Employees are core to your people strategy. They should be core to your HR software, too.
In a tech-enabled workplace, employee experience and user experience are synonymous. Well-designed tools can turn managers into career coaches, foster cultures of high performance and recognition, and transform HR leaders into data scientists.
Earlier this year, Lattice launched navigation improvements across the platform — making it easier for everyone to find what they need to do their best work with fewer clicks. To mark the news, we asked HR leaders to share why they prioritize UX when evaluating HR software.
1. It turns managers into leaders.
Management is rewarding and challenging — especially if you’re new to it. But besides offering training videos and manager coaching classes, HR teams haven’t always had meaningful, tech-powered ways to support managers on an ongoing basis. Software providers that design their products with HR teams, managers, and employees in mind can go a long way in righting that.
Christine Millette, HR Manager at Mintz + Hoke, implemented Lattice’s performance management suite to foster an engaged, high-performing culture. For her, the most significant benefits of making the switch weren’t just the platform’s ease of use but how it rewired the way managers worked. Bringing feedback, goals, growth plans, feedback, and one-on-one agendas together on the same dashboard made them more cognizant of employee needs and better equipped to address them.
“Peers and managers are no longer wracking their brains to remember yearly project wins, as all the data is seamlessly there,” Millette said. Offering praise and constructive feedback is a lighter lift when showing the “receipts” doesn’t involve opening five separate windows. “Because agendas, next steps, and feedback are all stored in one place, our managers [can] provide solid examples that promote transparency and drive better performance.”
2. It empowers HR teams to be more efficient.
HR teams don’t have the luxury of focusing on just one priority at a time. Behind-the-scenes planning for performance reviews, compensation cycles, and employee surveys can take months, and much of that work overlaps. With so many irons on the fire, it can be hard for HR teams to know what to prioritize, let alone think strategically about the big picture.
Thoughtful design brings clarity. For instance, Lattice’s Admin Overview page provides HR leaders with a snapshot of active and inactive products, an employee directory, and even links to helpful library content — all within one view. This hub allows administrators to check in on employee adoption metrics or visit product-specific pages, including our new Engagement Overview page.
The Engagement Overview page provides HR teams with a comprehensive understanding of recent and ongoing surveys, including participation metrics and current scores. That level of visibility is critical, as HR teams may conduct multiple surveys across different points in the employee lifecycle at any given time. For example, on top of a quarterly engagement survey and ongoing Pulse surveys, you may be running separate onboarding and exit surveys. Keeping tabs on all four in one dashboard gives you greater clarity and ensures valuable employee input doesn’t slip through the cracks.
3. Good design empowers self-service.
From pulling performance review scorecards to processing home address changes, routine requests can bog down your HR team and prevent it from tackling more strategic work. That’s because legacy HR software was built with one end user in mind: HR professionals. Bad design doesn’t just create a bottleneck; it perpetuates the misconception that Human Resources is simply an administrative function.
“When employees have to go to their managers or the HR department for every small change or clarification, it’s a waste of time for both managers and employees,” said Harriet Chan, co-founder of CocoFinder.
Employees use digital tools in their everyday life... and if a work-based tool can replicate that experience, [they're] more likely to engage with that system.
Since upgrading her HR tech stack, Chan found that one-off requests slowed to a trickle, giving her HR team the bandwidth to tackle meaningful projects. She’s now able to spend more time analyzing engagement survey results and making data-backed recommendations. “Using automated HR tools, especially ones that include an employee portal, just makes everyone’s lives easier,” she said.
4. Driving employee adoption is easier.
Even when you have the bandwidth to launch game-changing initiatives, getting employees to bite is the real challenge. Whether it’s open enrollment, mid-year performance reviews, or an employee engagement survey, your HR team’s success depends on participation. After spending months evaluating and purchasing HR software, the last thing you want is to end up with a tool people seldom use.
Jenna Carson, HR Director at Music Grotto, didn’t just consider employee user experience in her search for an HR information system (HRIS) — she made it a top-three priority. She knew that peers would judge her selection on the tool’s aesthetics, not just functionality.
“Employees use digital tools in their everyday life outside of work, and if a work-based tool can replicate that experience, employees are more likely to engage with that system,” Carson said.
She knew that tools that replicated even an ounce of the usability of apps like Instagram or LinkedIn would both help drive adoption and make her more successful.
“The best tools also allow for interaction between employees anywhere in the world, which is great for building culture between staff in different time zones,” she said. Implementing HR software that could integrate with communication tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams enabled her to do just that.
5. Great design puts everyone’s work in context.
Finding meaning in your day-to-day work is hard if you can’t connect it with the company’s mission. According to a Robert Half Management Resources study on employee role clarity, just 47% of workers understand how their work contributes to their organizations’ success. Objectives and key results (OKRs), cascading goals, and other goal-setting frameworks can help, but only if they’re top of mind year-round.
“When I ask managers what their vision for their team is, or what they expect from the team, I often get a quizzical look as the response,” said Irial O’Farrell, a learning and development consultant at Evolution Consulting. Even the best goals collect dust when they languish in HR spreadsheets or are two dozen clicks away. “Lack of clarity makes setting objectives or giving feedback very difficult and uncomfortable,” O’Farrell said.
Employee-centric product design helps connects the dots. Tools that bring personal, team, and company goals together in one dashboard make it easier to see how your work contributes to the bigger picture.
We built Lattice to integrate goals into everything teams do, resulting in more productive one-on-ones, targeted feedback, and more motivated teams. Our enhanced navigation ties these even closer together, making it easier for your people to view personal, team, department, and company goals in the same view.
—
Great design isn’t just about ease of use, it’s about empowerment. We built Lattice to help HR leaders, managers, and employees create high-performing cultures, grow their careers, and make work meaningful.
To see Lattice’s intuitive, people-first design for yourself, schedule a Lattice demo.
