Strive Health Keeps Performance Management Front and Center With Lattice

The Challenge

For kidney care startup Strive Health, rapid growth meant realizing its mission to improve healthcare outcomes for more people living with kidney disease. But the rapid growth — much of which happened during the COVID pandemic — also created some growing pains.

“We have had a distributed workforce since the company launched, but specifically when COVID hit, we shifted to focus on hiring the best talent, not necessarily just hiring people who would eventually migrate to the office. We have about 100 employees in the Denver area, but only about twelve actively go into the office regularly. We have clinicians spread all over the country, and we have fully remote and hybrid employees,” says Jane von Halle, Strive Health’s Senior Manager of Talent Development.

“We deployed Lattice when we had about 150 team members—we’re up to 480 now—because existing processes weren’t working. It was basically the Wild West before Lattice. There was no standardized process. Reviews were being done in Excel and then emailed to HR, so we couldn’t keep track of who did what. Individual Development Plans (IDPs) were in PowerPoint templates or Word docs. Many people didn’t have formal goals at all, and career development conversations weren’t happening.”

Using Lattice at Strive Health

Especially in a hybrid work environment, a single solution that enables employees to connect with their managers, give and receive feedback, and establish and track career goals is a powerful performance management tool. For Jane and her team, the first hurdle was to gain buy-in from staff.

For Strive Health, that included a large number of clinical staff who didn’t work in traditional office settings and were often on the go caring for patients. “Lattice was new to many team members, especially employees on the clinical side. So, we educate them on the value of the solution. We introduce people to Lattice during onboarding, we offer walkthroughs and webinars on how to use it, and we host regular refresher trainings. We also send employees reminders and explain why they should be using the tool consistently,” says Jane.

Currently, Strive Health is using Lattice to conduct its year-end performance review, which is required by all staff, and includes the self-review, upward review, and peer review components. Jane’s team has also set up optional quarterly check-ins that encourage managers to have more frequent performance conversations with staff. They’ve also utilized Engagement surveys to keep a check of how things are going between reviews. “So far, we have also conducted two engagement survey, and what we discovered is that people now have a better sense of what’s expected of them in their roles, compared to last year, and I think we can attribute that to more people using Lattice,” says Jane.

The 1:1 feature is a hit among users — specifically the Slack integration. “Sometimes, it can feel like a conversation is getting stale and you don’t know how to re-energize it. Lattice recommends questions you can shuffle through and offers templates. Plus, you can add 1:1 agenda items right from Slack and receive action item reminders in Slack, so we are reaching employees where they are,” she says. Managing people is hard, and Lattice makes it easier for our managers to do their jobs well.”

The team has started to roll out Grow and establish career tracks, and Jane is already seeing an uptick in usage. She is excited about leveraging the tool more to create development plans that focus on both long-term career goals and short-term growth areas.

“It’s nice to have this one place where we can direct everyone for guidance on how to kick off and follow up on IDP conversations. Managers can access talking points, action items, even a companion guide to walk them through it. It’s all baked into the system, so it makes my job much easier because I don’t have to train every individual manager on the process. Before Lattice, these conversations weren’t really happening, and now we know they are and can actually track employees’ progress.”

The Results

Strive Health is experiencing phenomenal usage rates, including a 91% completion rate on their year-end review, high survey participation, and increasing 1:1 usage. Jane credits proper training, establishing expectations for managers for their high usage and adoption.  

But, most of all, she says it’s the ease of use and convenience of Lattice that attracts employees. “Lattice provides a one-stop-shop for everything related to performance and development. You can plan and document a 1:1, set goals, track progress, and collect feedback that can be used for the year-end review,” says Jane. “It’s game-changing to have all these tools and resources in one place. Additionally, with Lattice’s reporting features, we can actually see which managers are meeting expectations around feedback, goals, and IDPs; and coach the ones who aren’t. It’s going to continue to support our mission to create a culture where employees feel like they can grow.”