Technically HR: New Lattice CEO sees AI as tool to augment employee management

In January, Lattice onboarded its new CEO, Sarah Franklin, a former Salesforce executive. Franklin told employees in a note upon joining the team that the performance management platform is “prime for the age of AI, as there has never been a more important time to help companies manage people and their performance.”

Franklin told HR Brew the performance management platform aims to leverage AI to create simple ways for the technology to improve the way managers manage people and HR leaders create systems to foster “high-performing teams.”

“There’s business value in this [AI technology], and so a lot of questions people ask of AI is: One, can I trust it? Two, is it going to have value? And three, how should I be using it?” she said.

Lattice unveiled this month a new AI feature for the platform’s employee engagement surveying tool. HR teams now have the option to enable this feature that can summarize and highlight insights from the survey responses, and suggest actions to take based on the feedback.

“It’s important because this is technology that empowers us to put in step-level change, which is taking us out of the mundane rigor of data processing and putting us into the strategic thinking around what we should be doing,” she said. “This was about empowering people-leader teams to shift their focus from tactical to strategic and value-add to the organization.”

Franklin said that Lattice’s first AI tool release aims at eliminating the drudgery around data analysis that follows employee engagement surveying and provides HR teams with the ability to gather and understand unstructured data, like comments. It frees more time to develop thoughtful policy and programs that address the feedback.

“There’s a lot of fantastical, incredible use cases for the technology that [are] not clear on what the business value or outcome are. What we’re talking about here are very clear cases that have very clear business outcomes, and they’re relatively simple to put into practice,” she said

Zoom out. The engagement insights tool is the first in a series the platform is eyeing to augment how to manage people and enable companies to create high-performance teams.

Lattice is developing two additional features to release to customers later this year: performance summarization, and AI-generated custom video content.

The platform’s performance summarization tool will help managers draft better employee reviews by bringing relevant employee data to the forefront. The tool will provide managers with information about employee goals, feedback, and growth areas, as well as external data, to help inform the performance review.

Franklin said she is also excited about the development of the AI-generated custom content for onboarding.

“So few people get personal contact and the experience can feel a bit like ones and zeros with emails and slacks and text communication,” she said. “When you augment that with video and an incredibly immersive, more human-feeling communication, it’s something which helps…make the employee experience more human.”