Managing a Remote Team Using Lattice
As an outsourced accounting provider who lives in the cloud, our entire team are remote. We used video and chat tools to collaborate as a team like Zoom and Slack, but that wasn't a complete performance management experience for us and the team.
How do our activities tie to our company goals of customer satisfaction? How do we remember what kudos we've given via Slack or on video so we can include that feedback during our employee reviews.
Enter, Lattice.
We see lots of apps, many of which look perfect at first glance and then fail to tick all of the boxes we need. Every once in a while we find one that just fits.
When I reviewed what Lattice did I found it solved an issue I really didn't know we had. The signs were there, but we didn't know what we didn't know if that makes sense.
Lattice performs 4 primary functions:
Reviews
Feedback
Goals
Check-ins
Annual reviews & Goals are common enough in HR employee management systems. We needed a solution there but were most excited about the Feedback and Check-ins features.
Feedback
We like to send the team kudos when a customer shares their experiences. Employees also share their thoughts on how other members of our team perform. We didn't have an easy way to capture that information in one place for all to see at the time, and later when you need to recall what a team member has done.
Lattice has a Gmail plug-in that allows us to enter feedback right from the email where we see the information to provide feedback about.
You also have the ability to enter the information directly in to Lattice. If you entered in your company values as we have in the system, you can tag feedback to your values. How awesome is that?
Check-ins
We have weekly 1:1 check-ins with our lead accountants that used to be handled with an email agenda that was discussed on video. It worked, but wasn't great.
Lattice lets us prepare the recurring agendas and let's the employee provide their answers in advance for us to review and discuss on the meeting. It keeps them all in one place so we can easily see what we discussed last week to make sure we're seeing progress.
Lattice is relatively new but has a great product already. I'd recommend it to any small business that needs a better way to manage their team. We are excited to see what they build in the future!
