Articles on People Management

Read best practices on everything related to people management

Performance Management

How to Create a Performance Improvement Plan

Use these easy steps to create a plan to improve your employee's performance.

What to Do with Your Employee Engagement Survey Results

Actionable advice for taking survey results to implementing changes at your company.

The How and Why of Performance Review Calibration

Time to train your managers how to iron out the differences across performance review scoring.

Like a Boss: “I need a better long-distance relationship with my remote employee.”

Long-distance relationships can require more — or just different — effort. Here's how to make it work.

Performance Management

How to Write a Peer Performance Review

With these tips, it doesn't have to be a stressful experience; it can even be a positive thing.

What Is Employee Experience vs Employee Engagement?

Many people use these terms interchangeably, but knowing the difference can help ensure your employees stay satisfied.

Your performance review is next week. Here’s what you need to do.

We’ve got some advice for maximizing your time in the seven days before the big day. We want to make sure you leave your review feeling confident about the year behind you and the year ahead of you.

28 employee engagement survey questions you need to ask

An engagement survey is intended to help you solve a critical problem at your company, better your workplace, and identify your strengths. So you need to be sure that your employee engagement survey questions are actually going to give you insight into your problem.

6 People Management Tips That Will Make You a Better Manager

For managers, knowing how to manage people and all their quirks and ambitions is a key part of you being successful at your job.

Like a Boss: “I have to have my first tough conversation with an employee who’s underperforming.”

But when done well, feedback sessions can turn an underperforming employee into one who is prized.

Performance Management

How Employees Can Prepare for a One-on-One Meeting with Their Manager

That weekly check-in with your boss is your time to shine and also get valuable feedback, so make sure you're ready.

Why Offboarding and Exit Interviews Are Important and How to Do Them Right

Creating smart offboarding and exit interview guidelines can give you engagement insights and keep your company's reputation safe.

Why Your Company Should Be Doing Pulse Surveys and How to Do Them Right

Bridge those gaps between bigger surveys and find out how your engagement initiatives are performing.

How to Ask Your Manager for Feedback

Asking your manager for feedback is an essential part of getting what you want out of your career. But asking someone to be honest about your shortcomings seems painful.

How Often Should Your Company Have Performance Reviews?

Your organization understands the value of performance reviews, but has struggled to implement them.

How to Write a Performance Review Self-Assessment

Reviewing yourself is usually the hardest part of the performance review cycle, but it doesn't have to be.

How to Talk to Employees and Managers About Your Engagement Strategy

Are your people and managers bought in on fixing engagement? Here's how to get them on board.

How to Give Your Coworker Feedback Without Sounding Like a Jerk

At a previous job, I gave feedback to a coworker and was, to be blunt, a total jerk about it.

Cindy Gordon of Policygenius: “Make HR about leading with purpose before process.”

Cindy Gordon is the VP of People at Policygenius, an Insuretech company that enables people to compare insurance options, based in New York, NY.

What to expect from your first ever performance review

If you’ve never had a performance review before, preparing for one might be stressful. Use this handy guide to know what to expect.

How HR Handles Work Friendships

Tips and advice for HR on making friends at work and creating a friendly environment at work.

Performance Management

How to Use Cascading Goals

Everything you need to know about cascading goals and how to implement them at your company.

HR’s Guide to Performance Review Questions

How you structure performance review questions will have a significant impact on your next review cycle and the data you collect.

7 Tips for Writing Work Emails Like a Boss

Step up your email game and set yourself apart.

6 Practical Ways to Build Rock-Solid Discipline

Productivity expert Thomas Frank shares his tried-and-true tactics for building discipline and staying focused at work

7 Times Managers Should Give Praise To Their Employees

Everyone knows praise is an important part of workplace feedback, but when you’re a manager, your praise to a direct report carries an extra special weight.

Performance Management

Here’s Everything You Need to Know About OKRs

OKRs help organizations stay aligned by connecting company, team and personal objectives to measurable results.

How to use feedback to be a better coworker

The key is to be intentional.

The Pros and Cons of Ratings in Performance Reviews

To rate or not to rate, that is the question. We give a breakdown of the good and bad of performance review ratings.

The Challenge of Being the First HR Person At Your Company

It's a tough job, but you're going to be great at it.

5 Techniques for Staying Focused at Work

It's so easy to get distracted, so find out how productive people keep from getting sidetracked.

5 People Management Skills Every Manager Needs

People management hinges on your ability to connect with and understand others, but high emotional intelligence isn't everything.

How HR Can Keep Slack a Safe, Productive Space

Here are some common problems that HR faces in keeping Slack a safe, productive space for both them and their company, and how to address them.

5 Conflict Management Skills For Every Manager

Conflict management can be one of the hardest parts of a manager's job.

How To Talk To Your Manager About Work Burnout

Burnout at work is widely acknowledged as an “employee crisis” that could be to blame for a slew of problems for companies, and their employees.

Brad Holliday of Caravan Health: “It’s important for me to stay in touch with employees. You rarely find me in my office.”

Brad Holliday is the Chief People Officer at Caravan Health. Here, he shares stories from his 30 years in HR, and how they’ve informed his HR philosophy.

Performance Management

How to Stay on Track with Your Goals

How to set goals – and really, truly stick to them – this goal cycle.

Managers, here’s how to keep your employees on track with their goals

Managers, here's how to make a plan with your direct reports to help keep them on track with their goals.

HR, here’s how to keep your company on track with their goals

Are you managing your company's goal-setting process? Here's what you need to know.

Amber Authier of TWG: “What I love most is being able to see people grow.”

Amber Authier is the People Operations Manager at The Working Group (TWG), a team of product managers, software engineers, and designers based in Toronto, ON, CA. We spoke to her about her HR philosophy.

Lattice welcomes our new Head of People Strategy: Farah Kassam

Our new Head of People Strategy sits down to talk about her history with HR, how her values and Lattice’s values align, and her plans for the next three months.

Embark uses Lattice to optimize engagement, culture, and productivity

Our customer Embark writes about how they use Lattice to strengthen and measure their employee engagement.

Performance Management

Which program management model is best for your company?

Performance management systems might not be one-size-fits-all, but many management programs do tend to have some common components.

Performance Management

Suzy's Chief People Officer Anthony Onesto on the Power of Play at Work

There's an epidemic of employees being stressed, anxious, and overworked. Most of them require larger, systemic changes, but one we can implement right away is more time for play at work.

How to use Lattice to boost your feedback culture

Effective performance management starts with understanding how to give accurate and specific feedback, and integrating it into your culture.

How Slack Built A People First Company Culture

If you work at a tech company, you probably use Slack.

4 management principles a manager should avoid

You've read articles about which management principles you should follow -- but what about the ones that you should avoid?

Performance Management

How to Write Goals, the S.M.A.R.T. way

The two most popular frameworks for corporate goal setting are SMART goals and OKRs. This article focuses on the former.

The complete guide to running an employee engagement survey

While some guides will only take you through the survey itself, this is a step-by-step plan for the engagement survey cycle.

3 Questions to Ask in Every 1:1

Regardless of what you need to cover in a 1:1, there are a few meeting questions you should always ask in order to maximize the check in process.

Performance Management

How to set sticky goals for your employees

Part of the performance management process is goal setting in a way that aligns the organizational goals and business objectives of your company with the individual goals of your employees.

10 ways to increase employee engagement survey participation

In order to improve employee engagement with a survey, you have to get employees to participate in it, and this can be easier said than done.

3 Simple Steps to Designing a Better Employee Engagement Survey

Employee engagement surveys help companies get a read on high and low points and offer a valuable space for candid feedback — if used correctly.

To drive employee engagement, you have to play the long game

Like with any other objective, companies need to develop a long-term employee engagement plan in order to be effective.

Build your employee engagement strategy around an engagement survey

Employee engagement surveys provide a base for employee engagement strategy.

Performance Management

7 ways status updates can help with people management

Status reports are a key way that employees define their work and set themselves up for success, as well as a key way managers communicate with employees.

New managers: Here are the 5 most important things you can do day one

Becoming a manager for the first time is a big step in your career. But your first day as a manager isn't about coming in hot and being the greatest.

Mahesh at Airtasker: "If the employee experience is the product, HR people are the product managers"

Mahesh Muralidhar is Head of People Operations at Airtasker, a Sydney-based community-based marketplace for outsourcing tasks to people looking and ready to work.

Round Table Recap: 7 Tips for Building Culture Across Remote Teams

We held a remote round table panel with four remote team experts. Here's what we learned.

What is employee engagement, and how do you measure it?

What is the actual definition of employee engagement?

How Fast-Growing Brands Can Improve Their Team Culture

As your business grows, use these strategies to foster a team culture that helps everyone succeed.

Performance and engagement: a powerful data combination

Performance and engagement are inextricably linked.

Using an engagement survey to make changes that improve employee engagement

Following generic improvement advice for engagement is not a path to success. Instead, you need to systematically survey the landscape of your company and make decisions based on what you see actually happening.

5 Best Practices to Increase Your Performance Review Participation Rates

We interviewed several People Ops leaders about performance review participation and made a list of their best tips for getting managers and employees to finish their reviews.

How to Evolve Your Company's Performance Management Process With Real-time Feedback

The vast majority of HR leaders are in the process of reimagining performance management.

Performance Management

4 Ways to Improve Your Performance Management Process

To get to the best performance management process for your workplace, figure out what is and isn't working in your current process.

Your employee engagement survey results are in. Now what?

Before you start sharing your results and implementing changes, you need to make sense of the data you've been given.

How to Take Feedback Well

Getting feedback in any form is stressful, but it’s also the key to growth and learning.

How The Performance Review Impacts Your Bottom Line (and How to Make Them Better)

Performance reviews can and should be an important tool for your company because they have the power to impact your bottom line.

Performance Review Examples: The Essential Guide for Managers

Figure out your perfect formula for writing good performance reviews and questions.

Lattice Book Report: Dream Teams

Why is it that some teams flourish while others collapse?

How Performance Management Boosts Engagement

Keeping employees engaged is a never-ending task.

Performance Management

The Essential Guide to Business Performance Management

Use this guide as a foundation for business performance management.

How to create a feedback culture

Creating a culture of direct, consistent communication within your business— also known as a feedback culture— is so important.

6 Key Takeaways From Our Panel About Building Great Teams

Lattice hosted a panel with three People Ops leaders to discuss the challenges of building great teams.

We spoke to leading people strategist Josh Bersin about how HR is evolving -- and how to keep up

Josh Bersin, Principal and Founder of Bersin by Deloitte, spoke with Lattice’s Co-Founder and CEO Jack Altman about the ways the department HR is evolving.

Alison Green: The creator behind “Ask A Manager” shares her best management tips

In the latest episode of Resources for Humans, Jack sits down with Alison Green from the popular “Ask a Manager” blog.

The CEO of Zapier, Wade Foster, talks to SaaStr on management structures and scaling a remote team

Wade Foster, the co-founder and CEO of Zapier, spoke with Harry Stebbings on the SaaStr Podcast about how to scale a remote, startup team.

How to Give Feedback Without Sounding Like a Jerk

Sometimes, giving feedback can make you feel like a jerk -- but it doesn't have to.

How to Give Your Client Feedback Without Sounding Like a Jerk

It’s not easy giving feedback—especially to the people who pay your bills.

How to Give Your Employee Feedback Without Sounding Like a Jerk

It can be hard not to come across as a total softie—or a total jerk—when giving your employees feedback.

How to Give Your Boss Feedback Without Sounding Like a Jerk

It can be extremely intimidating to give feedback to your boss.

Lattice Book Report: Radical Candor by Kim Scott

Put simply, this book shows you how a good boss behaves -- something that too often sounds like a pipe dream but doesn’t have to be.

The Value of Self, Manager, Peer, and Upward Feedback in a Performance Review Cycle

Review cycles are an opportunity to take a step back and think about what’s working and what can be improved, on the individual, team, and company levels.

Performance Management

How to use public and private goals for employee development

How do you navigate meeting company objectives while still achieving the more detailed goals employees personally want to accomplish and develop at work?

Performance Management

That moment when your company needs an employee performance management system

There’s always a moment when you realize your company’s employee performance management system needs to change.

Constructive Feedback Should Always Be a Discussion

For managers, providing feedback can be daunting— especially when that feedback isn’t entirely positive.

Managers, Here's How to Give Feedback

Feedback helps employees improve their workplace performance and develop their skill set.

The What, Why, and How of Giving Praise

Praise is a small thing that can have an enormous impact both on employees as individuals, and on the culture of the company at large.

Create a master checklist for onboarding new employees

How do you create your onboarding checklist that fits within your company culture and ensures success for you and your new hire? Ask yourself these questions.

Employee-job Fit

The “employee-job fit” is the hard-to-define but undeniable click that you do or don’t see between an employee and their role.

Performance Management

The value of performance management

Effective employee performance management is what naturally leads to strong employee engagement.

Performance Management

What is performance management?

When performance management is effective, everyone is happy. But what exactly is it?

How to make friends at work

It can be tricky to know how to navigate friendships in the workplace. Luckily, we've got a few pointers.

Performance Management

Performance management for remote workers

Remote work is here to stay, with a 115% increase over the last 10 years. That means managing remote workers is a skill every manager will have to learn -- if it isn’t one already.

Managers, Here’s How to Onboard Your First Hire

Hiring someone is often just the beginning of a new process: onboarding.

Performance Management

Quick Tips for Goals/OKRs

Here's how to make effective, useful, and -- most importantly -- achievable goals.

Rainforest QA's Heather Doshay on the role of People Operations in a startup

The Head of People at Rainforest QA talks about wanting to get into HR, scaling companies, and her average day.

Why your performance reviews shouldn't surprise you...and reasons why it might

Performance reviews can be very intimidating -- studies have shown it can even put your brain in “flight or fight” mode. However, performance reviews need not produce such reactions -- mostly because you should already know what’s going to be in your performance review.

Managers, Here's How to Run a One-on-One

A 1:1 meeting is an ongoing feedback strategy to keep both the manager and the employee updated on the employee’s progress, an opportunity to develop employees’ skills, and gives the employee a chance to discuss workplace challenges with their manager.