How 3 Companies Boosted Employee Performance With Lattice

Facing a tight economy and labor market, companies across all industries are looking for ways to do more with less. For HR teams, that means challenges like supporting teams in hitting performance goals and ensuring strong employee retention, all while navigating budget cuts, hiring freezes, and layoffs.

When companies tighten budgets, people success platforms like Lattice are especially well-poised to help HR empower their teams to boost employee engagement and improve performance. Below we'll look at the notable performance wins of three Lattice customers.

1. Million Dollar Baby hit 92% completion on engagement surveys.

Wholesale distributor of baby furniture Million Dollar Baby Co. has always prioritized employee satisfaction and company culture, but as the company grew, its homegrown employee engagement solution wasn’t able to scale with it. Even worse, the former solution lacked data and analytics functionality. “We had zero data or benchmarking capabilities, which made it difficult to understand how we were doing against our own goals and other companies,” said VP of talent management Julia F. Yip. 

After surveying the options, Million Dollar Baby Co. went with Lattice because it offered a comprehensive platform that met all of its needs, including robust data analytics capabilities. “When we were shopping and comparing, we didn’t find a single solution that offered everything we needed, including one-on-ones and weekly updates, sentiment measurement, performance reviews, and engagement surveys; so Lattice was a no-brainer for me,” Yip said, noting that “the biggest differentiator was the analytical capabilities.”

Since implementing Lattice, Million Dollar Baby Co.’s workforce has enthusiastically embraced the platform, even hitting a record-breaking 92% completion rate on their bi-annual engagement surveys — an especially impressive metric considering the work environment extends beyond the office to warehouses.

“I’ve only heard good things from employees, most notably how clear everything is. Every performance review, every growth conversation is crystal clear, so they can evaluate their performance and know exactly what they need to do to improve,” Yip said.

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Lattice is also supporting Million Dollar Baby Co. in prioritizing employees’ skill development, with 65% of employees setting goals and 40% creating growth areas. “We use every single feature of Grow because it is such a cutting-edge employee development software,” Yip said. “We set quarterly OKRs that we tie to performance management because managers will talk about the Grow tracks during performance reviews,” she added. 

Lattice has also proven enormously beneficial from an administrator’s point of view, giving Yip and her team data that supports their people program to win approval from leadership. “Benchmarking against other Lattice users is extremely valuable. Being able to present the comparison to other companies to leadership is much more impactful than just telling them how great we are doing,” she said. “I can show my CEO we have a 90% completion rate, when 5,000 other customers are at 82%, so the data speaks for itself.” 

All in all, Yip has never been so impressed with any software she’s implemented during her tenure at the company. “I have deployed a ton of software throughout my years at Million Dollar Baby, and Lattice is the most highly adopted tool for our company. It's truly the most impactful tool we have ever used here.”

2. Article clocked a 95% completion rate on its first 360-degree review.

Prior to using Lattice, direct-to-consumer furniture company Article handled most of its people processes manually, jumping between Google Docs and Google Forms to conduct performance reviews and engagement surveys. But after the company doubled its headcount in just one year, the Article People and Culture team knew they needed a holistic people success solution that could scale with them to support employee training and onboarding, make it easy to set clear goals, help employees embody target competencies, and support a high-performing workforce. 

“We needed something that could allow us to grow, help improve our talent development programs, and build processes that were more in line with our mission,” said Jennifer McMillan, talent and learning development manager at Article. 

The Article People and Culture team was also looking for a platform that would help them understand the link between performance and development at the company. “We had no real big picture view of how performance management fit in with development planning,” McMillan said. “As we continue to grow, we need a way to better understand what our [employees’] knowledge, skills, and abilities are so we can identify gaps and know where to focus our learning and development and recruiting efforts,” she added. 

Since bringing Lattice on board, Article has used the people success platform to identify learning and development opportunities for employees across the organization, from individual contributors to managers and directors. “One of the most interesting ways we use the data is to evaluate every [employee] on our company’s unique guiding principles. We look at the data and see where people at different [organizational] levels score lower to identify areas of development that we need to focus on,” McMillan said. “That really helps inform our learning and development priorities because we know exactly which guiding principles we need to build more learning opportunities for,” she added.

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Article ran performance reviews prior to implementing Lattice, but managers were the only ones who provided feedback. The company now uses Lattice 360-degree reviews to reduce the potential for bias and ensure a more holistic picture of employee performance during their bi-annual performance reviews — and has been rewarded with an impressive adoption rate. Article’s first 360-degree review was a hit with a completion rate of 95% and over 1,800 reviews completed.

The company has also launched bi-annual engagement surveys to facilitate effective communication and ensure employees’ experiences are heard and acted on accordingly. “Lattice helps us to collect better and more reliable data. This has, in turn, enabled us to better understand our workforce and respond and act more meaningfully based on this feedback,” said McMillan.

3. DECIEM’s workforce uses Lattice to set goals and drive performance.

While the employees at skincare and cosmetics company DECIEM had long expressed interest in learning and development, they had a hard time charting it to company goals and growth. “They would come to us in our surveys asking, ‘How do I connect this to my growth in the organization? How do I understand how my work impacts the business overall?’” said Ashley Thompson, VP of People at DECIEM. Employees were eager to see how their contributions supported the company’s overall success, as well as get a formal read on their performance. 

At the same time, the people team knew they needed to transition their strategy from an informal, siloed program to a more structured organization to support the company’s rapidly expanding headcount of more than 1,400 employees. Thompson said the talent and acquisition team was under lots of stress to support day-to-day success like employee productivity and performance levels while the company was growing at breakneck speed.

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When DECIEM set out to find a people success platform that enabled a formalized people program that could remain flexible and approachable, Lattice beat out the competition thanks to its comprehensive bundling of performance and engagement and its overall ease of use. 

After deciding on Lattice, one of the first features DECIEM rolled out was OKRs & Goals. Since employees had expressed a desire to understand how their work contributed to DECIEM’s overall performance, prioritizing goals and setting clear expectations was paramount.

“When it came to goal-setting, we wanted to make sure that our people had business goals that were directly linked to the organizational strategy, so that every individual could understand how their work drove the mission forward within their team and at an individual level,” said Kristina Tsiriotakis, senior director of organizational development and learning at DECIEM. “But we also wanted everyone to have a development goal and a learning or a wellness goal,” she added — goals that needed to be set by employees. 

To help employees prioritize setting goals with Lattice, DECIEM positioned individual and team work within the greater context of organizational success. The result? More than 80% of employees used Lattice to set goals, which was “huge for us, because in our production environment, some of these teams are 50 or 60 people reporting to one person,” Tsiriotakis said.

Lattice has been so well received that, just one year after implementation, DECEIM reached a 97% completion rate for performance reviews. Reviews include peer feedback, self-assessment, and a managerial review. It’s not just office or remote work staff with regular access to a computer who have been completing their performance reviews; this impressive completion rate includes retail and production staff, too. Team members have been eager to provide feedback via reviews, with DECIEM consistently hitting an 80% completion rate for engagement surveys since bringing on Lattice. “People want to use their voice, which has been amazing,” said Thompson. 

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When the economy slows and the labor market tightens, it’s your people above all else who give your organization its competitive edge, so high performance is a priority. Companies like Million Dollar Baby Co., Article, DECIEM, and thousands of others choose to lean on Lattice to boost employee performance with a comprehensive suite of people success tools.

At your own organization, investing in employee engagement, development, and alignment will drive high performance and give your business what it needs to outplay competitors. Download Lattice’s ebook HR's Guide to Driving Business Impact to learn more today.