How Lattice’s People Strategy Group Helped Klick Health Launch OKRs and Reviews

Klick Health, a marketing agency specializing in life sciences, was founded 26 years ago with a people-first culture that continues to be prioritized today. According to the company’s VP of People Insights Shveta Malhan, Klick Health’s mantra, “There’s something different here,” couldn’t be more fitting. “It’s how we do what we do that makes Klick different. The way we execute, come together, address our clients’ problems and needs is our key differentiator. We prioritize outcomes over optics and lean into our entrepreneurial spirit,” she shares.

But at this stage in Klick’s growth, the organization realized it was time to evolve its people practices. Until recently, goal-setting and performance reviews were happening organically, but there was no formal company-wide process or framework for team members to follow. As the company grew and hired more first-time managers, the need for more formalized performance management, goal-setting, and development processes became apparent. So Shveta identified the need to design not only a new performance management system for the company, but one that also fit within its unique culture.

Shveta and her transformation team understood that finding the right people management system would be crucial to the long-term success of any new goal-setting and performance management processes. “We knew figuring out just the process side of things wasn’t enough. We also had to look at what infrastructure we’d need to support this experience and ensure it is quick, easy, intuitive, and impactful,” she explains. “We wanted consistency to help us set the right foundation for more scalable workforce planning in the future.”

When Klick kicked off its search, it identified Lattice as a top contender. Not only did Lattice offer robust performance management and objectives and key results (OKR) tools, but it was the only solution Shveta’s team felt confident could grow with the company and keep up with its evolving people needs. “We were looking for a platform provider that would not only meet us where we are today, but that could also evolve with us. Lattice was more flexible than other platforms and let us adapt the rollout to meet our future needs,” says Shveta.

Using Lattice at Klick Health

While Shveta was eager to launch Lattice OKRs & Goals, Klick’s OKR approach was unique because of its organizational structure that revolves around “crafts” (areas of specialization, like creative or technology) rather than departments. To ensure the organization took an intentional, strategic approach to the platform’s rollout, Shveta turned to the Lattice People Strategy Group for guidance.

“We’d tried and tested the OKR methodology before, but it didn’t get the traction that we were looking for,” shares Shveta. “This time around, we leaned on the expert advice of Lattice’s People Strategy Group to see how we could get the OKR framework to work for us as an organization. Their team came to us with recommendations on what they thought would work best in a context like ours.”

The Lattice People Strategy Group educated Shveta and her team on the Lattice platform, taught them best practices, and helped them intentionally design their people programs. Together, they developed a lightweight, fair review process and transparent goal-setting using the OKR framework, aligning that it was the best first step toward translating their people strategy into organizational action.

Phase One of this strategy involved creating a beta group of senior Klick executives, showing them how to use Lattice, teaching them about the OKR framework, and helping them create OKRs for their teams. With these internal champions in place, the formal rollout to the whole company went smoothly.

Subsequently, Shveta and team interviewed 150 “Klicksters” to find out their perceptions of performance management. They quickly realized that while people had an appetite for constructive feedback and professional growth, they had negative perceptions of performance reviews. In response, she and her team opted for a unique three-season review cycle called “Cultivate Performance,” with periods for goal-setting, ongoing feedback, and a formal end-of-year review.

“The approach we took here was not to copy and paste, or replicate anything that has been done outside of Klick,” she shares. “We are not evaluating team members and giving them grades. We are actually invested as an organization to nurture, grow, and develop our talent for today and for the future.”

Lattice helped make the transition to their new performance management schedule seamless. Klicksters can now easily create and track their individual OKRs within the platform, as well as request and receive ongoing feedback from both peers and managers. Come review time, managers can easily reference peers’ information from the entire year, like feedback, goal progress, and one-on-one agendas, allowing them to write more comprehensive, constructive, and unbiased reviews for their teams.

Impact of Lattice

OKRs is now an integral part of the Cultivate Performance program and has helped set the stage for the broader transformation of Klick Health’s culture. Today, 50% of Klick team members have at least one OKR in the platform — a number Shveta is confident will rise to an even more impressive 80% this year. Klick also stores its annual company-wide OKRs within Lattice, helping to improve both organizational alignment and platform adoption. Klicksters can easily view organization-wide goals and use them to guide the creation of their own annual objectives.

The company has seen even higher engagement with end-of-year reviews. Shveta attributes these results to Lattice since its platform gives managers the luxury of having all team member information in one place. “I love that Lattice makes it so our people leaders don’t have to hunt for information about their teams. Whether they are having one-on-ones, giving feedback, or engaging in a review cycle, our managers have all the context and information they need at their fingertips thanks to Lattice,” she shares. “It just makes the lives of our people leaders that much easier.”

Overall, Shveta has been overjoyed by Klicksters’ adoption of the Lattice platform. “Given how we implemented both OKRs and performance reviews at the same time, the results we’re seeing are very encouraging,” adds Shveta.

Rolling out two major new people management processes at once and training team members on a new system is no small feat. Luckily, Shveta and her team didn’t have to do it alone. The Lattice People Strategy Group was there every step of the way, from winning executive approval to introducing the tools to the Klickster community. “Our consultations with Lattice’s People Strategy Group are so helpful. They always work to understand our needs and help us decide which approach would work best for our unique situation,” she says. “The team has been an amazing thought partner, and they are available either through email or face-to-face time. We even got the Lattice team in front of our executives to speak about OKR methodology, so that we could win over their support.”

Now, Klick has a people-first goal-setting framework and performance management program that provides Klicksters with what they’ve asked for: continuous clarity around performance expectations and real-time access to professional and developmental feedback.