Small Improvements 101

Welcome! We’ve designed Small Improvements with simplicity in mind, but we know that learning a new platform can be daunting. This guide will introduce some key terms and concepts to help you feel confident navigating and implementing Small Improvements.

A personalized demo is the best way to learn about how Small Improvements can support your specific goals. Schedule a 15-minute consultation with our Customer Success team so that we can point you in the right direction.

Each user will see their outstanding tasks listed front and center on their homepage, along with an overview of their open Objectives and some shortcuts to quickly give and receive feedback.

Use the toggle in the upper left corner to toggle between your Employee view and your Admin view.

Your Employee view is where you can use our tools in your capacity as a regular employee, e.g. participate in your own performance review and set your own objectives.

Your Admin view is where you can access backend settings, e.g. set up a performance review or objective-setting cycle for the entire company.

Each employee has their own profile page where you can find their basic demographic info (e.g. department, title, location) as well as any of their past activity that you have access to.

Click your profile name in the lower left corner and select View Profile to review your own profile, or click the magnifying class to search for another employee's profile.

Managers will also have a People tab for easy access to their direct reports' profiles.

Use the + shortcut in the lower left corner to quickly create a new Praise, Meeting, Objective, or Anytime Feedback.

You can expand the Helpful Resources sidebar on the right side of your screen when writing a Performance Review, sharing Anytime Feedback, or planning a 1:1 Meeting. You'll have easy reference to all of the employee's activity across the platform without leaving the page you're on.

You do not need to explicitly assign users the role of manager: if a user has employees reporting directly to them, they automatically gain visibility into most of their direct reports' activity throughout the platform.

You’ll also see the term indirect manager used in Small Improvements to refer to an employee’s manager’s manager, that person's manager, and so on all the way up the reporting line.

You can optionally assign employees a secondary manager, which is independent of the reporting hierarchy and grants that person a similar level of access as the employee's direct manager.

There are 3 advanced permissions you can grant to users who will be helping you administer the account:

Please see here for more details.

Many of our features are organized into cycles.

Think of a cycle as one set of participants, one set of dates and deadlines, and one set of reporting. If you are reviewing the entire company on the same timeline, you can include them all in the same Performance Review cycle; if you are reviewing different departments on different timelines, you'll need a separate cycle for each department.

Cycles can only be created by HR Admins, and employees can only use these features when a cycle is open.

Performance Reviews support quantitative and qualitative questions, 9-boxing, overall ratings, and calibration. Borrow a template from our library or design your own questionnaire entirely from scratch.

Get started here: Creating a Performance Review Cycle

Once the results are in, you'll have access to all sorts of powerful analytics to help you focus your HR team’s attention where it’s needed most, from AI-powered summaries to anomaly detection. Plus, you always have the option to export your results for offline processing.

Solicit feedback from peers, cross-functional teams, and even guest reviewers to paint a more holistic picture of employee performance.

Choose whether to empower employees to nominate their own reviewers, or have managers or HR decide who's in charge of reviewing whom. Visibility and anonymity settings are flexible: choose exactly what employees, managers, and HR can see in order to balance psychological safety and transparency where it matters.

Get started here: Setting up a 360 Feedback Cycle

Employees can publish their goals and then leave comments, update status labels, and cross items off their key results checklists to keep management updated on their latest progress.

Learn more here: Setting up an Objectives Cycle.

Our Objectives module supports not only individual development goals, but also strategic objective-setting. Enable Cascading Objectives to link individual goals to team- and company-level goals and ensure that employees are working toward a shared vision.

Lightweight, confidential Pulse Surveys provide real-time insights into employee engagement across teams and over time.

Get started here: Survey Setup and Administration.

Small Improvements also provides tools for ongoing feedback to keep the momentum going outside of formal cycles. These tools can be used by employees and managers at any time without any help from HR Admins.

Empower employees to take ownership of their professional development conversations. Work together to plan an agenda so that employees show up prepared and focused, and assign action items to provide extra accountability for next steps.

More details here: Getting Started with 1:1 Meetings.

Recognize great work in real time with Praise, our tool for public recognition. Publicize your employees' accomplishments by broadcasting Praise to a public Slack channel or displaying your Praise Wall in a shared space.

Learn more here: Getting Started with Praise.

Whereas Praise is designed for celebration, some feedback is better suited for private channels. Enter Anytime Feedback.

If you're wrapping up a big project and the next review cycle is still a few months away, request Anytime Feedback instead of waiting around to learn how you did.

If you have something valuable to share with a colleague, you can proactively give Anytime Feedback even if it hasn't specifically been requested of you.

More details here: Getting Started with Anytime Feedback.