General administration information

Small Improvements is a simple system for the end-user. But there are many options to help the HR Administrator fine-tune the system according to their company's needs. The best way to learn is to set up a trial account and go exploring through the features.

For big picture items, this document could prove to be a valuable resource to reference.

Walkthrough of all features

The best way to learn about Small Improvements is to view our recorded webinar for the big picture. The webinar explains how to create cycles and how the application feels in general.

Once you understand the big picture, below are some important setup options to consider.

Feature configuration

There are four main modules in Small Improvements: Performance reviews, 360° feedback, 1:1 Meetings, Objectives (goals), Praise, and Messages.

You will find all the features explained in their dedicated section of this documentation:

What's useful to consider is: You don't need to launch all features at the same time. Since HR Admins have the ability to enable and disable any of these, it is not uncommon for our customers to start with a pair of features, enabling more when they are ready for their team to consider the next piece of the performance feedback process.

User management

Small Improvements user management is pretty easy to work with. Our roles system is straightforward, many permissions are implicitly determined via the reporting structure ("she's my boss so she can see my review, while my peers can't"). And you can set up users via Excel file upload, integrating with BambooHR, or auto syncing from a hosted file.

Still, do take your time to learn about how user management works – especially when communicating admin roles to fellow HR colleagues. The majority of user management is covered here, with links to detail pages embedded.

Using a sandbox to test

You are not restricted to one single Small Improvements deployment. You can easily have your official company site, and a totally separate sandbox system to try out new things. This may not be required during the initial evaluation, but later on, when your entire company is using Small Improvements, it can be helpful if you want to experiment with setting or new features.

Simply log out of your account, then register a new company account but this time with your personal email address.

Deleting content

If you've been exploring the system, but want a clean slate, you can delete all content from the system in one sweep. Since it's a potentially dangerous thing to do, we hid the option in the "Advanced Settings" tab of the Company Overview page, and you will need to get in touch with us to retrieve the "secret deletion password".

Contact our support team for more information, as deleted content can never be recovered.

Merging or deleting accounts

Sometimes your company may have registered different accounts for different departments. We provide a service to merge accounts or completely delete content from the Small Improvements servers to help you consolidate your data.

Please get in touch with us to discuss this further.

Getting people to use the system

Once accounts have been created, you want staff to log in and start working on goals and sharing feedback. You can send individual employees the password mail from the user directory. Or you can navigate to the Admin button in the upper right hand corner of your User Directory, where you'll find bulk notification options.

This sends a mail to everyone, telling them how to set their password and where to log in. You may preview the email, possibly making some adjustments. Here is a walkthrough on how to edit email notification templates.

Company settings

Most of the global company settings are pretty straightforward, and well-documented on the administration page.

But in addition, each feature can be customized independently, so there are plenty of settings for performance reviews, 360 feedback, and objectives too. See the big overview page here to get a feeling for how flexible Small Improvements is!

About daily digest emails

We categorize everything that happens inside Small Improvements by relevancy. For simplicity's sake there are only three levels: Low, Medium, and High priority. This is seen from the perspective of a regular employee. A regular employee will care about messages exchanged, or feedback requested. A regular employee will not care about new staff imported, admin permissions assigned, etc.

These are still important, but we consider them to be medium priority. And then there's the day-to-day stuff, like people invited to review other people, performance reviews created or completed, and so on. We consider them low priority. On the homepage and user-overviews, all activity is displayed.
By default, normal staff only see high priority items in their emails, e.g. messages exchanged. Anyone can also decide to see medium or low priority- The "switch" being located by drilling into their settings section of their user profile menu.

Admins however will by default see everything in their daily digest. Admins can decide to disable these emails for themselves within the settings section for their employee profile, here.

Less is more

By default, most options are enabled when you start evaluating Small Improvements. After all, we want you, the software evaluator, to learn about all our powerful features. There are a few advanced settings you might wonder about if you have any questions, please contact us.

Once you roll Small Improvements out to staff however, you may want to disable features you don't intend to use right away. This makes the experience a bit easier on your staff. If you want to start with 360s and Objectives, consider disabling the performance review module, then re-enable it once you kick off reviews after 3 or 6 months.