If you were recently added as an HR Admin to your workplace's Small Improvements account, have no fear! Small Improvements is designed to be easy to learn and use, and this guide introduces you to the basics.
If your organization is new to Small Improvements and you're looking for help setting up a brand new account, check out this guide instead.
Small Improvements 101
As a first step, please take a look at our Small Improvements 101 guide to get familiar with basic navigation, terminology, and core features.
Feature Selection
Admins have the power to hide modules from employees' view. Some features included in your plan may not be active in your account. You can visit your Feature Selection menu to review and turn features on/off.
License and Payment
Go to Admin > Settings > License and Payment to download past and current invoices, review and update your billing information, and manage your subscription.
You can add a credit card or download the invoice to find instructions for paying by bank transfer.
If you exceed the number of user licenses included in your subscription, you'll eventually be prompted to update your subscription. You'll be charged the prorated cost for the additional users for the remainder of the subscription term.
More details here.
Customizations
Customers on our Elevate plan have several advanced customization options. Learn more here:
Security
Our Trust Center contains a wealth of information on the measures we take to safeguard your data. Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.
Customers on our Elevate plan have several advanced security options. Learn more here:
User Management
Your company may already be integrated with your HRIS to manage user information. These are one-way integrations that pull basic employee data (e.g., hiring date, manager, location) from your HRIS to Small Improvements, but do not send any data back.
All updates to user information must be made via the HRIS; employee profiles cannot be edited manually in Small Improvements when an integration is active.
You can find our detailed guides to HRIS integrations here.
Customers on our Elevate plan can integrate with an unsupported HRIS via SFTP. Learn more here.
Otherwise, you can update your employee information manually or in bulk by following the instructions here.
Roles and Permissions
You do not need to explicitly assign users the manager role: if a user has employees reporting directly to them, they automatically gain visibility into most of their direct reports' activity across 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:
HR Admins have full access to nearly all user data across the company (with some exceptions for users in their reporting line).
HR Assistants can help with most administrative tasks, such as designing questionnaires, setting up review cycles, monitoring participation, and sending reminders, but they cannot access other users' reviews and other sensitive content.
Tech Admins can set up integrations and help with basic user management, such as resetting passwords.
Please see here for more details.
Deactivating, Deleting, and Merging Users
Deactivating a user removes their account access while preserving the full record of their historical activity. Deactivated users do not count against your licenses.
Learn more here.
Notifications
Go to Admin > Settings > Emails to customize the sender name and signature for our email notifications. Customers on our Elevate plan can fully customize all of our notification emails via this menu.
Go to Admin > Settings > Mail Log to see a record of all of the emails we've sent to your users.
Go to Admin > Settings > Bounced Email Addresses to review undelivered emails and detailed error messages to help troubleshoot.
Employees can also configure notifications at the user level. Click your name in the lower left, then select Your Settings.
Continuous Feedback Tools
Our continuous feedback tools -- Praise, Anytime Feedback, and 1:1 Meetings -- require minimal HR Admin support, and you can monitor usage and update the backend settings for each feature through your Admin dashboards.
HR-Driven Tools
Other features, such as Reviews, 360 Feedback, Objectives, and Pulse Surveys, can only be used after an HR Admin opens a cycle.
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 run in parallel or overlap. For example, if you are running quarterly Objectives cycles, you might keep your Q1 cycle open even after you've launched your Q2 cycle, so employees can start entering their new goals while continuing to update existing ones.
Integrations
We offer several integrations. Click the links below for more details.
In most cases, users must have Tech Admin permissions to manage integrations.
Getting Support and Staying in Touch
Click the blue bubble in the lower right corner of your screen to access our chatbot. Just reply "Talk to a person" to reach a member of our team.
You can also email us at [email protected] - we are here to help!
Keep an eye on our Release Notes to stay up to date on new features and get a preview of what's ahead.