Hassell founded 15Five as CEO in 2011 with the aim to deliver a product that could help companies and their people thrive. Under his leadership, 15Five’s customer base grew to more than 3,500 businesses accounting for over 400,000 users.

“I’m honored to return to the CEO role and partner with our incredibly talented team as we continue to build the future of work and intelligent performance management,” said Hassell. “We’ve made tremendous progress with our data intelligence platform, personalized AI coaching, AI-powered performance reviews, predictive impact models, and so much more. I look forward to continuing our mission to help every organization measure and maximize the strategic impact of their people investments so employees and organizations can perform at their very best.”

Hassell continued, “I appreciate the leadership Jim showed over the past two years. He led 15Five through a period of tremendous change, and his contributions made a lasting impact.”

“The progress we’ve made at 15Five in a short period of time has been such a rewarding experience for me,” said Morrisroe. “With the acquisition of Kona and a relentless focus on innovation and customer success, the business is well positioned to continue on its upward path.”

The post 15Five Welcomes David Hassell Back as CEO  appeared first on 15Five.

Some turnover is voluntary, meaning employees choose to leave for retirement, to pursue other opportunities, and for other reasons. Conversely, turnover is considered involuntary when it’s the organization that cuts ties with an employee.

Both types of employee turnover have a massive impact on your organization. A high turnover rate and low employee tenure mean you’re not building up institutional knowledge over time, making important projects needlessly complicated. Productivity decreases as you’re constantly training new hires. Your hiring budget is stretched to the limit, making every hiring (and firing) decision a high-stakes affair.

Proactive employee retention initiatives target the various causes behind employee turnover, both voluntary and involuntary. These initiatives increase employee morale across your organization, identify and reverse performance issues as they come up, and create career development opportunities. 

A focus on employee retention depends on knowing, identifying, and responding to the warning signs of employee turnover. Some are red flags, like increased absenteeism or missed deadlines, while others are more subtle, like job-seeking behavior and decreased engagement.

By learning to identify these factors and how to respond to them, you can reduce employee turnover, build institutional knowledge, and keep more of your workforce for longer.

Key takeaways:

• Employee turnover has a steep cost and wide-ranging impacts for your organization.
• Common warning signs of employee turnover include decreased engagement, declining performance, and increased absenteeism.
• Organizations can reduce turnover by offering competitive compensation, career growth opportunities, and a positive company culture.
• Improving employee happiness with a supportive environment and strong team bonds reduces turnover.

The impact and cost of employee turnover

The impact of employee turnover goes beyond just having to say goodbye to a beloved employee or scrambling to save a project after a key contributor leaves. You’ll see a high turnover rate affect everything from your hiring budget to productivity, team morale, and even company culture.

Hiring and onboarding expenses

If you constantly need to replace employees, your hiring and onboarding expenses will skyrocket. Just replacing a departing employee can cost between 50% and 200% of that employee’s salary, according to Gallup.

Onboarding their replacement also costs your organization valuable time and productivity. And the higher up the org chart the role you’re hiring for is, the more expensive and time-consuming the recruitment process will be. High turnover means you’re going through this process repeatedly, with decreasing returns as new employees stay for less time than the people they’re replacing.

Lost productivity

With high turnover, projects screech to a halt when key members leave and the rest of the team has to adapt. Every project becomes a constant game of hurry up and wait. Teams try to pack in as much work as possible in each week, watchful for the next departure, and then get stuck until their leaders replace that person.

Expand that to an entire organization and the loss of productivity becomes staggering.

Brain drain

Institutional knowledge is the skills, insights, and expertise your workforce has. That includes employees who know everything about your products and leaders who’ve helped navigate the organization through difficult challenges. This body of knowledge is a massive competitive advantage, and turnover is its worst enemy.

High turnover leads to brain drain, where many of your experts leave in a short period of time. Before long, it seems like no one knows how certain processes work or how to fix tenacious problems you once breezed through.

Low team morale

Few things affect your team’s morale as much as high turnover. Not being able to work with the same team for more than a few months at a time, watching important projects grind to a halt every time someone quits, and even dealing with a new manager every quarter can drain morale.

Consistently low morale can even make employee turnover worse as employees start looking for other opportunities.

Struggling company culture

Building a strong, positive company culture is already hard enough. If you’re dealing with a constant rotation of people leaving and being replaced, you hardly have what you need to build that culture. You have to constantly reeducate employees, and you’ll struggle to find the champions you need to promote that culture.

The warning signs of employee turnover

Decreased engagement

Employee engagement represents how aligned an employee is with your mission, how excited they are about their day-to-day work, and how much they enjoy working with their team. If you notice any of these characteristics slipping, you might be dealing with someone looking to move on.

Declining performance and missed deadlines

As people become frustrated and disengaged, they care less about their performance. They’ll miss deadlines and just shrug when you bring it up. If an employee regularly misses their deadlines and their productivity is on a steady decline, you might want to schedule a meeting with them.

Increased absenteeism

Employees on their way out are more likely to start missing shifts, show up late without explanation, or call in sick. Similarly, a sharp increase in requests for time off can potentially be a signal to watch out for. Of course, you could be dealing with an employee trying to build a healthier work-life balance or dealing with personal issues that keep them away from work. Open communication with that employee is essential for knowing what you’re dealing with.

Withdrawal from team activities and social interactions

Not all employees actively engage in social interactions with other team members or participate enthusiastically in team activities. But if the social butterfly on your team starts to pull back, check out of those activities, or avoid speaking up in meetings, that’s a sure sign they’re looking for a job elsewhere.

Job-seeking behavior

You might not always catch an employee sending resumes on their lunch break, but maybe you’ll notice they’ve updated their long-dormant LinkedIn profile or they’re attending more networking events. Top performers might regularly look for other opportunities before negotiating for a raise, but a sudden increase in this kind of behavior is a warning sign.

Negative attitude or prolonged dissatisfaction

There’s a difference between constructive, justified criticism and a consistently negative attitude. If you have an employee who never seems satisfied with anything leaders come up with or the work they’re given, they’re more likely to be on the way out.

How to reduce employee turnover

Some employee turnover is unavoidable, especially if you find out an employee isn’t a fit for their team or your organization. But reducing both voluntary and involuntary turnover comes down to a few initiatives every organization can implement.

Offer competitive compensation packages

Competitive compensation is essential for attracting and retaining top talent. Salaries need to be competitive (especially for top performers), and you need strong benefits to keep people around.

Provide more opportunities for career development

Few employees are satisfied with doing the same job day in, day out, without any potential for career advancement. While you don’t necessarily need to guarantee regular promotions for everyone, helping employees build up their skills and know how they can grow with your organization is essential.

Create a positive company culture

Your company culture is one of your greatest assets when it comes to retaining employees. Build a culture that makes employees feel supported, encourages them to be collaborative, and promotes transparency from leadership.

Make employee feedback and engagement surveys a priority

Employee feedback loops allow leaders and managers to get regular feedback from employees beyond the typical performance review. They also give employees the feedback they need to ensure they’re always moving in the right direction. Engagement surveys, on the other hand, give you a consistent sense of how engaged employees are.

How to improve employee retention

Proactively putting practices in place that improve employee retention doesn’t just help reduce turnover. It protects your company’s institutional knowledge, reduces recruitment and onboarding costs, and keeps productivity constant.

Strengthen relationships with leadership and management

Leaders shouldn’t lead at arm’s length, and managers should avoid micromanaging their teams. Encouraging transparency in how your leaders work and building relationships between managers and their teams make employees feel respected and valued.

Recognize and reward employee contributions

Your employee’s contributions shouldn’t go unseen. Building a culture of recognizing small wins and celebrating big wins will foster stronger bonds between coworkers, create goals employees can shoot for, and make everyone feel like they’re on the same team

Prioritize work-life balance and flexible work arrangements

Healthy work-life balance keeps employees engaged and motivated, and flexible work arrangements are a big part of that. Whether you can support fully remote employees or provide a remote day or two each week, showing flexibility can accommodate more work styles.

Employee retention is an essential pursuit for your HR team and your organization. It brings down costs for hiring, onboarding, and recruitment. It allows you to build up leadership from within, leveraging institutional knowledge at the highest levels of your org chart.

Strategies for improving employee happiness

Happy employees are engaged employees, and they’re more likely to stick around. If you’re serious about lowering your turnover rate, here are some strategies to consider.

Build a supportive work environment

A work environment that supports employees in all things makes employees happier to show up to the office. Leaders who understand what matters to their employees, managers who have their team’s backs, and coworkers who watch out for each other are all hallmarks of a supportive work environment.

Encourage team bonding and social connections

Bonds between coworkers don’t happen in a vacuum. Giving teams plenty of opportunities to bond by inviting them to collaborate on more projects or planning team activities empowers your employees to build more connections and a more cohesive work environment.

Provide mental health and wellness programs

Mental health is an important part of wellness and happiness. Your organization should show that it understands this. This can mean providing mental health resources at your workplace or making them part of your benefits package. A wellness program, on the other hand, gives employees resources to handle their wellness needs as they see fit. This promotes trust and makes them feel valued.

Happy employees are more satisfied with their day-to-day work, which helps keep them productive. They’ll be more likely to stay with your organization longer if you actively show them how valuable their happiness is to you.

Prevent turnover with the right strategy

High employee turnover can have a grave impact on your organization. Decreased employee engagement, declining performance, and increased absenteeism are all warning signs of an employee potentially leaving, but they’re rarely the main cause. Employees leave for many reasons, sometimes just because they find a new opportunity, and sometimes because they feel like they’ve been disrespected or they have no future at your organization.

Quickly detecting and addressing the warning signs of employee turnover with proactive employee engagement initiatives helps employees feel supported. This can keep productivity trending upwards, keep important projects on track, and protect your institutional knowledge.

Want to know what you can do to be more proactive about employee retention? Check out our retention roadmap.

The post Identifying the Early Warning Signs of Employee Turnover appeared first on 15Five.

With regrettable turnover, you lose a top performer because of something firmly within your control. Maybe you didn’t choose them for a promotion, and they left for a better role elsewhere. Maybe you changed your policy around hybrid work, and that top performer decided to look for a fully-remote opportunity with a competitor.

Whatever the cause, a top performer left, and you’re feeling the impact of their departure.

That impact can be massive, depending on who’s leaving. A leader’s sudden departure can cause disruptions to your overall business strategy or leave important teams rudderless as they navigate challenges. An individual contributor’s departure can cripple an essential project or bring important initiatives to a halt as you struggle to replace them.

A key employee retention plan allows organizations to proactively identify the top performers they want to retain, predict when they might be thinking of leaving, and work to retain them.

Key takeaways:

• With regrettable turnover, key contributors leave for reasons within your control.
• Non-regrettable turnover describes departures that don’t have negative impacts on your organization or happen for reasons beyond your control.
• Calculating your regrettable turnover rate as a percentage lets you measure the effectiveness of your employee retention efforts.
• A key employee retention plan will help your organization reduce regrettable turnover.

What is regrettable turnover?

Regrettable turnover describes any instance where a top performer leaves your organization for a reason within your control. It’s considered “regrettable” for two reasons:

• The top performer’s departure will have significant impacts on your operations.
• You could potentially have avoided it with the right initiative or retention efforts.

Some turnover is inevitable, but regrettable turnover, being both avoidable and impactful, means it’s important to measure. HR teams calculate and track regrettable turnover rates in order to ensure they’re not seeing periods of excessive turnover.

Top performers can leave an employer for a number of reasons, but in regrettable turnover cases, it’s usually due to one of the following:

• Lack of career growth: If a top performer doesn’t see any opportunities to grow within your organization, they’re likely to seek those opportunities elsewhere.
• Company culture: This can be due to serious issues with your company culture or just that it doesn’t match a top performer’s preference. 
• Leadership challenges: Top performers who’ve been with your organization for a long time might have had a few different leaders. Sometimes, a new leader’s perspective isn’t compatible with a top performer’s, leading to friction that can eventually lead to their departure.
• Inadequate compensation: Top performers often take on more and more responsibility over their tenure. But if their compensation doesn’t match the amount of work they’re doing, they’re likely to start looking somewhere else.

No matter why a top performer leaves, your organization is going to feel their absence. Not only are the projects individual contributors work on affected, but a significant amount of regrettable turnover can have lasting effects on the organization as a whole.

Company culture can be significantly affected as the top performers who should have been champions of your culture keep leaving. Teams start to feel dysfunctional as they have to relearn to collaborate with new arrivals as turnover increases. 

There’s also a significant financial cost associated with this kind of turnover. Important projects and initiatives can take a major productivity hit, potentially causing ripple effects throughout the company. Then there’s replacing the person you lost. According to Gallup, replacing an employee can cost 50%-200% of their salary. That’s a conservative estimate, however, and replacing top performers can easily surpass that amount.

That’s why getting a handle on regrettable turnover is so important.

Regrettable employee turnover vs. non-regrettable turnover

Preventing regrettable employee turnover is quite different from preventing other types of turnover. Before diving into these methods, let’s clearly identify what non-regrettable turnover is and differentiate it from more regrettable instances.

Non-regrettable turnover refers to instances of turnover that a company doesn’t necessarily want to prevent, usually because they wouldn’t have a major negative impact. Examples of this type of turnover include:

• Low performers leaving: Whether they leave on their own or are let go for performance issues, turnover from low performers is rarely a concern for organizations.
• Layoffs and other involuntary terminations: While a wave of layoffs can have a significant impact on company morale and short-term performance, it typically doesn’t have the same impact as a top performer leaving unexpectedly.
• Cultural misalignment: Not all employees are a cultural fit, no matter their performance. The friction caused by this kind of misalignment can eventually lead to them leaving. This rarely poses serious problems as working around that misalignment can often cause more productivity issues than simply allowing the employee to leave.
• Retirement: There’s little an organization can do to prevent an employee from retiring. While losing a top performer to retirement can have negative impacts on your organization, you can usually see it coming from far enough away to plan ahead and mitigate these impacts.

Regrettable turnover often comes as a surprise and involves employees who have a serious impact on your organization’s operations. That means their departure will disrupt important projects, often until they’re replaced. Those disruptions, and the cost of replacing the employee you lose, can affect hiring budgets, revenue, company morale, and more.

Non-regrettable turnover rarely has such outsized impacts. Sure, a wave of layoffs will affect morale, but a single case of non-regrettable turnover typically has negligible impacts on projects, departments, and operations.

That’s why most organizations with a dedicated employee retention plan focus their efforts on regrettable turnover rather than their overall turnover rate. Not only does regrettable turnover have significant costs, from lost productivity to recruitment costs and institutional knowledge loss, but it’s typically within your HR team’s control. By addressing the causes of turnover you can control, you maximize the impact of your retention efforts.

How to calculate regrettable turnover within your organization

With a simple formula, HR teams can calculate their regrettable turnover rate, allowing them to compare their rate to benchmarks in their industry and track the impact of their retention efforts. Here’s the formula:

Regrettable Turnover Rate = (# of Regrettable Departures / Total Employees) x 100

Usually, the Total Employees figure will be an average of the number of employees you had throughout the period you want to calculate your turnover rate for. For a yearly turnover rate, for instance, you’d take the number of employees your company had each month and average it all out.

Here’s an example calculation for the yearly turnover rate of an organization with over 1,000 employees.

First, we calculate the average number of employees the company had over that year. To do that, we take the number of employees the organization had for each month:

• January: 1100
• February: 1085
• March: 1200
• April: 1190
• May: 1175
• June: 1201
• July: 1199
• August: 1150
• September: 1105
• October: 1176
• November: 1155
• December: 1180

By adding all these employee counts and dividing the result by 12, we get an average number of employees for the year: 1160.

We’ll also assume the organization saw 150 instances of regrettable turnover. With these two numbers, we have everything we need to calculate this organization’s yearly turnover rate.

Regrettable Turnover Rate = (150 / 1160) x 100

Regrettable Turnover Rate = (0.129) x 100

Regrettable Turnover Rate = 12.9%

Benchmarks for turnover rates can vary depending on factors like industry, company size, and market conditions, but generally, an overall turnover rate of 10% or less signals a healthy workforce. But that’s for all types of turnover. At 12.9% the regrettable turnover rate is pretty high for this organization!

To properly calculate your regrettable turnover rate, you need to track employee departures and identify which ones qualify as regrettable. You can do this by holding exit interviews. In these interviews, managers and HR professionals sit with employees who’ve given notice—or are showing other signs of imminent departure—to find out why they’re leaving and if there’s anything the company can do to retain them.

These interviews won’t just prevent cases of regrettable turnover, they’ll also give you the data you need to identify and address turnover trends.

Developing a key employee retention plan

A key employee retention plan is essential for identifying key employees and potentially preventing their departure. It’s your best resource for addressing regrettable turnover, since it allows HR teams to be proactive about the common causes of this kind of turnover. Key strategies to include in this plan include:

• Competitive compensation and benefits: Not only do compensation packages need to be competitive, but they should be regularly reviewed so they stay competitive. You should also explore opportunities for creative benefits that make your company stand out.
• Career development opportunities: Top performers and leaders need to know that they have opportunities to grow with your company. Otherwise, they’re likely to stay on the lookout for opportunities elsewhere. Those opportunities might involve promotions, but not necessarily. The ability to develop new skills and take on new responsibilities can bring its own satisfaction.
• Engaged leadership: Companies with engaged leaders are a better place to work than environments where leaders stay at arm’s length. When leaders regularly recognize the impact of top performers and ask for their opinion, those top performers are less likely to leave.
• Strong company culture: Company culture is one of the single best assets you have for preventing turnover. A collaborative, supportive culture built on transparency makes employees feel valued.
• Regular employee feedback: Top performers are among your best sources of feedback, and they can help guide important initiatives and close valuable projects. By keeping feedback channels open, you can make employees feel heard, eliminating one of the core causes of regrettable turnover.
• Employee engagement initiatives: Employee engagement measures how excited employees are about your mission and how aligned they are with your culture. Employee engagement initiatives, like engagement surveys and feedback sessions, can keep top performers engaged.
• Work-life balance and flexibility: For some employees, nothing is more important than a healthy work-life balance and the ability to work from more locations than just the office. Exploring these options can help you nip regrettable turnover in the bud.

A key employee retention plan can greatly reduce your regrettable turnover rate, minimizing the impact of important contributors leaving at the worst time.

No regrets

Calculating and tracking your regrettable turnover rate is essential. It’ll give you the data you need to ensure your workforce remains engaged and committed, preventing the negative impacts that come with this sort of turnover. Because regrettable turnover is always caused by elements within your control, a key employee retention plan is essential, and your regrettable turnover rate is the best metric to know how successful your plan is.

By being proactive in analyzing your turnover rates and building initiatives to reduce them, you’ll lose fewer top performers, retain more institutional knowledge, and grow more sustainably.

Are your current HR tools not cutting it? See why 15Five Engage is the best platform for retaining your top performers.

The post The Impact of Regrettable Turnover on Your Business appeared first on 15Five.

But employee engagement isn’t a binary; it’s a spectrum.

Employees can be actively engaged with their work and your organization. Or they might not be engaged at all, meaning they’re still getting their work done, but they won’t go out of their way to innovate or take on additional tasks. Finally, you have actively disengaged employees, who actively avoid responsibilities and are more consistently absent than their coworkers, often with no valid reason.

Some employees might be inherently negative and halfway out the door. But in the vast majority of cases, your organization’s inaction can be a direct cause of employees feeling undervalued and unmotivated, leading them to become actively disengaged. By simply maintaining the status quo and not actively pursuing employee engagement efforts, disengaged employees don’t change, and engaged employees slide further down towards being disengaged.

Disengaged employees don’t just struggle in their own work. Their negative outlook on their work and your organization can seriously impact important projects, increase employee turnover, and even affect your company culture as a whole. You’ll have a harder time hiring the right people, keeping them on, and growing sustainably.

That’s why proactive action is so important.

Key Takeaways:

• Your organization’s inaction erodes employee trust and motivation.
• Employee disengagement worsens when employees feel unheard and unappreciated.
• Disengaged employees typically display negative attitudes towards their work and their employer, as well as rarely taking on additional responsibilities.
• Rampant employee disengagement can seriously impair productivity and jeopardize important business outcomes.
• Proactive leadership and employee engagement initiatives can detect disengagement before it becomes a greater problem and mitigate the impacts of disengaged employees.

Is organizational inaction impacting employee performance?

In short, yes.

Employee performance is deeply affected by employee engagement. According to a meta-analysis from Gallup, the performance gap between organizations with the highest employee engagement levels and those with the least engagement is massive. Low-engagement organizations saw 81% more absenteeism, 64% more safety incidents, 41% lower quality (in products and other outputs), and 23% less profitability. With the right data, you can draw a direct link between disengaged employees and the business outcomes that matter most to your organization.

Employees can grow disengaged for a variety of reasons, from a lack of career development to shoddy work-life balance or even just a mismatch between an employee’s role and their abilities. Some of these causes can be deeply personal, while others are caused by organizational issues.

But how does organizational inaction directly lead to disengaged employees?

Key ways inaction leads to employee disengagement

Your organization might not control everything that can lead to employees feeling disengaged, but sticking to the status quo can lead to those areas where you do have control contributing negatively to employee engagement. Actively engaged employees slide into more neutral territory, neutral employees grow disengaged, and disengaged employees leave.

Many organizations invest just enough in their HR function to keep employee turnover at a reasonable level, maintain existing policies, and keep communication channels open between leadership and the workforce. But inaction—an absence of proactive employee engagement initiatives—can lead to serious disengagement. Here’s how that inaction typically manifests:

• Lack of leadership response: How does your organization respond to employee frustrations? Do you respond at all? A continued lack of acknowledgement and action from leadership about important employee issues will be noticed and contribute to disengagement.
• Lack of growth opportunities: Employees don’t need yearly promotions to feel engaged, but they do need to feel a sense of upward momentum in their careers. If you don’t have a system in place to actively help them build skills they’re interested in, even when promotions aren’t available, you’ll see more disengagement.
• Inconsistent feedback: Employees need feedback to know what they’re doing well and where they need to improve. But if you’re using outdated annual reviews as the main source of employee feedback, your teams aren’t getting what they need to keep improving.
• Little recognition: A culture of kudos and employee recognition makes employees feel valued and appreciated. In organizations that don’t go out of their way to make employee recognition a priority, employee disengagement is a lot more likely.
• Ignoring employee well-being: High-stress, high-pressure work environments are unavoidable in some industries. But whether an organization does nothing to mitigate this or artificially creates a high-stress work environment through toxic expectations, employee engagement is sure to decline.
• Poor communication and transparency: Communication isn’t just essential when collaborating at the same level of your org chart. Transparent communication from leaders to employees—and vice versa—is crucial for keeping everyone aligned on your mission, living your company values, and engaged with their work.

Organizational inaction can be felt by every employee if it goes on long enough, and it will absolutely have a debilitating effect on employee engagement. Proactive employee engagement initiatives don’t just move your organization to action; they show employees that they matter and that you’re ready to make their work more engaging.

But before we get into what organizations can do about employee disengagement, let’s identify clear signs of disengagement so you know when it’s time to act.

The warning signs of disengaged and unhappy employees

Actively disengaged employees are more than just a little negative or quiet. They are completely misaligned with your mission—and even your core values—in a way that doesn’t just impact their work, but their whole team’s work. In some cases, a single disengaged employee can impact an entire department.

Here are some warning signs to identify disengaged employees:

• Decreased productivity and motivation: If a top performer’s productivity starts to slip and you can’t attribute it to any other factors, it’s likely a sign of growing disengagement.
• Withdrawal from team activities and collaboration: Team activities and collaboration on important projects can build tighter bonds between team members. If teams don’t seem interested in either pursuit, they may not be feeling particularly engaged at work.
• Increased absenteeism or lateness: Everyone misses a day of work every so often. Everyone shows up late once in a while. Employees who are repeatedly late or absent are usually not the most engaged with their work.
• Negative attitudes toward leadership or company initiatives: Engaged employees are often the most critical of leadership or company initiatives because they care deeply about your mission. Disengaged employees have a negative attitude towards your leaders and their work without offering anything constructive.
• Declining quality of work or missed deadlines: The telltale symptom of a disengaged employee is their work. Whether they’re a high performer or not, you’ll see a clear decline in what they’re able to get done and how long it takes them.

As we’ve already seen, employee disengagement can have a massive impact on your organization. Disengaged employees often leave if things don’t change, increasing turnover. But their disengagement can spread to others, bringing down previously-engaged employees, slowing down important projects, and tanking productivity throughout your organization. Teams become inefficient, projects become costly, and you might even lose your best talent.

But a disengaged employee doesn’t have to remain that way—or become a former employee. A robust employee engagement plan, starting with your HR function but radiating throughout your organization, can turn things around.

How to prevent employee disengagement in the workplace

Choosing action over inaction is the first step. From there, it’s about brainstorming, implementing, and improving on initiatives that build employee engagement while addressing the root causes of disengagement. Some examples of tried-and-true employee engagement initiatives include:

• Implementing employee feedback loops: Employee concerns that go unanswered for too long lead to disengagement. In most organizations, leaders just aren’t aware of these concerns, and would address them if they were. Regular feedback loops ensure these concerns are spotted and addressed.
• Offering professional growth opportunities: No employee wants to feel like they’re stagnating in their role. Even if you can’t offer every employee a path to a promotion every year, give them ways to develop their skills, to grow within their role, and to find new opportunities.
• Recognize and reward employee contributions: Build employee recognition into your company culture. When employees, managers, and leaders are incentivized to recognize and publicize each other’s accomplishments, morale will improve for everyone.
• Enhance workplace communication: Transparency is key to employee engagement. Encourage leaders to implement open-door policies, so employees can openly share their opinions and learn why certain decisions are made. Similarly, leaders can openly communicate important updates.
• Prioritize well-being: Promoting mental health, work-life balance, and other forms of wellness should be a priority at your organization. Demonstrate this with initiatives like increasing paid time off, helping working parents through daycare days, providing a wellness benefit, or raising awareness of common mental health issues.

No matter what you choose to implement, remember that preventing employee disengagement is an ongoing effort. You need to evaluate the impact of your initiatives, adjust them over time, and improve on them.

Keep people engaged and you’ll reap the rewards

Organizations have a direct hand in improving employee engagement, and inaction can lead to significant disengagement. Employee disengagement doesn’t just bring morale down for a few employees. It can impact productivity, increase turnover, and lead to important deadlines being missed. This all culminates in serious consequences for your business.

Proactive employee engagement initiatives and leadership intervention allow your organization to identify the signs of disengagement and act on them. Initiatives like wellness benefits, rewarding employee contributions, and implementing feedback loops can all nip employee disengagement in the bud. Having the right performance platform can streamline implementation and give you valuable data for gauging the effectiveness of these initiatives.

Engage from 15Five gives data-driven HR teams everything they need to know what’s impacting engagement at their organization, where they need to take action, and how impactful their efforts are.

Want to learn more? Explore our customer stories to see how 15Five has helped HR teams at over 3,000 companies get results.

The post How Inaction Leads to Increased Employee Disengagement appeared first on 15Five.

Instead of keeping insights, recognition, and course corrections for scheduled reviews, this approach keeps communication channels open between managers and employees. Would you rather just get a progress report at the end of the quarter? Or would you rather have a coach at your side offering you guidance in real-time?

For HR professionals, implementing continuous feedback is one of the most impactful changes you can make to your performance management strategy. This goes beyond just improving how you evaluate performance; it fundamentally changes workplace culture and employee performance.

In this article, we’ll explore:

• How continuous feedback improves employee performance.
• How implementing continuous feedback fosters a growth mindset.
• A practical framework for implementing a continuous feedback model in your organization.
• How leaders can build a culture based on ongoing feedback.

What is continuous performance feedback?

Continuous performance feedback is a fundamental shift away from how organizations typically approach employee development. Instead of infrequent, formal reviews performed annually or quarterly, continuous feedback creates an ongoing dialogue between managers and employees.

Traditional performance reviews were a better fit for an era when work was more standardized and change happened more slowly. In an economy dominated by knowledge work, where priorities shift rapidly and employees manage multiple complex responsibilities simultaneously, infrequent performance reviews don’t cut it:

• They create artificial evaluation periods that don’t align with real work cycles.
• They rely too much on a manager’s and an employee’s memory.
• They focus on past performance instead of opportunities for improvement.
• They generate more anxiety than psychological safety.
• They fail to capture the nuances of an employee’s contributions.

Continuous feedback makes performance conversations relevant, bases them in real data, and focuses on development rather than pointing out mistakes. But despite their clear advantages over traditional performance reviews, some tenacious misconceptions can create resistance in organizations looking to adopt them:

1. Continuous feedback means constant criticism. In reality, continuous feedback covers a balanced mix of recognition, coaching, and redirection.
2. Continuous feedback is micromanagement. Even though continuous feedback depends on regular check-ins, it isn’t micromanagement. That’s because micromanagement is caused by leaders being unable to properly delegate work or trust the quality of their team’s work. Continuous feedback is about giving guidance, not controlling work.
3. Continuous feedback requires too much time. While the initial investment to set up a new continuous feedback process is necessary, it saves teams time in the long run. It prevents potential performance issues that cause more problems down the line.

The benefits of continuous feedback

Implementing continuous feedback won’t just make individual employees feel better about their performance reviews in the moment. This process creates ripple effects throughout your organization, benefitting employees, managers, and the company as a whole. Here’s how.

Increased engagement and job satisfaction

When employees receive regular, meaningful feedback, they’re more engaged at work. Why?

• Clarity of expectations: Frequent communication eliminates ambiguity around what is and isn’t good performance.
• Feeling valued: Regular check-ins signal that their work matters.
• Sense of progress: Continuous feedback clearly shows an employee’s improvement, charting their growth over time.
• Alignment with purpose: Ongoing conversations connect daily work with broader goals.

37% of employees who left their job in 2024 did so because they weren’t engaged enough at work. That’s often caused by unclear job descriptions and a lack of feedback from direct leadership.

Faster skill development and professional growth

Traditional feedback cycles create long delays between behavior and feedback, which undermines an employee’s ability to learn and improve. Continuous feedback improves the rate of improvement for employees due to:

• Immediate course correction: The closer feedback follows action, the more effectively it shapes future behavior.
• Skill refinement: Employees improve incrementally through ongoing coaching instead of being expected to improve all at once.
• Tailored development: With more frequent feedback, managers can tailor guidance to an employee’s challenges over time.
• Application in context: Feedback that ties directly to an employee’s current work is more effective when it’s given in a timely manner.

Higher productivity through timely course correction

When feedback comes every few months—or worse, once a year—a small productivity problem can quickly grow into a more substantial issue. Continuous feedback allows for micro-adjustments that maintain alignment and efficiency by:

• Preventing resource waste: Projects can be redirected before they veer too far off track.
• Reducing extra work: Misunderstandings about deliverables can be clarified before too much work is completed.
• Maintaining momentum: Regular feedback can address roadblocks promptly while encouraging team members to keep improving.
• Calibrating priorities: Organizational needs change, and continuous performance feedback ensures employees can adapt.

Strengthened employee-manager relationships

The most transformative benefit of continuous performance feedback is the massive difference in the dynamic between managers and employees:

• Increased psychological safety: Regular, balanced feedback normalizes praise and development guidance, making manager-employee interactions more positive.
• Greater trust: Constant communication builds a foundational relationship between managers and employees that makes every aspect of their work easier.
• Enhanced collaboration: Ongoing dialogue creates partnerships rather than reinforcing traditional hierarchies.
• Reduced anxiety: Frequent conversations eliminate the stress that comes standard with infrequent, high-stakes performance reviews.

Case study: How WP Engine improved employee experience

The HR team at WP Engine was looking for a way to get away from traditional performance reviews and improve engagement throughout their organization. With 15Five’s automated check-in reminders, self-reviews, 1-on-1s, and digital high fives, they were able to:

• Get near-100% self-review completions.
• Achieve 65% ongoing check-in utilization.

Learn more about how WP Engine uses continuous performance feedback here.

Implementing a Continuous Performance Feedback Model in Your Organization

Transitioning from traditional performance reviews to a continuous feedback model requires deliberate cultural change. This framework gives HR professionals a practical roadmap to implement this effectively.

Establish clear expectations

Before you launch anything or make significant changes, you need a solid foundation:

1. Define your feedback philosophy: Much like your organization has a mission statement to guide it, your continuous performance feedback model needs a clear statement connecting it to your organization’s values and objectives.
2. Setting participation expectations: Clarify how feedback should occur, who initiates it, and how employees are expected to participate.
3. Creating feedback guidelines: What does solid, constructive feedback look like? What should managers and employees avoid?
4. Communicating the why: Help employees and managers alike understand how continuous performance feedback will benefit them and the organization at large.

Leverage technology to facilitate real-time feedback

At the core of continuous feedback are real interactions between managers and employees, building trust and reciprocity. But using the right performance management platform can build clear guardrails around this. A platform like 15Five Engage can:

• Centralize feedback in a single platform, allowing managers and employees alike to review growth opportunities.
• Create regular reminders, meaning 1-on-1s, regular check-ins, and self-reviews aren’t missed.
• Turn feedback into valuable data, meaning managers and other stakeholders can spot performance and engagement issues, allowing them to adjust their approach.
• Goal tracking that connects feedback to performance, AI-powered insights turn qualitative feedback into quantitative metrics, connecting goals with employee engagement.

Build a culture that values positive and constructive feedback

While the right platform can make the practical aspects of sharing feedback more effective, it’s far from all you need. Here’s how you build feedback into your culture:

1. Model it at the executive level: Few things are as powerful as seeing your CEO ask for constructive feedback and actually apply it.
2. Recognize feedback champions: By highlighting managers and employees who exemplify the feedback practices you want to see more of, you’ll see broader adoption across the board.
3. Share success stories: Show how continuous feedback leads to better performance with examples of employees who’ve seen this positive change.
4. Build feedback rituals: Incorporating opportunities for feedback into existing team meetings and workflows makes it easier to implement your continuous performance feedback process.

Train managers and employees on effective feedback practices

Knowing feedback matters isn’t enough. People need to know what makes feedback actually effective. Comprehensive training should include:

1. Manager coaching on feedback delivery: Managers have a significant part of responsibility in this model, and need training to give balanced, specific, and growth-oriented feedback.
2. Employee guidance on receiving feedback: Employees need to learn how to receive feedback without being defensive, so it can lead to improvement.
3. Practice sessions: Create a safe environment where both managers and employees can practice giving and receiving feedback.
4. Ongoing reinforcement: Refreshers on ongoing training, advanced techniques for high-performers, and frequent examples at the executive level can help accelerate the spread of effective feedback practices.

With this plan in place, you’ll start seeing the impact of continuous performance feedback throughout your organization.

Why continuous feedback is important for employee development

Continuous performance feedback isn’t just about the productivity and performance impacts you’ll see throughout your organization. You’ll see the most change in individual employee development. Understanding how continuous feedback is closely tied to employee development can help HR professionals make a case for this model.

Career development isn’t a steady, linear path. Few employees just stick with their role for decades and regularly climb the corporate ladder. Growth depends on skill expansion, getting the opportunity to work on different projects, collaborating across business functions, and deepening expertise in job-essential domains.

Continuous feedback affects all these aspects of career development by:

1. Increasing visibility of contributions: Regular check-ins give managers more opportunities to recognize, reinforce, and share an employee’s wins.
2. Identifying growth opportunities in real-time: Managers aware of an employer’s goals can connect them with relevant projects and learning experiences as they emerge.
3. Building development narratives: Ongoing conversations create a documented growth journey that supports promotion and advancement discussions.
4. Aligning development with organizational needs: Regular dialogue allows managers to fine-tune an individual employee’s growth plan so it’s always relevant to broader organizational goals.
5. Enhancing self-awareness: Self-perception is notoriously unreliable. Frequent check-ins with managers allow employees to avoid blind spots, illuminate their strengths, and calibrate their self-assessments.
6. Increasing accountability: A key element to growth for employees is the ability to be accountable for their actions, and knowing their manager will support them in these efforts. Continuous performance feedback helps managers set clear expectations, get visibility on an employee’s progress, and build a strong support mechanism for employees when they struggle.

This feedback model builds employees up to take the next step in their careers, knowing their managers are partners in growth rather than just a source of criticism. But a key advantage for organizations becomes apparent in situations where quality talent is scarce: increasing employee retention.

By showing your willingness to invest in an employee’s growth in a way that promotes psychological safety, you make professional development opportunities available to them while equipping them to grow into them. By charting a path for growth in your organization, you squash one of the top reasons employees have for leaving: feeling like they have no opportunities for advancement.

Keep feedback coming

Continuous performance feedback is a fundamental shift in how organizations develop talent and drive results, but it comes with clear benefits. It allows managers and employees to redefine the feedback experience, improve employee engagement, prioritize skill development over micromanagement, and build better relationships throughout your teams. By leveraging the right tools and training managers and employees, you can implement continuous performance feedback in a way that has a lasting impact.

Want to see how a robust performance management system can make this simpler? Check out 15Five here.

The post The Benefits of Continuous Performance Feedback appeared first on 15Five.

Tying compensation with performance can motivate employees, boost employee engagement, clearly communicate the value of each employee’s contribution, and help justify every pay increase. Better yet, making performance a larger part of determining an employee’s compensation can eliminate other, more biased factors, improving equity throughout your organization.

Simply making compensation dependent on performance isn’t enough. You need regular performance and compensation reviews to make this work. A performance management platform like 15Five turns performance data into insights you need to make informed compensation decisions and reminds you when compensation reviews are needed.

Employees need to know exactly what goes into compensation. Employers need to benchmark to align compensation with market data and across departments.

Want to learn more? See how 15Five makes compensation benchmarking and optimization easier.

Key takeaways:

• Tying compensation to performance is essential for employee retention and engagement.
• Compensation reviews have a clear role in driving transparency and pay equity.
• An effective compensation review is structured to create transparency and combat bias.
• Compensation benchmarking with accurate salary data streamlines compensation reviews.
• 15Five’s compensation management software empowers HR leaders to properly reward top performers.
• Linking performance and compensation requires fairness and clarity.

The importance of compensation reviews in today’s workplace

Compensation reviews are structured evaluations of employee pay against multiple factors, including individual performance, equity, market rates, and organizational budget constraints. Unlike traditional annual salary adjustments, modern compensation reviews integrate directly with continuous performance management, creating a robust feedback loop between contribution and reward.

Traditionally, salary reviews happened independently from performance discussions, creating a disconnect between employee contributions and compensation. This can lead to a decline in employee engagement as employees aren’t clear on how their day-to-day work impacts their compensation.

Today, effective organizations have reimagined this process by:

• Aligning compensation reviews with performance review cycles.
• Incorporating specific performance metrics into compensation decisions.
• Creating visibility into how an employee’s contributions translate to rewards.
• Implementing regular compensation conversations in development planning.

This approach isn’t just crucial for properly compensating employees for their work. It also impacts equity throughout your organization. Unstructured, subjective approaches to compensation have historically disadvantaged underrepresented groups. Regular, data-driven compensation reviews combat this by allowing organizations to analyze pay across demographic groups, removing subjective elements that contribute to bias, and establishing clear criteria for determining compensation adjustments.

Complete salary transparency might not be right for every organization, but it generally improves employee engagement and voluntary turnover. It also allows employees at every level of your hierarchy to have open, honest conversations about compensation, promoting progress and change.

The contributors who drive growth at your organization approach employment as a value exchange. They expect compensation to reflect how you value their skills, effort, and results. This means they appreciate data-backed explanations for compensation decisions and regular feedback on where they stand relative to expectations. Combined, these elements allow them to strive to reach the next milestone. Fail to meet these expectations and you’ll lose top talent to competitors who won’t.

Why linking performance with compensation matters

The fundamental concept behind linking performance with compensation is simple. Those who contribute the most to your organization should get the most rewards. Performance-based compensation creates a positive feedback loop where motivated employees achieve more, are rewarded consequently, and are motivated to keep growing.

By linking performance with compensation, organizations send a clear message about their values. They show that they reward merit over tenure, that results matter more than activity, and that continuous improvement matters. This all leads to greater innovation and high effort across teams.

Regarding compensation, few things can be as frustrating as an employee feeling like their contributions aren’t properly rewarded. Getting properly recognized can feel like an uphill battle, especially when it involves overcoming these challenges:

• Recency bias: Managers overvaluing recent achievements compared to current contributions.
• Halo effects: Allowing one positive trait to influence the overall evaluation of an employee.
• Similarity bias: In which similar people are rated more favorably.
• Inconsistency: Varying standards from manager to manager.

Linking performance directly with compensation goes a long way towards improving objectivity in compensation reviews, which can help mitigate these challenges. However, it’s important to balance objective metrics with contextual understanding to get a complete picture of an employee’s performance. This means:

• Considering both what was achieved and how it was done.
• Acknowledging factors outside an employee’s control and how they affect performance.
• Recognizing different types of contributions.
• Understanding how team dynamics influence individual results.

Making compensation reviews as objective and fair as possible can’t be done in a vacuum, and legacy tools are rarely enough. 15Five’s performance data integrations put performance review data at every manager’s fingertips, reducing bias and giving every employee a clearer understanding of what they need to do to reach compensation milestones.

Compensation benchmarking: Making pay decisions with confidence

Even with a clear understanding of an employee’s performance, HR professionals and managers need benchmarks to ground compensation decisions. Without this, organizations risk losing top talent or becoming unprofitable. With compensation benchmarking, companies compare internal pay rates with market data for similar roles, accounting for different industries and locations.

Compensation benchmarking evaluates total compensation packages, including base pay, bonuses, equity, and benefits. Additionally, HR professionals need to consider the differences in pay across geographic locations and the impact of remote work policies on compensation. Industry-specific compensation practices and trends need to be properly reviewed, as well as role-level compensation progression. This market intelligence transforms compensation discussions from subjective negotiations into data-informed decisions both parties can understand and accept.

While compensation benchmarking is already common, many organizations still rely on outdated benchmarking methods. These create significant disadvantages:

• Annual survey data quickly becomes obsolete in dynamic labor markets, especially for high-demand roles.
• Generic industry classifications don’t capture role-specific nuances, especially for positions that combine multiple skill sets.
• Spreadsheet-based compensation management creates version control issues, security problems, and makes it difficult to maintain current data across the organization.
• Limited sample sizes in traditional surveys may not provide reliable data for specialized roles or emerging positions.

15Five’s performance management software allows organizations to surpass these challenges by giving them access to real-time benchmarking data from over 5,000 companies. This places the essential information they need for compensation benchmarking in the same platform they use for other performance management initiatives.

Streamlining the compensation review process with 15Five

Even organizations with clear compensation philosophies and robust market data often struggle with properly tying compensation to performance. The administrative complexity of compensation reviews can overwhelm HR teams and managers, leading to delays, inconsistencies, and frustration. 15Five transforms this traditionally cumbersome process into a streamlined, data-driven workflow.

Effective compensation reviews don’t start with talking about money. They begin with a thorough understanding of performance. 15Five allows you to create this foundation by:

• Automatically aggregating performance data from continuous feedback, check-ins, and formal reviews.
• Presenting performance trends over time rather than ad-hoc assessments.
• Highlighting specific achievements and development areas relevant to compensation decisions.
• Connecting individual performance to team and organizational outcomes.

By centralizing performance data from throughout your organization, 15Five eliminates the disconnect between performance management and compensation processes. From there, 15Five gives managers detailed calibration tools that ensure fairness throughout teams and departments. This facilitates structured discussions among leadership to align on performance standards, surfaces potential bias patterns, and provides historical context on past compensation decisions.

Additionally, 15Five automates the manual processes involved in compensation review, from keeping stakeholders in the loop to gathering necessary documentation.

15Five’s performance management platform makes it easier for organizations to define a fair compensation range for every team, role, and seniority level. With tools to create and manage job architecture, integrate benchmark data, visualize current compensation, and more, 15Five is the best way to build a better compensation framework based on performance.

Driving retention and engagement with fair, data-driven pay

Linking compensation with performance creates an environment where top talent feels valued, understood, and motivated to stay with you for the long run. Employee engagement ties directly to compensation, and by making performance an essential element of how employees are rewarded, you give them a framework to understand what they need to do to shine.

Top performers have options. They need to know their contributions are recognized and valued, and that their compensation accurately reflects their impact. They need a clear growth trajectory that feels achievable and clear signs that the organization is committed to rewarding them when they excel. In practice, this means creating a visible difference between compensation for top performers and for the rest of your organization. Part of that means having clear, transparent reviews with employees so they know exactly what they’re shooting for.

Curious what that looks like in practice? Here’s a scenario showing how compensation reviews happen with a high-performing marketing manager named Sarah:

1. Throughout the performance cycle, Sarah receives regular feedback via 15Five check-ins about her contributions to key projects and development areas.
2. During the formal review, her manager documents specific achievements, like exceeding campaign performance metrics by 32%, successfully launching new product lines, and mentoring two junior team members.
3. In a calibration session, leadership confirms Sarah’s performance rating, placing her in the top 10% of contributors at her level.
4. Using 15Five’s compensation tools, HR provides Sarah’s manager with:
   • Current market data for similar roles.
   • Historical context about Sarah’s compensation trajectory.
   • Pay equity analysis to ensure the recommendation is fair.
5. In the compensation discussion, Sarah’s manager clearly explains:
   • The specific performance factors that led to her increase.
   • How her new compensation compares to market rates.
   • The connection between her future performance and compensation growth.
   • Additional rewards beyond base compensation, like bonuses and equity.

This transparent, data-driven approach leaves Sarah feeling valued. The rewards for her continued high performance are clear, increasing the likelihood that she’ll remain engaged and committed to the organization.

Compensate appropriately with performance management

Regular compensation reviews allow organizations to ensure their overall compensation packages are fair when compared to market data and perfectly matched to each employee’s performance. For this framework to succeed, reviews must be as objective as possible, based on performance data, and completely transparent. HR leaders should examine their current compensation review process, find opportunities to improve, and make compensation fairer.

Want to see how 15Five can make this happen for your organization? Check out our compensation tools here.

The post Tying Performance To Pay Using 15Five’s Compensation Review Tools appeared first on 15Five.

Anthony, a recognized author and speaker on AI in HR, brings a wealth of experience at the intersection of technology and human capital. His background as a former CPO and CHRO – combined with his understanding of emerging technologies – positions him well to champion the evolving 15Five platform and, more broadly, the value of AI for HR leaders. 

“Anthony’s mix of HR leadership and tech expertise makes him a hugely valuable addition to the 15Five leadership team,” said Jim Morrisroe, CEO. “With the advances we have made in AI and our data intelligence, Anthony will play a critical role in shaping our platform and product marketing strategy. His vision for the future of performance management and manager effectiveness aligns perfectly with our focus on improving employee engagement, performance and retention in partnership with HR leaders.”

Anthony’s hire comes on the heels of our May launch of Kona by 15Five, the AI-powered manager effectiveness coach. The launch, following our January acquisition of Kona, marks a big leap forward in 15Five’s AI capabilities. And the addition of Anthony further bolsters our team of AI leaders, which includes Kona co-founders Yen Tan and Sid Pandiya.

For over two decades, Anthony has been committed to exploring the impact of technology on work, culture, and leadership. As an author, speaker and people leader, he has consistently advocated for a human-centric approach to tech advancement, a philosophy that resonates with 15Five’s core values.

Please join us in welcoming Anthony to the team!

The post 15Five Adds AI in HR Visionary Anthony Onesto to Leadership Team  appeared first on 15Five.

That’s because an investment in human resources has significant impacts on your workforce, improving results across your business. Employee engagement is improved, leading to a stronger talent pool you can entrust with complex projects or even promote to leadership. Productivity increases, since you’re giving teams the tools and models they need to do better work in less time. Finally, your organization’s performance as a whole skyrockets as teams collaborate more cohesively.

Modern HR departments aren’t just for resolving disputes between employees or creating policies to help everyone work more effectively. They’re strategic allies in every organization’s drive for growth and an essential asset for staying competitive.

If you’re considering where you should invest to get the best productivity bang for your buck, you’re in the right place.

Key takeaways

• A strategic investment in human resources leads to higher employee retention, stronger succession planning, and a boost in shareholder value.
• Human resources is a critical function for optimizing your workforce.
• Investments in HR lead to savings in recruitment costs and a stronger bottom line.
• Leveraging HR technology and upskilling HR professionals allows your HR function to scale with your organization.

Why should companies increase strategic investment in human resources?

An organization’s level of investment in HR should rise to match the shift in HR’s priorities. No longer a business function solely for managing hiring, resolving disputes, and enforcing policy compliance, HR is a strategic partner and a key driver of business growth. Your HR team is responsible for upskilling talent throughout your organization, improving employee retention, and maximizing the value of your talent pool. They’re the department taking care of one of your organization’s greatest assets. Its people.

Investing in your HR department means investing directly in your workforce. That’s because HR is responsible for brainstorming, implementing, and optimizing initiatives that contribute to acquiring the best talent and keeping them on for longer. And when you consider that replacing an employee can cost up to twice as much as their salary, employee retention becomes an essential priority.

HR also has an important role to play in company culture. They help leadership craft that culture, establish its values, and reinforce it throughout the organization. HR can identify opportunities for promoting company culture, spot situations where it might be in trouble, and ways to rework that culture as your organization grows.

At the end of the day, investing in HR means investing in your organization’s future. According to data from the Academy to Innovate HR, HR represents a larger proportion of total headcount at successful companies than other organizations, 1.9% and 1.3% respectively. That significant additional investment (a 46% difference) is a signal of success.

Why is HR important?

HR is no less than the central nervous system of your organization’s operations. While many leaders still see their HR department as mostly responsible for maintaining compliance with company policy and managing paperwork, forward-thinking organizations know HR has a much larger role to play.

For an example of this mindset in action, look no further than Zappos, where former CEO Tony Hsieh made company culture a key priority when he built up to a billion-dollar business. The HR team at Zappos wasn’t relegated to processing paperwork and resolving issues between employees. They were an essential part of designing and sustaining the company’s customer-first culture. HR’s role as a strategic partner didn’t just create a better place to work, it translated directly to customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and financial performance.

While HR still has a heavy hand in recruiting—even at companies like Zappos—they’re also involved in every aspect of the employee experience:

• Talent optimization: Making the most of your current talent pool by aligning their skills and training with business objectives.
• Performance management: Including transitioning from outdated methods like annual reviews to continuous feedback systems.
• Cultural architecture: Building and designing norms for your workplace that support each employee in driving innovation and executing on essential tasks.
• Change navigation: If employees show resistance to organizational change, HR is usually in charge of addressing their concerns.

The data is clear. Investing in strong HR practices can boost shareholder value by up to 26%, according to consultancy Watson Wyatt. Where competitors might focus narrowly on product features and pricing to stay ahead, organizations with strategic HR functions can build an adaptable, engaged workforce that executes on essential initiatives faster, innovates consistently, and weather market disruptions more effectively.

When was the last time your HR team was invited to the strategic planning table from day one? Not as an afterthought, but as key players in executing on strategy? HR professionals reading this already know their value; they just need to prove it.

The benefits of continued investment in human resources

Whether your organization survives the ups and downs of the market or consistently thrives comes down to how much it invests in its people functions. But while that causal link is clear to HR professionals, it isn’t always easy to communicate to leadership. Here are the tangible and intangible returns that make HR investment an imperative.

Improved employee retention and satisfaction

Top talent is one of your organization’s most valuable assets, making employee retention a priority. When your organization invests in strengthening its HR function, you’ll see measurable improvements in your ability to keep key talent.

When HR teams are properly funded, their retention strategies have a massive impact:

• Voluntary turnover rates can decrease significantly as HR remains on top of employee issues.
• By investing in widespread retention initiatives, organizations can spend less of their hiring budget on replacement.
• As HR teams increase employee engagement, customers feel the impact.
• A growing base of institutional knowledge.
• Long-term, stable client relationships.
• Projects that stay on track without disruption.

Stronger leadership development and succession planning

Replacing a leader is one of the most difficult and expensive things an organization can do. But with proper investments in strategic HR, you can plan proactively for this instead of rushing to hire reactively. With these investments, you’ll be able to:

• Create leadership pipelines that identify suitable talent early.
• Implement upskilling programs that give you a steady supply of new leaders
• Reducing the costs associated with searching for executives externally.
• Ensuring business continuity during leadership transitions.

A key leader’s departure can completely derail important projects and cause hiccups in your business strategy. But with strong investments in HR, you can source the leaders you need without costly recruiting.

Increased operational efficiency through HR technology

To become strategic partners in your organization, HR professionals need the right technology. Investing in this technology has a ripple effect throughout your workforce:

• Automating routine processes allows HR to focus on strategic initiatives.
• Self-service platforms reduce HR’s administrative burden while improving employee experience for processes like performance reviews and engagement surveys.
• Platforms that provide data-driven insights empower HR teams to implement proactive workforce planning rather than reactive staffing.
• Integrating performance management systems with business objectives maintains alignment.

HR technology doesn’t just save your teams time, it completely transforms how they work. It unlocks opportunities you might never have seen when you were still working with spreadsheets.

Better alignment between HR and overall business strategy

Building a relationship requires investment, and that’s just as true when making HR a strategic partner. But the end result, perfect alignment between HR and other business functions, is essential to making the most of your talent. Through these investments, you’ll get:

• HR leaders with a better understanding of the organization’s strategy who can design talent strategies that support growth.
• Performance management systems with the data and the ability to incentivize behaviors that drive strategic priorities.
• Proactive workforce planning aligned with business goals becomes the norm.
• Employee experience initiatives reinforce brand promises to customers.

This isn’t the kind of alignment you can just stumble into. It requires consistent, intentional investment in HR, represented by involving HR in strategic conversations and giving them the technology they need.

What is the value of HR: Understanding HR ROI

HR teams often face a paradox. While executives readily acknowledge that people are the organization’s greatest asset, they deeply scrutinize HR budgets. The solution? Giving HR teams the ability to clearly articulate the return on investment for their initiatives. By translating their objectives into clear, measurable metrics, HR teams can demonstrate the value of their work in a way any leader can understand.

The first step? Turning the seemingly unquantifiable—like alignment and employee satisfaction—into clear metrics. Here are just a few of these key indicators:

• Revenue per employee: This shows how effective your workforce is as generating value for the organization.
• Human capital ROI: How much is the organization generating in relation to the benefits and compensation provided?
• Quality of hire: The performance ratings of new hires when they hit the 90-day, six month, and one year marks.
• Training effectiveness: Quantifying skill improvements throughout your workforce.
• Engagement-to-profit correlation: Tracking the relationship between engagement scores and business unit performance.

With metrics like these in hand, HR teams can clearly calculate the ROI of their initiatives across two primary vectors: direct cost reduction and value creation. HR teams help an organization reduce its costs by:

• Reducing turnover costs with effective retention strategies that reduce voluntary turnover.
• Making recruitment more efficient by reducing the time and money it takes to fill a vacancy.
• Reducing absenteeism throughout the organization by making it a better place to work.

HR teams can also demonstrate a clear impact on value creation in their organization through:

• Enhancing productivity with performance management systems.
• Accelerating innovation by reinforcing an inclusive culture with psychological safety.
• Establishing a direct link between increased employee engagement and customer satisfaction.

Key to demonstrating value through quantifiable factors is the ability to produce, process, and analyze HR data. Performance management tools like 15Five turn everything from employee engagement to performance into data you can turn into actionable insights without being a data analyst yourself.

What about intangible factors?

Not all HR impacts can be captured in metrics. But by using the right language when describing the results of their initiatives, HR professionals can still demonstrate their value even when numbers won’t do. Some examples of these intangible benefits include:

• Organizational resilience: A more engaged workforce is more flexible and more likely to innovate when faced with changing market conditions.
• Employer brand equity: Your organization’s reputation as a great place to work can make hiring more efficient, secure long-term relationships with clients, and more.
• Cultural alignment: When employees are more aligned with your company culture, they’re more likely to gravitate towards decisions that align with your broader objectives, improving efficiency.
• Leadership readiness: Many HR initiatives center around upskilling employees at all levels, getting them ready to take over if a leadership position becomes vacant.

How to grow human resources teams in your organization

Your people needs will become more complex as your organization grows. Whether you’re scaling rapidly, navigating a transformation, or simply maturing as a business, basic HR administration eventually becomes inefficient and inadequate. Here are some factors that might signal your need to expand your HR function:

• An imbalanced employee-to-HR ratio: Exact benchmarks might vary by industry, but service quality and strategic capability decline when your ratio exceeds 100:1.
• Increasing compliance complexity: Expanding into new markets or growing your headcount can both trigger the need to comply with increased regulations.
• Leadership bandwidth: When existing HR leaders spend more time on administrative tasks than strategic initiatives, you’ll know they need support.
• Business transformation: Mergers, rapid growth, and strategic pivots can all stretch your HR team’s capabilities to the limit.

How to scale HR in alignment with business growth

Growing your HR function isn’t as simple as adding more HR professionals. You need to consider their specialization and align this with your organization’s needs. Examples of these specializations include talent acquisition, learning and development, and employee relations.

Additionally, leaders need to properly prioritize growth in HR functions according to their broader business objectives. For example, a tech company in a period of high growth will want to hire HR professionals who specialize in hiring and onboarding. This is known as strategic sequencing.

Using the right technology is also an important part of scaling; you can only get so much out of your headcount without the right tools. An organization with an army of HR professionals handing out and reviewing performance reviews will be quickly outperformed by a team of just a few professionals who are leveraging the right tools.

Finally, upskilling is just as important in HR as it is in other functions. HR professionals need to constantly develop their skills to meet their organization’s evolving needs and reduce the need for hiring externally.

Leaders have a clear role in positioning HR as a strategic partner rather than a transactional function, and involving them in business planning as early as possible is a key part of this. By doing so, they’ll open opportunities for investment that contribute to the organization’s growth and overall stability.

HR investments bring clear ROI

Investing in HR ensures that they remain a key strategic partner in optimizing your talent pool, streamlining hiring, and growing your organization’s bottom line. HR professionals have a direct impact on reducing an organization’s costs and generating value across its workforce, leading to more resilience, greater workforce satisfaction, and long-term profitability.

The post A Case for Increasing Your Investment in Human Resources appeared first on 15Five.

That’s the intersection of predictive analytics and employee engagement: using current information to identify future trends.

Predictive analytics is used in various industries, like HR, hospitality, finance, and military logistics. It consists of reviewing existing data to craft models that help predict future trends with mathematical formulas. This means you can uncover cause-and-effect relationships between present variables and future outcomes, leading to better decision-making.

Employee engagement defines your workforce’s dedication to the company’s mission, how they feel about their job, and their belief that their work contributes to a broader goal. When employee engagement is low, organizations see an increase in absenteeism, more turnover, and lower profits. High employee engagement leads to more productive teams, more creativity throughout the company, and more bang for your HR buck.

Keeping employee engagement high is a complex task. You have to see to each employee’s emotional needs, ensure they have a balanced workload, maintain their psychological safety, and more. There are hundreds of variables at work, and predictive analytics can help you identify which you should care about most and when you should care about them.

15Five’s Predictive Impact Model is just one way you can leverage AI to take on this challenge more efficiently, even if you’re not a data scientist by trade.

Key takeaways

• AI-powered predictive analytics transforms employee engagement strategies.
• Predictive analytics gives HR teams the tools to directly improve morale and employee retention.
• 15Five’s Predictive Impact Model puts AI-powered predictive analytics at your fingertips.
• AI-driven engagement models require careful implementation.
• The impact of predictive analytics can be measured with metrics like turnover, engagement score, and business performance.

Understanding predictive analytics for employee engagement

Predictive analytics requires significant statistical and mathematical know-how if done manually. You need to properly identify and calculate the necessary variables, apply models like linear regressions, and verify the output to avoid potential mistakes. AI-powered predictive analytics eliminates the need for that knowledge, giving you access to an AI data analyst that takes on the heavy lifting. That gives you breathing room to focus on areas where human judgment is actually needed, finding the important variables for your analysis, and using predictive models in your employee engagement initiatives.

Employee engagement can involve hundreds of variables, but its impacts on your organization are very real. Increases in turnover, dips in employee morale, and lower productivity are all examples of how low employee engagement can affect your teams. Predictive analytics gives HR teams the tools to use current data to predict these trends and begin drafting strategies to address them. For example, an HR team might use predictive analytics to estimate how a new hybrid work policy might affect turnover and absenteeism, allowing them to make a plan to mitigate these impacts.

AI-powered predictive analytics lead to real-time, data-driven insights, which are miles ahead of the data HR teams typically get from traditional engagement surveys. Imagine having a consistent stream of employee engagement data at your fingertips and knowing how this data might change in the future, all from a single dashboard. How much more could your teams achieve?

Benefits of AI-powered predictive analytics in employee engagement

For some organizations, using predictive analytics without AI would be essentially impossible, since it requires a significant level of technical skill. That being said, AI-powered predictive analytics comes with significant benefits for all organizations.

Proactive decision-making

Too many HR teams are reactive, dealing with employee engagement issues as they happen instead of trying to plan ahead. This leaves HR professionals on the back foot, needing to adapt to the situation as it happens. AI-powered predictive analytics gives HR a model for anticipating employee engagement trends in their organization without reviewing data manually. With these models, HR teams can regularly look through potential trends and make plans for addressing them.

Personalized engagement strategies

When you leverage AI for predictive data analytics, you significantly reduce the time it takes for your teams to produce models robust enough to build employment engagement strategies. Less time spent building models and crunching data leaves more time for building strategies, allowing you to tailor them to specific scenarios or even personalize them for individual teams.

Increased retention rates

Your organization’s retention rate is one of its most important employee engagement metrics. When replacing a former employee can cost as much as 150% of their annual salary for technical roles and 213% for C-Suite positions, you’ll want to invest in keeping them around. AI-powered predictive analytics can identify potential dips in employee retention before they happen, allowing your HR team to kickstart initiatives for preventing them.

Data-driven performance insights

Data-driven HR teams already have a better understanding of the struggles their workforce faces, which employees are their top performers, and what initiatives drive the best results. By adding predictive analytics to their toolkit, these teams can get that understanding sooner, getting insight into performance organization-wide that they can use to tailor their strategy.

How 15Five’s Predictive Impact Model enhances employee engagement

15Five’s Predictive Impact Model is the best way to put AI-powered predictive analytics at your HR team’s fingertips. Being part of 15Five’s Engage product, it allows you to get more out of every engagement survey, identifying trends and determining the impact they’ll have on employee engagement throughout your organization. 15Five’s Predictive Impact Model essentially operates in two stages:

• Prediction: Answers from your organization’s employee engagement surveys are compared to a database of over 600,000 surveys and analyzed to determine their impact on overall employee engagement.
• Explanation: 15Five turns each impactful statement into a Predictive Impact Score, which quantifies the improvement in employee engagement if the responses to that statement are improved. Leaders can then determine which areas of employee engagement they should focus on.

Think of 15Five’s Predictive Impact Model as your own private AI model for turning massive amounts of employee engagement data into quantifiable metrics that guide your efforts. Curious how that translates into real-world impacts? Here’s what 15Five customers are getting out of AI-powered engagement surveys:

• 35% of managers at Core Medical Group saw improved employee engagement, performance, and intent to stay throughout their teams.
• Employee turnover decreased by 88% at TrustRadius.
• Kreg Tool saw employee turnover decrease by over 20% and employee engagement skyrocket.

Want to learn more about 15Five’s Predictive Impact Model? Check out this guide, or get an overview of 15Five Engage here.

Implementing AI-driven analytics in your engagement strategy

Convinced AI-driven predictive analytics can impact your team? Here’s a step-by-step guide to implementing this in your organization.

Step 1: Find the right tool

If you’re not already using some kind of HR analytics or performance management platform, you’ll want to find the right one for your organization. Look for a tool that’s robust enough to support your current needs and scale with you as you grow. Evaluate its AI capabilities to determine if it can produce the insights your team needs.

Step 2: Implement employee engagement surveys and feedback channels

Before you can implement predictive analytics, you need data. The tool you select should allow you to send regular employee engagement surveys automatically and centralize replies for analysis. You just need to determine the cadence at which you want to send these surveys.

Step 3: Regularly review engagement data

Some organizations review employee engagement data once a year, while others do it once a quarter. If you want to get the most out of predictive analytics, you should review engagement data regularly to stay aware of evolving trends.

Step 4: Plan employee engagement improvement strategies

Use the employment engagement data your tools collect to inform your strategy. Keep that data available during brainstorming sessions, tie potential initiatives to key metrics, and plan how you’ll review each initiative’s impact.

Step 5: Monitor and improve employee engagement impacts

Regularly review the impacts of employee engagement initiatives on the metrics you track through predictive analytics. If you notice negative impacts on these metrics, make changes to your initiatives as needed. This allows you to consistently improve your employee engagement strategy over time.

Measuring success: Key metrics for AI-driven employee engagement

AI-powered predictive analytics tools will usually give you a crash course in the metrics you need to track employee engagement, but here’s a rundown of the most important ones:

• Engagement score trends: Engagement surveys can be boiled down to a single score that tells you how engaged individual employees are. Predictive analytics turns this data into a broader overview of engagement throughout your organization. You can track this over time to see how your strategy improves employee engagement.
• Turnover prediction vs. actual retention rates: Predictive analytics can turn employee engagement data into a prediction of employee turnover, raising a flag when you need to make reducing turnover a priority. But with these trends in hand, you’ll be able to compare predicted turnover with actual turnover rates, which is essential for determining the effectiveness of your strategy.
• Employee feedback analysis: AI-powered predictive analytics doesn’t just allow you to turn quantitative data into insights. It can also turn qualitative survey responses into data through sentiment analysis. Through this technology, AI tools analyze survey responses to gauge the overall mood and perspective of the writer, allowing you to get a broad view of multiple responses without having to read them all.
• Business performance impact: Predictive analytics gives you the data you need to tie employee engagement directly to business goals. This allows you to see how your strategies help improve your bottom line.

See the future with AI

Predictive analytics allows you to turn today’s data into tomorrow’s predictions. You get a better picture of employee engagement throughout the organization and can build models that tell you what engagement challenges you might run into, allowing you to prepare. The data analysis needed to make this happen is extensive, and doing it manually requires significant technical skill. That’s why AI-driven predictive analytics are growing more popular, and you’ll find this feature in HR platforms more and more.

15Five’s Predictive Impact Model turns employee engagement surveys and other data into actionable insights and models HR professionals can use to increase engagement throughout their organization.

Want to see what it can do? Check out our documentation here.

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An AI-powered coach for managers, Kona joins virtual meetings and provides personalized, privacy-conscious coaching and enablement in the flow of work.

Check out Kona by 15Five

Kona uses data from 15Five such as performance reviews and engagement surveys alongside the context it builds over time to help people managers continuously level up across a wide range of critical skillsets – from leading more effective meetings to navigating difficult performance conversations. Kona automatically measures changes in manager behavior so HR leaders can see what’s working and what needs rethought in an ongoing way.

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 Report, global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, with managers experiencing the largest drop. Gallup has previously highlighted how engagement of managers strongly correlates with that of their teams, with a 70% variance in team engagement being attributed to managers. This underscores the role managers play in fostering a positive work environment, promoting growth, and maximizing performance.

“HR leaders know that managers are the critical lynchpin for maximum employee performance, engagement and retention,” said Jim Morrisroe, 15Five’s CEO. “Failing to equip them with personalized enablement tools and training minimizes the role they play in increasing performance, engagement, and retention on their teams to drive organizational success. Kona enables organizations to deploy personalized manager enablement at scale, helping HR teams further unlock the impact of manager effectiveness, and early adopters have already seen meaningful results in this regard.”

“As a growing company, we’re promoting rockstar individual contributors into management roles, but we can’t scale traditional coaching fast enough,” said Jenn Sobocinski, Senior Director of People and Culture at ReUp Education, an early adopter of Kona. “Kona is helping us support those new managers in real time, with feedback that helps them adjust and grow immediately. It’s also changed how I run my own meetings. This kind of continuous, in-the-flow coaching is exactly what fast-growing companies need.”

“We’ve heard CHROs and CEOs clearly: they need managers to be the drivers of business success,” said Sid Pandiya, 15Five’s General Manager of Manager Products and former CEO of Kona. “But being a manager is more complicated than ever before. Instead of one-size-fits-all solutions that HR hopes will work, 15Five’s manager products are personalized based on data such as performance reviews, engagement surveys, and manager effectiveness measurements, so everyone can focus on what matters most. Even in the early days of building Kona by 15Five, we’ve seen how personalization powered by data, combined with continuous measurement, enables HR to see where efforts are working and where they need to double down.”

15Five helps HR teams drive real change at scale with easy-to-use performance reviews and surveys, including engagement, eNPS, manager effectiveness, and onboarding, actionable insights about where to focus and why, and manager products that address hot spots to drive impact.

Learn more about Kona by 15Five and how 15Five helps HR leaders, managers, and organizations drive business results.

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