Integrating your organization’s Google Calendar or Office 365 (Outlook) with Small Improvements automates the 1:1 process by syncing existing calendar events directly into the platform. This ensures managers and reports have a dedicated space for talking points without manual scheduling.
How the integration works
The integration follows a calendar-to-platform flow. This means:
Meetings created in your calendar automatically appear in Small Improvements.
Meetings manually created in Small Improvements will not sync back to your calendar.
Once synced, you can add talking points and notes directly within Small Improvements.
Note: For guidance on how your employees will interact with this feature, see our article, [1:1 Meetings] Calendar Integration.
Technical requirements and permissions
Before you begin, ensure you have the necessary administrative access:
Small Improvements: You must be an HR Admin or Tech Admin.
Calendar Provider: * Google: You must be a Google Workspace Super Admin (this is only required for the initial setup).
Outlook: You must have permissions to grant application access for your Office 365 tenant.
Setting up the integration
To get started, navigate to Settings > Calendar Integration and select your preferred provider.
Then, select “Outlook Calendar” or “Google Calendar”.
Google calendar setup
You must a domain administrator for your Google Workspace domain.
After clicking “Connect” on the “Google Calendar” card (see above), you’ll be brought to this window overlay:
Follow the link to the “Google Workspace Marketplace”
Click on “Domain install”
Then press “Continue” and accept the permissions
The permissions required to turn the integration on:
View and edit events on all your calendars
View your calendars
View your email address
See your personal info, including any personal info you’ve made publicly available
The next steps:
Now go back to Small Improvements and click “Confirm Installation”
We then test whether we can connect to your organization’s calendar
When the installation was successful, the first 1:1 Meetings will be created automatically within the next hour.
HR can determine the keywords or symbols in the event titles that should represent 1:1 Meetings and, therefore, pull them into Small Improvements (see below in How we create Meetings from Calendar Events).
Office 365 (Outlook)
When clicking on “Connect”, you will be asked to give our Office 365 Application permissions, and must grant all permissions here in order for the calendar integration to work as intended.
After doing so, you are redirected back to Small Improvements.
The integration is now set up and the first 1:1 Meetings will automatically be created within the next hour.
How we create Meetings from Calendar Events
Every hour, on the hour, our system will scan all of your organization’s calendars for 1:1 Meetings within the next 4 weeks that look like 1:1s. There are certain criteria for the integration to work smoothly.
The event is in a person’s primary calendar
The event contains only 2 participants
Meeting rooms don’t count as participants, but the meeting room cannot be a participant. It must be listed as the Location of the meeting.
Participation in the event cannot be declined
Both participants must be part of the same Small Improvements account. We use the email address of the Google or Office 365 user to look up those users in Small Improvements
Your Small Improvements login email must match the email you use to create your calendar events. If you use an alias, your events might be missed.
The meeting must contain one of the keywords set by the admins. The default keywords are: /, <>, one-on-one, 1on1, 1:1, one-to-one
After the integration is confirmed, HR can also customize further keywords/symbols to be recognized in the titles of the event as 1:1 Meetings.
If we discover a potential 1:1 meeting, our system will try to see if we already have it in our database:
If there is already a meeting in Small Improvements linked to the same calendar event, we update the date and time of the meeting.
If there is already a meeting in Small Improvements happening around the same time (± 12h) between the same people, we assume this is the same meeting and link it to the calendar event.
If there is no meeting in Small Improvements, we create one and link it to the calendar event.
Meetings with Private visibility in the calendar with also be scanned and create a meeting in Small Improvements.
When a meeting is linked to a calendar event, it is not possible to edit the date in Small Improvements. That must be done in the Calendar via ‘View on Calendar’, as shown below.
If an event is deleted from the calendar, we will delete the meeting from Small Improvements. If any Talking Points or Meeting Notes are already added to the automatically created meeting, we will simply unlink the meeting from the calendar event instead of deleting it.
Adding links to your Google Calendar Events
A link is added to Google Calendar events to make 1:1 meetings in Small Improvements easier to find.
