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15Five + Emplify
Culture
4 Min Read

15Five Acquires Emplify and Relaunches Human-Centered Platform

David Hassell, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of 15Five

I’m thrilled to share the news that 15Five has acquired Employee Engagement Measurement company, Emplify, and to reveal the new 15Five: The only human-centered performance management platform that combines software, education, and community to help create effective managers, highly engaged employees, and top-performing organizations. This is a significant milestone in our nearly 10-year journey to accelerate a world of work where true, sustainable success in business can be achieved by supporting people in thriving, rather than at their expense.

15Five is based on the 5-15, a simple, concise report with profound impact. Every employee would spend 15 minutes a week writing a report that takes their manager no more than 5 minutes to read. We began our journey by adapting this simple weekly “check-in” process into a software platform, focused on improving the manager/employee relationship. We believed that this was the locus for driving positive change in organizations around engagement, performance, and culture. While over the years our platform has expanded into a suite of products that help today’s HR leaders drive business success through thriving employees, our core belief that the manager/employee relationship is at the root of that success remains the same.

We met the Emplify team over two years ago and were amazed at how aligned our mission, vision, values, and hopes and dreams for the world were. After discovering that we had both a shared vision and focus around improving manager effectiveness, we realized that our products, services, and companies were highly complimentary, and that together we could create far more meaningful outcomes for our customers than each of us could on our own.

Looking to the future, we believe that the strategic HR business partner is the person with the greatest potential to impact and enable the effectiveness of every manager across their entire organization, thus driving people-powered business outcomes. This milestone event in the histories of both Emplify and 15Five serves to support the holistic HR strategies of our current and future customers via a complete performance management solution that now includes the most innovative engagement product available.

To quote my good friend and new colleague, Santiago Jaramillo, Emplify’s CEO and co-founder, “Organizations that understand that business success depends on their people are searching for a comprehensive employee performance and engagement platform. Our mission at Emplify was to help all people achieve their true potential at work, which matches perfectly with 15Five’s: to create highly engaged, high-performing organizations by helping people become their best selves.” Santi and I both are extremely proud to now be one team that’s empowering organizations to succeed by supporting their people.

What makes this news most meaningful to me, is the impact it has on our customers. Kira Childers, Manager of Talent Development at Ontario System shared, “As a longtime customer of Emplify and a more recent customer of 15Five, we are thrilled to see two platforms that have brought our company such value join together to change the landscape of performance management and engagement. Thanks to 15Five and Emplify, our leadership has gained significant and actionable insight into our performance as an organization as well as visibility into what we can do to positively impact engagement and create an environment in which our employees can thrive and do their best work.”

As we move forward into our next decade in business, we will never stop asking the questions, “how can we partner with HR leaders to develop and grow the best managers in the world?” and “how can we further unlock the potential of each and every employee?”  We firmly believe that when companies are able to do those two things, success is inevitable, for everyone involved. I welcome you to join us on this journey, and take a tour of the complete human-centered performance management platform 15Five has become.