Lattice Helps Olo Consolidate HR Tools and Prioritize Development

Hospitality technology company Olo has helped drive the digital transformation of the restaurant industry in the last two decades. By streamlining ordering, payment, and marketing, Olo helps over 600 brands increase sales, while making every guest feel like a regular. As expected of any company in the hospitality space, Olo knows the importance of serving people, especially when it comes to its 750 employees.

In order to help all those employees succeed, Olo has a 32-person People and Culture team — three of whom are dedicated solely to learning and development. One of those three is Kyle Teague, the company’s director of learning and development (L&D).

When Kyle first joined Olo, the company was continuing to evolve its HR programming. At the time, employee engagement and performance management were quite established whereas other programs were still in their infancy stages. “Our people management practices lived across multiple platforms or simply did not exist. Our reviews, for instance, were based in our HRIS system and consisted of a simple manager review and self-review. Our company-wide surveys lived in a separate platform that we only leveraged for surveys,” he shares.

The Olo People team knew if it wanted to achieve its goal to “retain, attract, and grow the best talent…,” it needed the right systems in place to support its evolving initiatives. “As we grew, it was important to not only scale our people practices but to also connect them,” says Kyle. The company wanted one tool that could handle all of its evolving HR needs: engagement surveys, 360-degree performance reviews, and learning and development. “As an L&D professional, it was important to me that we introduce a platform that empowered our employees and managers to better track and enable development, for instance with the ability to create and manage individual development plans (IDPs),” adds Kyle.

When Olo’s contract with its previous survey management system ended, Kyle and his team jumped at the opportunity to look for a holistic HR solution that could meet all their needs. But selecting a new tool was not an easy process with many stakeholders and opinions involved. Kyle’s team formed a cross-departmental selection committee to demo Lattice and other competitors to determine which system could bring the most value to the organization. “We had to help our stakeholders understand that while HRIS systems have performance management, talent management capabilities, and employee engagement surveying capabilities, that’s not their bread and butter. In our demos, we quickly found that these HRIS tools are either severely underdeveloped and not useful at all, or are so customizable that it feels like programming your own software before you can even use it,” shares Kyle.

Kyle and the team knew the company needed an easy-to-use solution in order for employees to actually benefit from the tools. “We wanted something that was easy to understand and that people could easily make sense of how to use it. Plus, we needed it to be somewhat out of the box. Obviously, we wanted to customize some things here and there, but we didn’t want to program an entire process or program from the ground up,” he shares.

When the team found out Lattice could support engagement surveys, performance reviews, and employee development all from one platform, they were sold. “Lattice garnered a lot of excitement and helped centralize a lot of our people, practices, and programs that, at the time, either lived in our HRIS system or another tool or [for which] we didn’t have a formal tool — like development planning and IDPs. Switching to Lattice made the most sense for our growth and our maturity, and the rest is history,” Kyle says.

Using Lattice at Olo

Since finding Lattice, Olo has launched engagement, onboarding, exit, and DEIB surveys and introduced its first-ever 360-degree performance reviews and employee development tools. More importantly, Lattice gave the Olo team the ability to bring all of this people data together in one place.

So far, Olo’s People and Culture team loves how easy it is to manage all of their programs from a single platform. “It’s great to see everything take place within Lattice. The more you use the platform, the more it becomes apparent just how easy, intuitive, and valuable it is,” shares Kyle.

In fact, the Olo team found the tool so beneficial, they decided to roll out Lattice features ahead of schedule. Initially, they’d agreed on a more spaced-out rollout, with most of Lattice’s features being implemented after end-of-year reviews. “That is, until we saw a lot of excitement from our senior stakeholders and executive team,” explains Kyle. With this positive feedback, the Olo team decided to accelerate the launch date of additional programs. Only five months after implementation, Olo has almost every Lattice feature live, with plans to launch Lattice Grow shortly.

Even with this accelerated timeline, Olo’s employee adoption rates far surpassed expectations. Kyle attributes these results to how easy Lattice is to use (even for first-time users), as well as Olo’s internal team of Lattice champions. “The tools we used before were never a part of your day-to-day like Lattice is now. Employees would only look at our survey system once or twice a year, or they’d only use our HRIS system to request time off or check upcoming company holidays,” shares Kyle. “Neither were in front of you on a daily basis, whereas Lattice has become an integrated part of everyone’s daily lives. It has your one-on-one talking points, weekly action items, individual goals, feedback, and praise, which encourage employees to visit the platform every day.”

Olo’s managers have found immense value in the Lattice platform since launch too. It helps them track goal progress, keep a pulse on employee morale, share ongoing feedback, create one-on-one agendas, and more. Kyle even admits it’s empowered him to be a better manager for his team. “Now, I have everything I need to be a manager at my fingertips: our team and company goals, team development plans, individual feedback, and performance reviews. Plus, I love getting notified that my team member received praise so I can bring it up in our next one-on-one,” he shares.

While Olo had a one-on-one tool previously, Kyle says Lattice 1:1s have positively transformed the way managers approach these weekly catch-ups with their teams. “People used our old one-on-one tracker in a task-oriented way, but we never really had a tool that highlighted people development. Using Lattice has given our company a shift in mindset around what a one-on-one should look like versus how people were using their one-on-one agenda previously,” says Kyle.

Impact of Lattice

In under six months, Lattice has become Olo’s one-stop-shop for all its people needs. Now, employees can use a single platform for reviews, surveys, one-on-ones, professional development, and more. “The number one benefit of Lattice is that it’s allowed us to centralize most of our key people programs in one platform. It puts these tools at the forefront of people’s attention and makes them accessible,” shares Kyle.

Lattice Praise was the first tool Olo enabled because it complemented the company’s existing strong culture of recognition. While Olo has used its HRIS system for public recognition in the past, the tool had poor adoption because employees didn’t access the tool frequently. With Lattice’s Slack integration, Olo employees can easily give and receive public praise directly from the Slack app, making it easy to recognize their peers and tie contributions and behaviors to a company value. Since launch, the company has seen a consistent stream of positive recognition. In fact, Lattice is the highest trafficked Slack integration for the entire company — a testament to Olo’s culture of internal recognition.
Of course, employees aren’t the only ones benefiting from Lattice’s robust tools. The Olo People team loves finally having a single source of truth for all their people data. “Having everything in one platform, with all our data intertwined, gives us a lot of great insights and solid ideas on what we can do as a People and Culture team, and even as an organization, to support or address areas of opportunity,” shares Kyle.

Kyle says the team has been blown away by Lattice’s analytics dashboards and how easy it is to pull actionable takeaways “without having to download a spreadsheet and create pivot tables.” He goes on to add, “Lattice interweaves all the analytics together in an easy-to-understand way to create deeper insights. As we launch more surveys, I’m constantly impressed by how our new data connects together and creates different insights — like being able to compare a department’s engagement survey scores to their performance review scores. Having access to all that data on one platform allows you to make a story out of it or see something beyond just one particular program, [which] I think can be really helpful to gather additional insights,” Kyle says.

Olo recently completed its first performance review cycle using the Lattice platform, and that was the company’s first time incorporating 360-degree feedback from both peers and managers. “While adding peer feedback to our reviews gave our employees a new muscle to learn and exercise, it allowed our managers to ultimately get more holistic feedback about their individual team members, and therefore, better inform their review for each employee,” he shares.

Even though Olo has yet to launch Lattice Grow, Kyle believes it will be the most impactful tool for the company. Aside from being highly anticipated by employees, Lattice Grow will give newfound clarity to internal growth opportunities and empower employees to take ownership of their own career growth. “I’m really excited that we’re helping employees think about their career vision, long-term goals, what energizes them, what are some things that they see themselves doing or position that they’re in down the road, and then breaking those down into short-term growth areas they can focus on,” says Kyle. “Plus, the Grow module integrates directly into employee one-on-ones and integrates everywhere within the Lattice platform to keep growth top of mind — ensuring it’s not lost in a Google Drive or inaccessible in a very complicated-to-use tool.”

While the company still has a few more job matrices and competency models to build out, Grow is the rollout he’s most excited for. As he puts it, “I believe [Lattice Grow is] going to help us focus on our company-wide goal to ‘grow the best talent’ in a way that makes sense for our business and empowers our employees.”