Writing Assist: Leverage AI to deliver high-quality feedback with ease

At Lattice, our mission is simple: to help businesses build high-performing and engaged teams. One way we're doing that is through our new AI-powered Writing Assist, designed to support employees and managers in requesting and delivering high-quality feedback and performance reviews.

Feedback and performance reviews are cornerstones of growth, but it can be challenging to deliver clear, constructive, and actionable observations. That’s why we are excited to announce the release of our new Writing Assist feature, which makes providing feedback or writing formal reviews easier and more effective for everyone regardless of their experience level. 

So how does it work? 

Getting started with Writing Assist is easy! Firstly, it needs to be turned on for your organization within Lattice’s AI Settings page. 

Once activated, Writing Assist provides real-time, in-context recommendations to improve the clarity of your writing, ensure it's inclusive, and (of course) make sure you're saying it all without any typos.

You’ll automatically see it appear when giving feedback or writing self, peer, downward, or upward reviews. Simply jot down your thoughts and click “Assist” to get recommendations on how to improve your writing. You’ll then be able to generate a new recommendation, add the recommendation to your current text, or fully replace your existing text with the recommendation. 

Our Collaborative Building Approach

From the beginning, we collaborated closely with our customers, using their insights to shape Writing Assist's capabilities. We began by understanding our users' core challenges around effective feedback delivery.

We learned that many HR teams spend a lot of time coaching their people on using inclusive language and delivering actionable and coherent feedback – usually following the Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) framework. While coaching is helpful, we’ve heard (and seen firsthand) that there are still some key gaps when applying those strategies to providing feedback: 

• Coaching sessions are hard to recall when they matter most: Employees often struggle to remember and apply coaching tips while actually drafting feedback within Lattice.
• Employees have varied comfort levels in writing feedback: Employees have different levels of comfort in delivering feedback. Some find the overhead of articulating feedback so high that they end up not doing it at all.

By integrating this coaching into Writing Assist, we hope to simplify feedback delivery and reduce the cognitive overhead. This allows employees to focus on the content of their feedback rather than the structure, making the process more intuitive and effective for everyone.

A Tangible Impact 

Our goal with Writing Assist was to promote inclusivity and actionability in feedback. We used AI to help refine feedback, making it clear and constructive. And it worked—since launching at Lattice, we've seen a 41% increase in feedback submissions from our team just 10 days after launch. Plus, 70% of the AI suggestions were accepted, showing that Latticians found the tool helpful and accurate.

But the numbers only tell part of the story. Hear what two of our early-access users told us: 

"Downward reviews would previously take managers about an hour, sometimes more, to write, but we found that for some Managers, using Lattice’s Writing Assist reduced that time to as little as 30 minutes. We also had two managers who were initially skeptical about using the AI-powered feature for fear of it adding a lot of fluff or feeling robotic and generalized. But this feature kept all of the key info while also maintaining an authentic and distinct style.” - Alli Doyle, Strategic People Program Manager at Figma

"Writing isn’t very easy for me. I used to put off writing feedback until I had more time. Now, I just write my thoughts in simple sentences and let the assistant polish them. Then, I tweak it to make it sound more like me." - Sherri Aminshahidy, Senior Software Engineer at Lattice

This kind of feedback is what it's all about—making the process easier and more accessible, especially for those who find writing challenging.

Supporting Continuous Performance Management

At the end of the day, our goal is to support 'continuous performance management' by encouraging frequent, high-quality feedback. Writing Assist helps shift the focus from worrying about how to frame feedback to the actual content, enabling more meaningful conversations. Of course, while the tool is a great support, the final output is still up to the person giving the feedback. Proper training on using the tool is essential to get the most out of it.

You can activate Writing Assist now for your company on the AI Settings page! We’d love to hear your thoughts when you do. Please reach out if you're interested in sharing your experiences or partnering with our product team to further enhance this tool. 

Not a Lattice customer? Request a demo to discover how Lattice's AI-powered people platform can help uplevel your company's HR strategy.