How Reach Financial Achieved Data-Driven Growth with 15Five

Reach Financial, a high-growth fintech lending platform, faced a significant hurdle as it scaled from 70 to nearly 200 employees

When Erik Christiansen, Vice President of People & Culture joined the organization, the company was scaling quickly but lacked a structured performance management framework. Reviews were handled manually and inconsistently across teams, creating limited visibility into employee development, performance trends, and manager effectiveness.

As the company grew and moved into a fully remote environment during the pandemic, it became clear that Reach needed more than just a review process, it needed a scalable system that would help managers lead effectively, strengthen employee development conversations, and give leadership meaningful visibility into organizational health.

With a small HR team of two, Reach Financial needed a scalable way to:

• Bridge the virtual gap: Managers in remote-first environments sometimes lost the "human connection" with their teams, leading to lower engagement and higher turnover.
• Address growth and visibility challenges: As teams scaled, it became naturally difficult for managers to maintain deep visibility into individual needs, often causing development conversations to drift into tactical status updates.
• Improve low-impact or “check-the-box performance”: Performance management was a manual, administrative burden that produced data but no real action or direction. It was a "compliance task" rather than a growth driver.

   

Before implementing a technology platform, Reach focused on designing the underlying performance management framework. The goal was to move away from annual, compliance-style reviews and toward a system centered on continuous feedback, manager accountability, and clear development signals.

The framework focused on three priorities:

• Equipping managers to have better conversations with their teams

• Creating visibility into employee growth and engagement signals

• Turning performance data into actionable insights for leadership

The Solution

After evaluating several performance management platforms, including CultureAmp and Lattice, Reach selected 15Five because it aligned best with the company’s philosophy of continuous feedback and manager-driven development rather than rigid review cycles

• Continuous Feedback Loop: Reach implemented 15Five’s Check-ins to ensure frequent, structured conversations that prevent communication drift.
  
  
• Seamless Integration: The platform connected directly with their payroll system, Rippling, making onboarding frictionless as the company continued growing.
  
  
• High Fives for Organic Recognition: Reach used the High Fives feature to build a public wall of appreciation that became a cornerstone of their digital culture.
  
  
• Strategic Engagement Surveys: Moving beyond simple scores, Reach utilizes annual surveys and regular Pulse checks to drive their long-term people strategy.

A central goal of the implementation was improving manager effectiveness. Reach focused on creating consistent manager–employee conversations through structured check-ins and clear expectations around feedback and development discussions. This helped ensure that performance management was not just a data exercise but a leadership capability embedded into day-to-day management.

The "A-Ha!" Moment

The moment that stood out most for Reach happened before formal training even started. "People just logged in and started throwing each other High Fives," Erik noted. The feature was so intuitive that employees adopted it immediately, turning the "High Five wall" into a living indicator of company health. New hires now cite the High Five feed as one of their first positive impressions of the company, viewing it as real proof that the culture is thriving.

“At Reach, we didn’t start with software, we started by defining what great management and meaningful employee growth should actually look like, then selected technology that could reinforce that system at scale”

"High Fives are ingrained in our culture... One of the first comments new hires make is, 'Wow, it's so great to see your culture is thriving in this way and that people are appreciating each other.'"

 

"If you have a great relationship with your manager, you have better retention. That's the main driver... getting that clarity and fostering better relationships."

— Erik Christiansen, VP of People and Culture, Reach Financial

The Results

After bringing performance and engagement into 15Five, Reach Financial transformed its HR function into a proactive, data-driven strategic partner.

• "Highly Engaged" Workforce: Despite the challenges of remote work and rapid growth, Reach has maintained consistently high engagement scores, falling in the 95th percentile of other companies in the selected benchmark.
  
  
• Data-Backed Retention: Leadership can now connect engagement data directly to retention. After spotting pulse trends (e.g., an employee’s morale dropping from a 5 to a 2), the People team can reach out directly, address what's wrong, and keep that person from walking out the door.
  
  
• Operational Efficiency: The performance review cycle is now straightforward to set up and run. Managers use specific rubrics and scorecards (such as QA scorecards for agent teams) to identify precise training needs, moving away from subjective "check-the-box" evaluations.
  
  
• Strategic Action Plans: Instead of just seeing low scores, Reach can now tactically address departmental gaps by identifying whether a low score is a performance issue or a company-side process problem.

Beyond engagement scores, the People team now has clearer signals around team health, performance trends, and potential retention risks. This allows leadership to address issues earlier and focus development efforts where they will have the most impact.

Looking Ahead

Reach Financial is continuing to evolve with 15Five by becoming a design partner and early adopter for Amaya, 15Five's new AI-powered analytics agent. They are also preparing to roll out career pathing and competencies through the platform to show employees a clear future within the organization.

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