How Lattice Helps ZayZoon Position People and Culture as a Strategic Function

The Challenge

Financial empowerment platform ZayZoon is transitioning from startup to scaleup. With plans to double its employee count in the next year, the company decided to take stock of its current people practices to ensure they’re ready to support its future growth.

The company’s engagement survey processes immediately stood out. ZayZoon’s ongoing surveys were run via Google Docs and manually analyzed by Kristen McGill, the company’s Chief People Officer. Kristen would spend hours aligning employee comments with survey data points to identify which areas and initiatives the company should prioritize. This process was not only time and labor-intensive, but it also failed to give Kristen and her team the nuanced insights they needed to make informed people decisions. 

After recognizing the need for a better team member engagement solution and hiring Jocelyn Meyer as the first team member dedicated to people and culture, ZayZoon set out to find a more comprehensive HR solution. Faced with the choice between implementing only an HRIS or adopting Lattice, ZayZoon's people team opted for the latter, recognizing its potential to make significant and lasting improvements to engagement.

"We chose to go with Lattice because we knew that it would have a much more tangible impact on the organization. An HRIS would make things easier for the people and culture team behind the scenes, but we knew Lattice could help increase engagement company-wide in a more visible way," remarks Kristen.

The team also liked that Lattice could evolve alongside their company and keep up with their workforce’s growing needs. "If we were going to invest in something, we wanted to be very sure that with the speed of our growth we wouldn’t outgrow the tool in a short amount of time," Kristen says.

Using Lattice at ZayZoon

After running their first engagement survey with Lattice, the ZayZoon team was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to pull robust insights from their data. Now, the team can dissect data by criteria like department, manager, gender, performance score, tenure, and more to better understand their workplace and identify underlying issues. More importantly, these insights have helped Kristen and Jocelyn craft a clear business case for investing in employee experience. 

In addition to their baseline engagement questions, ZayZoon also asks additional survey questions related to planned people initiatives. “People and Culture can be one of the most strategic functions in your business, however in most organizations it can feel challenging to measure...If we’re going to roll out a new initiative or people program or know that it is upcoming in our roadmap, we’ll add a question to the engagement survey, use the score to set our baseline, and see if it actually worked by comparing to the score post-launch,” says Kristen. She added that using the same recurring questions made it easier to report on and spot trends over time. 

Lattice’s engagement survey benchmark data also allows the team to compare their scores to similar businesses and gain even more context into their organizational health. “For us, being able to compare ourselves to similar companies means we can show our team how we are moving in the direction the company wants to move in. If there’s an area we know we need to work on, we can check how we compare to other companies that we'd like to aspire to. That's been a really cool feature,” says Jocelyn. She added that ZayZoon conducts its engagement surveys quarterly — giving the team enough time to act on employee feedback and measure meaningful progress.

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Kristen and Jocelyn have also loved how Lattice OKRs & Goals have transformed the organization’s objective-setting process, referred to internally as “rocks.” Displaying company, department, and individual goals within a user-friendly dashboard gives employees a visual understanding of how their efforts tie into overall company success,” shares Jocelyn.

“Businesses never achieve higher performance than when they create a true sense of purpose for their people. That purpose often comes from having a line of sight into how they’re making an impact for themselves, their team, and the company at large. The more that you can paint that picture visually, the easier it is for people to understand why what they log in to do everyday matters,” Kristen states.

Impact of Lattice

Thanks to Lattice’s data and workforce insights, Kristen and Jocelyn have transformed ZayZoon’s people and culture function into an invaluable strategic asset driving organizational growth and employee engagement. At just the right time, Lattice has enabled the team to optimize and refine their HR practices as the company gears up to rapidly scale up. 

“We've used Lattice to make people and culture a strategic function in our organization. Now that we've got clear metrics, we're using Lattice to ensure accountability, strategic execution, and business excellence. The records that we've been able to smash would not have happened without our people and without our ability to retain and engage them,” says Kristen. 

In just a few months, Lattice has become an integral part of ZayZoon's efforts to attract, retain, and grow talent. Lattice OKRs & Goals has not only improved accountability organization-wide but also helped employees feel more connected to the business’s vision and success.

“When you're going from startup to scaleup, you have to be hyper-focused to deliver explosive results and make sure you're not starting a hundred different things and never finishing them. You can see that reflected in our engagement survey results when we're asking people about whether they understand if their work is contributing to and aligned with our mission,” says Kristen.

Furthermore, ZayZoon managers appreciate the seamless integration of goals and one-on-ones within the Lattice platform. That integration lets them monitor the progress of goals and schedule agenda items for their next one-on-one meetings effortlessly. While one-on-ones were still happening organically before Lattice, Jocelyn says the platform has helped managers be more intentional and consistent with how they’re running those meetings.

Above all else, Lattice has helped ZayZoon put its employees first and build a better workplace for them both in the present and the future. As Kristen puts it, “In order to effectively retain and grow your team, you must truly demonstrate that you care about them as people, that you're going to be transparent, and that you're going to give your employees a voice. Lattice has provided us a tool to be able to do all of those things.”