15Five Wins 2025 Lighthouse Research & Advisory HR Tech Award for Best Midsize Business-Focused Solution for the Third Consecutive Year 

For the third year in a row, 15Five has been named a winner of Lighthouse Research and Advisory’s HR Tech Awards in the Talent Management category as a Best Midsize Business-Focused Solution. 

Now in its sixth year, the HR Tech Awards program helps HR leaders and technology buyers identify solutions that drive real results. Each submission is rigorously evaluated by an independent panel of practitioners, consultants, and educators to ensure it reflects measurable impact and true innovation. 

15Five’s recognition this year highlights the significant strides we’ve made since being acknowledged last year as the Best Midsize Business-Focused HR Tech Solution, namely: 

• Acquiring Kona, the AI-powered assistant and coach for remote managers. Kona joins virtual meetings in platforms such as Zoom or Google Meet, providing tailored, privacy-conscious coaching and enablement to remote managers in the flow of work. Kona uses 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.

• Launching the 15Five Predictive Impact Model, which layers machine learning atop the company’s proprietary employee engagement dataset spanning over 6 years, 30 million responses, and 600,000 surveys across thousands of organizations. The resulting predictions provide a clear representation of how changes in specific statements from employee engagement surveys can improve engagement, giving HR teams extremely specific, actionable areas to improve. 

• Debuting our latest platform evolution, including an upgraded HR Outcomes Dashboard that better empowers HR leaders to easily explore their data and develop strategic action plans. 

Over 3,000 HR teams and their companies trust 15Five to help increase employee engagement, performance, and retention. And for good reason. 

Organizations are asking for more than ever from HR. In fact, 83% of HR leaders say they’re expected to deliver more business impact than three years ago. But more of the same isn’t working. Only 2% of HR leaders believe conventional performance management delivers business impact. 

Traditional performance management software falls short in a number of ways. It fails to help HR deliver the strategic partnership the business is asking for (and that HR can – and should – be poised to deliver). It creates more administrative burden, fails to turn data into useful insights, falls short in coordinating and tracking action, and doesn’t get managers on board. 

15Five changes that, serving as HR’s strategic command center, helping HR and people leaders go beyond just measuring performance, engagement, and retention, to actively increasing it. We build products to help customers accurately diagnose their challenges, strategically plan how to solve them, and take action through their managers to make an impact. This comes to life through tools like: 

• Perform, our easy-to-use performance management platform that HR teams can tailor to their unique approach to continuous feedback and growth. With Perform, users can set up a review cycle in as little as 15 minutes, collect performance reviews and ratings, calibrate ratings and review reports, and make compensation decisions that empower career growth. 

• Engage, our employee engagement software that gives HR leaders science-backed confidence around what is impacting engagement and where to take action to move the needle.

• HR Outcomes Dashboard (HROD), where the platform comes together into a robust command center for strategic HR. HROD is a one-stop shop for measuring outcomes, gathering insights, and taking actions that connect performance management initiatives to the business’s bottom line.

“15Five has pulled all the data points together to create a real vision of engagement and retention,” said Ben Eubanks, Chief Research Officer, Lighthouse Research & Advisory. “They turn the insights into actions with succession planning, performance actions, meaningful surveys, and most importantly–team communications.”

Lighthouse estimates that over 5,000 HR technology firms exist globally, and only 1–2% are honored in this year’s program for their standout efforts. Each winning solution has been vetted based on case studies, product demonstrations, and technology innovation.

Time to celebrate!