15Five

15Five Engage allows you to build your own custom culture survey or start from a template, as well as using audience segmentation to target individual surveys to the entire organization or specific teams.

When building your survey, try to limit yourself to 10-15 questions. This strikes a balance between being thorough and not overwhelming employees with a long survey. Make sure employees can answer the survey anonymously, and time yourself taking the survey so it takes no longer than 10 minutes.

Step 4: Launch and communicate the survey

To get as many participants for your survey as possible, you need to launch it across multiple communication channels. Share it in internal emails, Slack or Teams messages, or even mention it in important meetings.

In your messaging, make sure to:

• Emphasize anonymity.
• Highlight the impact of past survey results.
• Reinforce leadership’s commitment to listening.

Try to avoid sending out culture surveys around holidays, quarter-ends, or other high-stress periods.

Step 5: Analyze the results using 15Five’s tools

15Five’s Manager Products give managers and leaders dynamic dashboards for centralizing, analyzing, and acting on the data you get from your culture surveys. With these tools, you can:

• Segment data by department, role, and tenure.
• Identify trends in low-trust areas or inconsistent values alignment.
• Use visualizations and models like heatmaps, NPS summaries, and sentiment analysis.
• Connect data to KPIs like retention, engagement, and absenteeism.

Step 6: Act on your findings

When you run your first company culture survey, you’ll end up with a ton of data. But just having that data isn’t enough. You need an action plan. Start by prioritizing the key issues that come up multiple times in your data. Stick to two to three focus areas; any more than that and your efforts will be too scattered.

Once you’ve picked the areas you want to improve, make a detailed plan of the actions you’ll take to improve them and share a summary with your employees. They need to know that you’re taking action and that this action matches the outcomes of the survey.

Remember that culture surveys aren’t a one-and-done process; they need to happen regularly to track changes over time.

Best practices for running a workplace culture survey

The basic process of running a culture survey is simple: plan your survey, share it with employees, and act on the data you get from it. But there are common pitfalls that can make your surveys less effective. Here are some best practices to avoid them.

Find the right frequency

The perfect frequency for culture surveys will vary for each organization, but you should start with quarterly or bi-annual surveys. You can then adjust your cadence from there, depending on the results of your first few surveys.

Keep it short

Survey fatigue is real. If your surveys take longer than 10 minutes to complete, you’ll see participation start to decrease, and the answers you get won’t be as complete. Be aggressively selective in your questions.

Follow-through

You should be spending more time and energy on your action plan following a culture survey than the survey itself. Make your actions visible, impactful, and based on data.

Center surveys in a broader culture strategy

Company culture should be built into everything you do, and culture surveys should contribute to that. Use the data from culture surveys to inform onboardings, training sessions, and other aspects of day-to-day operations that need to reflect company culture.

Survey says…

A successful culture survey reveals the truth of how employees feel about your organization’s identity—and whether it matches with leadership’s intent. Getting these surveys right can be a challenge, which is why you need to use the proper tools. 15Five gives you everything you need to build effective culture surveys and turn the insights from them into impactful action.

Want to see what 15Five can do for your company culture? Explore 15Five Engage or see what’s possible with Manager Products.

The post How to Create a Culture Survey for Your Workplace Using 15Five appeared first on 15Five.

Employee retention is closely related to employee engagement, which measures how passionate employees are about their day-to-day work and how aligned they are with your mission. According to Gallup’s 11th employee engagement meta-analysis, businesses with the lowest engagement scores experience 21% to 51% more employee turnover than businesses with high engagement scores. That’s why employee retention often involves employee engagement initiatives.

The success of these efforts is measured using an employee retention rate. This is calculated by:

1. Determining the time period for your retention rate. Typically, this covers a single year.
2. Define which group of employees you’ll measure. This can be a single department, an entire division, or the entire organization.
3. Get the total number of employees from the beginning of your defined period and the end of it.
4. Calculate the employee retention rate.

The formula for this calculation is:

(# of remaining employees ÷ number of starting employees) x 100 = Employee Retention Rate

So if, for example, you wanted to measure the retention rate of your marketing department, you’d do the following:

1. Pick “last fiscal year” as your time period.
2. Pick “the marketing department” as your group of employees.
3. Get the headcount for the marketing department at the beginning of the last fiscal year (say, 85).
4. Get the headcount for the marketing department at the end of the last fiscal year (say, 72).
5. Plug your numbers into the formula.

(72/85) x 100 = Employee Retention Rate

0.847 x 100 = 84.7%

By calculating this rate and tracking its evolution over time, you can spot trends before they become problematic (e.g., uneven rates across departments) and measure the effectiveness of your retention efforts (e.g., improving your benefits package).

In this guide, you’ll see the impacts employee retention can have on your organization, as well as how 15Five’s performance management platform can improve your retention efforts.

Key Takeaways:

• The business case for improving your employee retention rate
• Proven employee retention strategies
• How 15Five’s platform supports engagement and development
• Best practices for managers to improve retention
• Insights from industry benchmarks (e.g., what is a good employee retention rate)
• Real ways to increase employee retention using 15Five

The business impact of retention: Why it should be a priority

Before diving into the business impact of employee retention, let’s set a baseline for employee retention rates by looking at industry-wide data. Most data focuses on turnover rather than retention, but since an employee retention rate is essentially the inverse of a turnover rate, we can still use this data to benchmark retention rates by industry.

Employee retention rates vary wildly depending on your industry, with some (like tech) being inherently more volatile than others (like logging). That means your retention strategies—and the effort put into these strategies—will vary based on your industry. What doesn’t vary? The impact of poor retention.

That impact in two words? Productivity and profitability. It affects recruitment, as you burn through budget to continually replace employees as they leave. It creates brain drain, as your top performers leave for greener pastures and you scramble to document and spread the knowledge they had. It affects productivity in the teams that suddenly lose crucial collaborators.

While you could technically recruit your way out of low retention, it’s far from an effective strategy in the long term. You’ll lose time and money to recruitment and onboarding without reducing the financial impact of turnover. According to Gallup data, a 100-person organization with an average salary of $50,000 can lose between $660,000 and $2.6 million to turnover each year.

How employee engagement fuels retention

Employee retention involves a combination of efforts, and many of them overlap naturally with employee engagement initiatives.

Employee engagement describes the level of passion, drive, and motivation employees have for their work and for your mission in general. There are three levels of employee engagement:

1. Actively engaged: These employees are active participants in your company culture, go above and beyond, and are solid collaborators.
2. Not engaged: These employees don’t show much enthusiasm for their role and rarely take on additional tasks.
3. Actively disengaged: These employees are especially critical of company decisions, may be consistently absent, and miss important deadlines.

The further down this scale an employee is, the more likely they are to leave. Employees leave a job for a variety of reasons, from finding a better role elsewhere to dealing with low pay or having little opportunity for advancement. But the less engaged they are, the less compelling that reason needs to be. Even a minimal pay bump would be enough to make them leave, whereas an engaged employee might need a serious increase to even consider it.

Employee engagement can be contagious, with actively engaged employees creating a more positive work environment for their direct collaborators, other teams, and even their leaders. Similarly, actively disengaged employees harm the engagement of employees who work with them regularly.  So if employee engagement is steadily decreasing, and a disengaged employee leaves, then there’s a higher risk of turnover with anyone who once worked with them.

When you prioritize employee engagement, you give every employee more of a reason to keep working with you, improving your retention rate.

Key features of 15Five that help improve your employee retention rate

15Five is a performance management platform that streamlines, optimizes, and automates this essential process. It can be used to improve engagement surveys, manage your one-on-ones, optimize your performance reviews, and more. As such, a tool like 15Five is essential for improving your employee retention rate.

Here’s why.

Engagement surveys and insights

Engagement surveys give your leaders everything they need to know what matters most to their teams. That way, you can diagnose any potential issues before they lead to engagement problems, make a plan, and act on them. And because 15Five centralizes your surveys in a broader performance management platform, you can use that data in other retention efforts.

One-on-ones and check-ins

One-on-ones and check-ins are essential tools for managers who want to get the pulse of their teams on important issues. In an employee retention context, they give managers essential information to know what their direct reports need to stay engaged and committed to their work. 15Five streamlines the one-on-one process, aligning managers and their direct reports on talking points, as well as making every meeting more productive.

Recognition and visibility

High Fives and similar features allow leaders, managers, and teammates to publicly recognize top performers. Not only does this help build a more positive culture around important work, but centralizing this kind of recognition lowers the barrier to giving out more of it.

Performance reviews and goal tracking

Performance reviews support career growth—crucial for keeping employees engaged—but not in their current, outdated format. The yearly review rarely helps employees set meaningful goals or managers track progress towards them. 15Five’s performance reviews create clear feedback loops that build trust between managers and employees, as well as chart real progress towards measurable goals.

Manager enablement tools

Every aspect of the 15Five platform generates data that managers can use to better manage their teams. Turn every effort into a metric you can track. 15Five also offers built-in manager enablement content, so organizations can upskill managers in employee retention strategies and other essential aspects of their responsibilities.

Career development frameworks

Retaining top talent means investing in their long-term growth. 15Five gives you access to career visioning and development path tools, meaning your one-on-ones, engagement surveys, and more always happen with long-term goals in mind.

Want to see how 15Five can help you boost employee retention at your organization? Book a demo here.

Best practices and strategies: How to retain employees using 15Five

Improving your employee retention rate is typically done by addressing issues that arise from some of the most common reasons employees leave, including low pay, difficult relationships with managers, and a lack of role clarity. But while these are some of the most common issues, they’re far from the only areas you’ll want to address to boost retention. Here are some strategies that can help you retain your top performers.

Fine-tuning your hiring (and onboarding) process

Your employee retention strategy starts the moment you first interact with a potential candidate. Not when they’re hired; from the first communication you have with them. Every interaction from that point onward builds expectations around the work they’ll be doing and what your company culture is like. Constantly work on improving your hiring process so it accurately reflects your company. Otherwise, you’ll see a spike in turnovers in those first few months.

Reviewing your compensation package

Compensation is, unsurprisingly, a large part of employee retention. But it goes beyond just offering competitive salaries. According to SHRM, 88% of employees review health benefits before accepting an offer. Do you think they stop valuing these benefits after you employ them? Most organizations have a plan for increasing salaries over time, but few proactively improve non-salary benefits.

Improve and propagate company culture

Your company culture can make the difference between an engaged employee and a former employee. Being more intentional about your company culture contributes to employee retention in multiple ways:

• It roots out poor fits earlier: A wishy-washy culture makes it difficult for a potential employee to know if they’re a good fit or not, which can result in them leaving soon after they’re hired. A clearly defined culture with clear values is better for everyone.
• It keeps current employees engaged: Your mission and your culture are essential to employee engagement. When employees see leaders and managers put culture into practice, that culture feels more real to them, and they’re more likely to live in alignment with it. This helps make your workplace feel like everyone is working towards a common goal.

Chart clear paths for career development

Few employees enjoy working the same job, day in and day out, for years at a time with no hope of advancement. While you might not be able to offer short-term advancement to every employee, you should proactively work with all of them to build a development path that makes sense for them and for the organization. That can involve upskilling assistance, lateral career moves, or temporary responsibilities ahead of a promotion.

Use employee feedback loops

Feedback is crucial for employees to perform their best and for managers to know what their teams need. A tool like 15Five allows you to turn occasional, manual feedback processes into a feedback loop, which continually improves performance throughout your teams.

Keep more of your top performers

Your employee retention rate is the clearest indicator of how effective your organization is at keeping employees satisfied over the long term. It can tell you how you can expect recruitment budgets to change, which aspects of your organization need improvement, and even which departments are experiencing the highest turnover. Employee engagement is an essential element for this, as engaged employees are less likely to leave.

15Five’s performance management platform gives managers and leaders everything they need to boost retention, while employees are empowered to surface essential feedback and communicate engagement issues with their own powerful tools.

Want to explore 15Five’s full suite of engagement and performance tools? Book a demo.

The post How 15Five Can Help Improve Your Employee Retention Rate appeared first on 15Five.

Worse, there’s someone at the other end of that now two-mile stretch who needs those stones, and their project is now delayed.

A lack of role clarity leads to frustration from the person working in that role, panic from those who rely on their work, and confusion from managers who struggle to lead their reports.

Role clarity ensures the tasks and responsibilities of a particular job are properly defined. Organizations that take role clarity seriously also outline the expectations that other collaborators and teams can have of that role.

As hybrid work and remote work have grown in popularity, workers have struggled to stick to their job responsibilities and managers struggle to keep a close eye on their work. Clearly defined roles are essential when two remote workers could potentially take on the exact same task without realizing it, or, worse, a critical task goes undone.

Proper documentation, processes, and standard operating procedures can help achieve and maintain role clarity, but performance management tools like 15Five can reinforce clarity at every turn.

Here’s how your organization can establish and maintain role clarity, and how 15Five can help.

Key Takeaways:

• What role clarity is and why it’s vital for employee performance
• The risks of unclear employee roles and expectations
• How to establish role clarity during onboarding and performance reviews
• The link between role clarity and team alignment
• How 15Five’s performance management tools support and scale role clarity
• Actionable steps managers can take to define and maintain employee role clarity

What is role clarity and why does it matter?

Role clarity aligns everyone, including the person in that role, their manager, and their collaborators, on that role’s responsibilities. This includes the tasks they perform, who they report to, and more. Clear roles mean everyone knows exactly what to expect.

That’s one of the key differences between role clarity and a simple job description. According to executive coach Dr. Joel M. Rothaizer, most organizations focus too much on a role’s tasks and not enough on the expectations. By clearly defining these expectations, organizations can streamline collaboration and prevent misunderstandings that slow productivity to a crawl.

Centering a role within the team is essential for this. Take a marketing team, for example. What can a content marketer expect from a partner marketer when the two collaborate? No role works in isolation, and clearly outlining the way roles should interact is crucial.

According to research from Effectory, employees with clear roles are 53% more efficient and 27% more effective than those with more nebulous responsibilities. These benefits add up.

The hidden costs of poor role clarity

Poor role clarity can quickly lead to problems that seep into every project, workflow, and team. If the people in your teams aren’t clear on what’s expected of them, you’ll start seeing:

• Misalignment: When a role isn’t clear, everyone has their own idea of what it actually entails. This leads to a lack of alignment on the very basics of a role, leading to mismatched expectations between managers and their direct reports, individual contributors and their collaborators, and even leadership and entire departments.
• Duplicated work: Without clear roles, managers struggle to send tasks to the right person. Multiple employees might work on the same task, both convinced that it falls within their role. That leads to lost productivity, frustration from both parties, and slower projects throughout the organization.
• Employee burnout: Employees with unclear roles often find themselves doubling up on other people’s work and starting projects only to be told to move on to something else. This leads to frustrated, overworked employees who never know if their work matters, a perfect recipe for burnout.
• Disengagement: Engaged employees buy into your mission, are motivated to innovate, and are more productive. Disengaged employees, meanwhile, aren’t as productive, rarely innovate, and are more likely to see their job as little more than a paycheque. A lack of role clarity can lead to disengagement, as an employee feels like no one around them knows what they should be doing, so they might as well stick to the minimum.
• Friction between team members: Without role clarity, it becomes incredibly difficult for employees to know what they should be working on and what their coworkers should be taking on. This leads to friction as important deadlines go missed, with multiple parties thinking someone else is to blame.

Curious what that might look like in practice? Imagine a team of designers, each with their own specialty. They’re working on a project together, but it’s unclear who should be working on each part. Every step of the project is fraught with friction as individual tasks are passed around, with no one knowing what’s actually their responsibility. The project gets completed more slowly, with unnecessary misunderstandings and friction between designers.

A lack of role clarity decreases employee satisfaction throughout your organization, potentially even leading to higher turnover.

Establishing baseline role clarity: Building the foundation

A foundation of clear roles creates better collaboration, even as these roles evolve to meet new market demands. Additionally, they streamline your hiring efforts, as recruiters and prospects alike have a clear understanding of specific roles.

New hires are more likely to leave in the first few months of their tenure, and typically that’s due to a mismatch between their expectations and the reality of the role. A lack of role clarity contributes to this, as recruiters and managers fail to consistently explain the responsibilities of a role, leading the new recruit to learn the truth on the job.

Your onboarding process plays a key role in establishing role clarity, for both existing and future employees. Likewise, manager 1-on-1s allow you to reinforce clarity for a role as a new employee settles into their new job. It also gives managers an inside look at an employee’s responsibilities, allowing them to adjust them if the role needs to change.

Performance management platforms like 15Five can help keep roles clear at every stage of an employee’s tenure. Roles, responsibilities, and expectations are documented in these tools. Questions, changes, and updates can all happen within these tools as well, making everything from feedback loops to employee engagement surveys contribute to role clarity.

How to improve role clarity in the workplace

Clear roles lead to better productivity, more efficiency, and more engaged employees. If roles aren’t clear at your organization, here’s what you can do to change that:

• Use performance reviews to clarify roles and expectations: If leadership has a clear understanding of each role but the people in these roles don’t, you can use performance reviews to reinforce each role’s responsibilities.
• Run a role expectations workshop: This workshop leads to the creation of a role expectations matrix, which lists all roles in your organization (or just a team, to start small) on both axes of the matrix. Where one role intersects with another, have the workshop’s participants write the expectations they have of one another. This can help create a baseline for these roles.
• Document every role in a shared tool: Accurate documentation can help answer any questions about a role and its responsibilities. It can also serve as a basis for updating roles as needed.
• Encourage employees to share their perspective: A leader’s idea of a role might not match the reality of what happens in an employee’s day-to-day. Encourage employees to share their perspective on their role through feedback loops, so everyone has a clearer understanding of that role.
• Communicate changes quickly and clearly: Roles are rarely static. They evolve as teams change, the organization scales, or leadership’s priorities evolve. If roles need to change, ensure everyone in the organization knows it as soon as possible, both for their own roles and those of frequent collaborators.

How 15Five helps establish and reinforce role clarity

Clear roles are documented, revised, and updated in a way that everyone can consult them when they need to. Documenting a role can be as simple as writing a summary of its requirements in a word processor, but this makes it difficult to review that role in the context of performance management.

That’s where 15Five comes in.

15Five is a performance management platform that streamlines, optimizes, and automates every aspect of performance management, including contributing to role clarity. With 15Five, you can:

• Clearly define roles during an employee’s onboarding process and show their responsibilities throughout that process.
• Refer to roles and responsibilities during regular performance reviews, improving clarity and better tracking an employee’s progress.
• Reference responsibilities in feedback loops and real-time performance data.
• Help employees connect their strengths with success in their roles with Best-Self Reviews.

Other 15Five features, like alignment tools, goal-tracking, and 1-on-1 agenda, also help reinforce role clarity.

Want to see how this works? Book your demo here.

Role clarity drives long-term business success

Role clarity is essential to helping employees achieve better results, improving collaboration across teams, and creating better results for the organization at large. You’ll see the impact of clearer roles in:

• Performance outcomes: Employees who know what they’re working towards can better deploy their strengths towards those goals. Knowing how their role fits in with the broader organization is also inherently motivating.
• Team collaboration: Collaboration depends on clear communication, common expectations, and alignment. Clear roles mean everyone in a team knows exactly what to expect from their collaborators, preventing misunderstandings and miscommunications that bring projects to a halt.
• Employee engagement: With a clear role, employees know they’re always working towards your mission. That encourages them to innovate and dedicate themselves to their work.
• Employee retention: A clear role leads to greater employee engagement, greater employee satisfaction, and, ultimately, greater retention.

Managers may not always be responsible for defining the roles of their direct reports, but they’re the front line when dealing with unclear roles. As such, leadership relies on them to identify issues with a role if it needs to change, as well as keeping that role clear for their teams.

Let’s get this clear

Role clarity is crucial at every level of your organization. It keeps individual contributors productive and engaged, as clear responsibilities ensure they’re always working according to the expectations of managers and teammates. It keeps teams cohesive and collaborative, as everyone knows what to expect of their coworkers. It allows managers to more clearly gauge a direct report’s performance. Finally, the entire organization as a whole benefits from the productivity and engagement gains that come from role clarity.
Want to evaluate and improve role clarity in your organization? See how 15Five can help you with a demo.

The post How Role Clarity Can Help Maximize Employee Performance appeared first on 15Five.

Between increasing AI adoption, the popularity of remote work, and increasingly decentralized hierarchies, employee empowerment is an essential response to evolving market trends. It allows your workplace to operate in a more agile way, freeing employees from the need to constantly check in with managers on every decision while allowing them the freedom to solve problems more creatively.

In this guide, you’ll learn about what employee empowerment looks like in practice, how you can put it into effect, and the benefits you’ll reap as a result.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand what employee empowerment is and why it matters.
• Explore the key benefits of employee empowerment for individuals and organizations.
• Learn how to build a sustainable employee empowerment program.
• Discover real-world employee empowerment examples and best practices.
• Understand what is necessary for the success of employee empowerment efforts.
• See how 15Five’s employee engagement and performance tools support workforce empowerment.

What is employee empowerment?

Employee empowerment means giving employees the ability to work in a self-directed way, with more authority over the decisions that impact their day-to-day work. It’s the natural counter to micromanagement, giving employees more autonomy and allowing managers to dedicate their focus to more important tasks than just keeping tabs on their direct reports.

That said, employee empowerment extends beyond mere delegation, which is simply managers reassigning tasks to employees. True employee empowerment means trusting them to take on a task from start to finish, along with the responsibilities that come with it. That might involve reporting on a task’s progress to relevant stakeholders, autonomously checking in with collaborators, and building up their project management skills.

Managers have a direct hand in making sure their teams have the tools they need to handle this additional responsibility. That can mean giving them access to the right project management tools or databases, as well as helping them train up the skills they need to stay autonomous.

While employee empowerment is always about giving employees more autonomy at its core, it can take a few different forms in practice:

• Self-managed teams, in which employees take on the lion’s share of the planning and strategy roles for their work, with only occasional guidance from managers as needed.
• Decision-making authority, which allows employees to make important decisions on their own, without always needing approval from a manager.
• Idea implementation ownership, in which employees own their ideas from their initial inception to their final implementation.
• Workplace autonomy, allowing employees to choose how they get their work done, in a way that suits them best.

The benefits of employee empowerment

Employee empowerment doesn’t just reduce a manager’s workload and counter micromanagement. When applied throughout your organization, you’ll see a widespread impact that makes a difference:

• Improved employee engagement and morale: Employee engagement describes the commitment and passion employees have towards their role. Empowering them to have more autonomy and control over what they do can stir passion and satisfaction for their work, improving engagement. Likewise, a culture that empowers employees can lead to higher morale across the board, as they feel in control of their work rather than simply handling tasks dispatched to them.
• Increased productivity and innovation: Productivity has to be built on a solid foundation. It doesn’t come from just using tools and to-do lists. When employees own more of their work, they can tailor their tasks to their work style, ensuring that the responsibilities they take on happen at a time and in a way that allows them to hit peak productivity. Additionally, being empowered to take on more responsibility means they’re more aware of what’s going on outside their own work, giving them more opportunities to contribute to broader initiatives.
• Stronger retention and employee loyalty: According to Gallup data, 37% of people who left a job in 2024 did so for engagement and culture reasons, like a lack of development opportunities or their work no longer interesting them. When employees are empowered, they’re given opportunities to build up their skills as well as tailor their work to what they’re interested in, which leads to greater retention.
• Enhanced customer satisfaction: No customer likes feeling like their requests are being passed from department to department, with no one seemingly responsible for resolving their issue. Employee empowerment has a special advantage in customer support and other customer-facing roles, since agents are given more agency to proactively resolve issues rather than always escalating them.
• Better leadership development and succession planning: Leadership roles are incredibly difficult and expensive to hire for, especially when you factor in the lengthy onboarding needed for a leader to become familiar with your organization. Employee empowerment is the stepping stone to leadership development, which promotes the development of leadership skills throughout your org chart and gives you a steady pipeline of potential leaders.

What is necessary for employee empowerment to succeed?

Employee empowerment requires more than just a mindset shift from managers, especially in organizations that previously relied on close supervision for every task. To truly succeed in empowering your employees—and reap the benefits mentioned above—make sure you have the following:

• Clear expectations and goals: What are you empowering employees for? Do you want to reduce management’s workload so they can take on more strategic work? Or do you want to upskill employees, perhaps ahead of deploying AI throughout your company? Empowering employees means you need to be transparent with them about what your ultimate goal is, so they can align their efforts with yours.
• Supportive leadership: Employee empowerment requires buy-in from every level of your organization. All it takes is a single leader to request a report from a manager instead of the employee who’s supposed to own a task in order for an entire empowerment effort to stall. Managers also need resources to properly empower their direct reports, and that requires support from leadership.
• Open communication: Employee empowerment is heavily dependent on open, transparent communication. Managers need to trust that they can get accurate updates from their direct reports, while employees need to know they can be open about whatever they’re struggling with as they take on more ownership over their work.
• Access to training and resources: Employees need significant support as they begin taking on more strategic responsibilities, and your organization needs to be ready to provide that support. That can involve training on specific skills, access to experts, coaching sessions, and extra feedback loops.
• Recognition and accountability: When someone excels in their new empowered capacity, recognize it as publicly as possible. Use them as an example for other employees you seek to empower. Likewise, help employees become more accountable for all the work they do, which includes owning up to and fixing mistakes.

Building an employee empowerment program

Empowering employees to take more ownership of their work and act more autonomously requires organization-wide change. Here’s a step-by-step process you can follow to start implementing this with your teams.

Assess your current culture

Does your current company culture support employee empowerment? Better yet, do your employees believe that your culture can support this? Employee empowerment can only work in organizations where trust, transparency, and open communication are valued.

So how do you assess your company culture? Survey tools, like 15Five’s Engage, are a great way to get the pulse on your company culture and how it actually supports employees on the ground.

Define empowerment goals

What is your main objective? How will you measure your progress towards it? For organizations that prioritize leadership development and succession planning, employee empowerment will look very different than for teams that want to prioritize agility and autonomy.

Train managers to empower their teams

Managers have a key role to play in employee empowerment. Not only are they responsible for giving employees the resources they need to own more of their work, but they’re the front line for handling any problems that pop up along the way.

That’s why a performance management platform like 15Five Perform is an essential part of your employee empowerment strategy. It allows you to set goals for managers, track progress, and report on their performance company-wide.

Create structures for feedback and growth

Employee empowerment requires training and feedback for both employees and managers. Weekly check-ins allow managers to review work from employees without sliding into micromanagement, while continuous feedback loops allow employees to let their managers know how they can best be supported.

Tools like 15Five automate the majority of this process, allowing you to focus on the content of your feedback rather than getting it done just right.

Give employees decision-making power

Employee empowerment only works if employees have actual decision-making power. That can mean having actual input into what work they take on, influencing strategy, or choosing how they collaborate with other teams. It can be inherently risky, especially in some organizations where this kind of trust isn’t common, but it’s essential.

Recognize and iterate

Giving recognition to employees who excel when you empower them, and make it as public as possible. This gives you success stories helpful for getting buy-in from leadership and other employees alike.

But both employees who succeed and those who struggle once empowered should be consulted as you work on your employee empowerment process. This will give you the information you need to iterate and find a better process.

How 15Five supports employee empowerment

15Five is a performance management platform that gives data-driven HR professionals the technology they need to align HR initiatives with business goals and increase alignment throughout their organization. As a performance management platform, it’s also a perfect launching off point for your employee empowerment strategy. 15Five offers a variety of features that can completely transform the way you plan and carry out this essential process:

• Engage: 15Five gives you what you need to carry out employee engagement surveys and use the results to measure engagement over time. For employee empowerment, this gives you the data you need to create a link between your empowerment process and employee engagement.
• Perform: With 15Five, your review cycles don’t have to come with a mountain of paperwork and the ensuing administrative burden. Tailor reviews to your company culture, improve accountability, and make data-driven performance decisions.
• Transform: A blended learning solution and content library allows you to systematize manager and employee training at scale, making employee empowerment a smoother, more standardized process.

Want to see what 15Five can do for your employee empowerment process? Book a demo now.

Empower employees to achieve more

Your employees will achieve greater things if they have more ownership over their work. Meanwhile, their managers will be freed from the burden of micromanagement, giving them the ability to focus on more strategic work. Employee empowerment requires an investment, a mindset shift, and buy-in from leadership. But, when done right, it will lead to greater employee engagement, more employee retention, and greater achievements throughout your org chart.

Ready to empower your employees? Explore how 15Five can help transform your culture from the ground up in this demo.

The post Creating an Employee Empowerment Program in Your Organization appeared first on 15Five.

Many organizations still expect their HR department to exclusively handle these administrative tasks, without much input on other business functions. But others are proactively making a transition from administrative HR to a new approach: strategic HR.

In strategic HR, HR leaders become important partners in every aspect of an organization’s operations. They become a trusted advisor on productivity, turnover, and other aspects of managing the organization’s workforce. They provide key context in strategic initiatives, help identify leadership gaps, and prepare the organization for the future.

The shift from administrative to strategic HR can be a game-changer, but it can’t happen without a solid foundation. That foundation involves modern performance management tools that integrate seamlessly with existing HRIS systems, advanced data analytics, and continuous feedback cycles.

A dedicated performance management platform like 15Five has everything HR teams need to make that shift and become the strategic partners they need to be.

Key takeaways:

• Strategic HR enhances business performance by aligning HR functions with company goals.
• 15Five’s HRIS integration ensures efficiency by centralizing HR data and workflows.
• Real-time feedback and analytics empower HR leaders to make data-driven decisions.
• Goal-setting tools drive employee engagement and productivity by aligning individual and organizational objectives.
• Investing in strategic HR planning with 15Five leads to long-term workforce success.

The importance of HR as a strategic business partner

Strategic HR is an approach to human resources management that turns HR departments from an administrative function into a strategic partner for leadership and other departments.

So, what does this partnership achieve in practice?

HR professionals sit at the table when important strategic decisions are made. They have a hand in guiding overall business strategy, bringing their perspective on what employees and managers need to perform at their best, how organizations can retain their best talent, and how important skill gaps can be filled. They’re not just rolling out strategies handed down by leadership; they have an active role in building them.

Why strategic HR?

A better question might be, “Why not stick with traditional HR?”

Because organizations can’t afford to.

Employee engagement, retention, and upskilling have massive stakes. When replacing an employee can cost up to two times their yearly salary, keeping your top performers engaged is a massive priority. But traditionally, HR professionals have been reacting to employee engagement and retention issues rather than proactively planning to mitigate them. Strategic HR doesn’t just give them the tools to build the initiatives they need to do that; it gets them buy-in for those initiatives organization-wide.

Strategic HR makes HR professionals partners in strategy rather than just a department for handling administrative tasks trickling down from that strategy. It allows your HR function to tackle important issues proactively with more buy-in from the rest of the organization and it gives them the tools to prove the success of their efforts.

Add in the fact that HR priorities can change on a dime throughout the year, and a strategic HR function with the agility to pivot as needed becomes essential.

The benefits of making HR a strategic business partner

Administrative tasks will still be part of an HR professional’s day-to-day. But shifting their priority from that sort of work to strategy comes with significant advantages for the organization:

• Better alignment throughout business functions: When everyone in the organization isn’t working towards the same objectives, employee engagement and fulfillment suffer. A strategic HR function can reinforce the company’s mission and values, aligning departments.
• Organizational agility: Market conditions, innovation from competitors, and even evolving legislation can all force organizations to adapt. Strategic HR plays a key role in building upskilling processes that plug skill gaps and prepare your workforce for market changes.
• Increased performance across HR metrics: Whether you’re trying to enhance employee engagement, reduce turnover, or increase productivity, strategic HR brings the alignment you need to see massive improvements.
• Better ROI on HR initiatives: Strategic HR gives you the buy-in your initiatives need to accomplish more with every HR dollar you spend.
• A stronger bottom line: Ultimately, the increased effectiveness of your HR initiatives leads to a massive boon for the organization’s bottom line. Not only will you be spending less on recruitment, you’ll give employees everything they need to be more productive and promote innovation throughout the organization.

Strategic HR makes a massive difference for your organization, both with individual employees and across your broader strategy.

How 15Five empowers strategic HR initiatives

Strategic HR is both a state of mind and a deliberate practice. While you can make the transition to strategic HR with the platforms you already have, a dedicated performance management platform comes with significant advantages that facilitate that transition:

• Integration with existing systems: A new tool shouldn’t force you to throw out everything you’re already using. A performance management system can integrate with your current tool stack to ensure a seamless flow of data.
• Better data collection and analysis: How is your HR team currently collecting and analyzing data? Most still rely on a combination of spreadsheets and manual work when performance management tools can automate and streamline much of this process.
• Continuous feedback cycles: Manually managing a continuous feedback cycle involves massive administrative overhead. The right tool can streamline this significantly.
• Goal-setting and performance management: Setting goals and tracking progress towards them is much easier with a platform that turns raw performance data into meaningful insights.
• Automation of routine tasks: HR teams are already responsible for a ton of administrative work, and performance management tools can automate your more routine tasks.

A performance management platform can be the lynchpin in your transition towards strategic HR, and no tool serves that purpose better than 15Five. Here’s why.

15Five HRIS integration and performance management tools

Your HRIS is the platform of choice for storing data, but rarely the best place to act on it. Don’t abandon the data you already have; sync it seamlessly with 15Five’s HRIS connector so you can base your strategy on hard facts.

Many HR platforms require significant IT resources or third-party consultants in order to properly integrate with your existing systems. But with 15Five, you can start syncing data from your HRIS system to your new performance management hub in just a few clicks, whether you’re using BambooHR, Salesforce, ADP, Paycor, or one of the many other integrations supported by 15Five.

Start doing more with your data in minutes with 15Five’s HRIS integrations and go from strategy to action in a fraction of the time.

Data-driven decision making with 15Five

Data-driven decisions are better decisions. But if you’re not a data analyst, turning a pile of performance metrics, employee engagement surveys, and feedback into useful insights can be an uphill battle. That’s why 15Five’s analytics tools crunch the data for you, turning people data into clear takeaways in the HR Dashboard.

Build direct causal relationships between performance management metrics and business outcomes. Find the best place to take action. Plan your initiatives around quantifiable success metrics and drive results throughout your organization.

From there, your data feeds overview dashboards both HR teams and executives can use to plan better initiatives and orient their strategy.

Continuous feedback and employee development

Feedback works best when it’s a two-way street. Managers should feel equipped to provide timely, constructive feedback to their direct reports, while employees should feel empowered to evaluate their manager’s performance. 15Five’s engagement surveys and feedback tools keep feedback flowing throughout your organization, while also turning it into useful data for your HR strategy.

Do you know what drives employee engagement in your organization? Or what you’d need to do if you noticed a downward trend? 15Five’s engagement surveys use machine learning to cross-reference your employee engagement data with results from over 600,000 surveys so you can identify specific issues and build a better action plan.

With 15Five, you can centralize employee engagement surveys and feedback in one platform to ensure everyone gets the feedback they need and do more with every bit of feedback.

OKR and goal-setting for workforce alignment

OKRs (objective and key results) are a useful methodology for turning broad, vague goals into actionable objectives with metrics you can track to measure progress and identify success. While you can plan these goals and track them in just about any platform, they’re even more effective when they’re built right into your performance management platform.

15Five’s OKRs and goals help managers turn overarching company goals into objectives for their direct reports, track progress on those objectives, and identify challenges before they throw everyone off track. Built-in weekly reviews mean managers and employees alike always have an up-to-date perspective on how they’re contributing to their objectives.

Be the best strategic partner you can be with 15Five

Strategic HR allows HR teams to progress from managers of administrative tasks into the partners organizations need to improve productivity, reduce employee turnover, and enhance employee engagement. But beyond just pushing these metrics in the right direction, strategic HR puts HR leaders at the table for every major decision, meaning the workforce perspective is built right into the organization’s strategy.

Making the shift to strategic HR isn’t just a change in mindset and processes. You also need fully-integrated tools that support your strategy. 15Five is the performance management platform that can get you there. Book a demo to find out how.

The post How 15Five Can Help with Strategic HR Initiatives and Management appeared first on 15Five.

Fortunately, innovation is providing a powerful solution. A new generation of AI-powered notetakers like Gong, Otter.ai, Granola, and Fireflies.ai has emerged to tackle this problem head-on. An AI meeting assistant acts as a digital scribe, joining calls to transcribe conversations and create automated summaries.

This allows teams to stay fully engaged in the discussion, confident that the key details are being captured. The rapid adoption—with platforms like Otter transcribing over 100 million meetings by early 2021—proves just how valuable this technology is.

Like any game-changing technology, the initial rollout of these tools raised important questions. For all the value of automated productivity, what are the best practices for putting them to work?

Understanding the New World of Meeting AI

The first wave of meeting bots changed the game, but also revealed areas for growth. As with any new technology, there were growing pains. Some early platforms had complex setups, while others, originally designed for different purposes, had to adapt to the corporate world.

Most importantly, these tools sparked a necessary conversation about privacy and data security. Leaders and employees alike began asking legitimate questions like, “How do we ensure everyone consents to being recorded?” “How is our data being used and protected?” 

These questions weren’t a sign of fear. They were appropriate for responsible leaders to ask. They pushed the industry to mature quickly, leading to a new generation of AI tools designed with trust and transparency at their core. 

Early privacy policies from some vendors allowed for data to be used in ways that made businesses uncomfortable, like for third-party marketing or model training.

From Smart Tools to Trusted Coaches

The industry listened. Today, the standard for AI meeting assistants includes robust safeguards like SOC 2 Type II compliance, encryption, and clear data policies. But the most exciting development is the evolution of the tool’s purpose itself. The goal is no longer just transcription; it’s about enabling real change.

This is the vision behind Kona Meeting Assistant by 15Five. 

Kona Meeting Assistant connects to Google or Outlook calendars and joins scheduled 1:1s in Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams. Once enabled, it joins manager–employee meetings to capture key moments like progress updates, wins, blockers, and action items so managers can stay fully present in the conversation.

Over time, those summaries build a continuous record of growth that reflects each employee’s real contributions throughout the review period.

When review season comes, Kona compiles these summaries into a fair, balanced, and ready-to-edit performance snapshot. Managers save hours of writing time and avoid the usual pitfalls of recency bias. The result is a performance review process that feels faster, easier, and more meaningful.

Unlike generic AI note takers, Kona Meeting Assistant was designed specifically for performance management, not just meeting transcription. 

Kona understands which insights actually matter for reviews, focusing on feedback, progress, and development, and ignores personal conversations that would not be relevant. It’s also fully integrated into 15Five, so managers and HR teams can move seamlessly from conversation to performance cycle without switching tools or copying notes into other systems.

Kona was built on a foundation of “privacy by default.” All personally identifiable information (PII) is removed before any data is processed. Furthermore, the de-identified data is never retained or used for model training, and companies have complete control, with the ability to opt out or enable AI features as they see fit.

The notes and summaries generated by the Kona Meeting Assistant are private to the manager and their direct report. HR administrators cannot see the content of these 1:1 notes without the manager’s explicit consent

When you build AI this way, with trust and connection at the center, it helps people be more engaged, stay longer, and perform better. 

A Leader’s Checklist for Building Trust with AI Notetakers

Putting AI notetakers to work thoughtfully is the key to getting their benefits. Here’s a leader’s checklist for introducing these tools in a way that builds confidence and trust:

• Foster Transparency and Consent—always be upfront. Ensure all participants know that the meeting is being recorded and provide their consent. Look for tools that make this process automatic and clear.
• Partner with Principled Vendors—do your homework. Choose partners whose privacy policies guarantee that your data remains your own and is never used for external model training or sold to third parties.
• Put Smart Access Controls in Place—use role-based permissions to ensure that sensitive conversations are only accessible to the right people. Good governance builds trust.
• Champion Privacy-First Design—select solutions that are engineered for security from the ground up, such as by de-identifying data before it’s processed.
• Empower Your Team with Choice—the best vendors provide flexibility. The ability for your organization to enable, restrict, or disable AI features ensures you stay in control.
• Communicate the ‘Why’ and ‘How’—proactively explain the purpose behind the AI meeting assistant—to reduce administrative work, improve focus, and provide better coaching—and be transparent about how data is protected.

AI tools can be incredible partners when you choose the right ones. The best tools don’t just transcribe meetings, they help your people grow. Look for technology that enhances our ability to connect, create, and lead. Get this right, and you’ll build a workplace that’s both more productive and more human.

If you’re interested in learning more about 15Five and our Kona Meeting Assistant, click here for a demo.

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