How Mind Foundry Built a Performance-Enhancing Engagement Programme with Lattice

Challenges at Mind Foundry

As an organisation operating in the high-stakes world of AI, Mind Foundry’s people are laser-focussed on development and learning. This brings both opportunity and challenge for its small, yet agile, people team, whose goal it is to drive a great employee experience for its highly talented international team of innovators and change-makers.

Mind Foundry is creating a future where humans and AI work together to solve the world's most important problems,  by empowering its people to be the best at what they do. The people team achieves this through collaboration, continuous skills development, and a culture and working environment that encourages focus, creativity, and the achievement of shared goals. But disparate solutions and highly manual time-consuming processes stood in their way. 

“Our people programmes must always keep value front of mind—value for our people and value for our wider organisational goals,” explains Anna Roe, Chief People Officer and VP Operations at Mind Foundry. “Our old tools were not working—they became a burden. We have complex processes and a small team; we needed a system that could cope with that.”

Two years ago, Mind Foundry decided to streamline their HR technology stack. They wanted to deploy a holistic solution that would drive more value, by intrinsically linking performance, engagement, growth, compensation, and goal achievement, to deliver an exceptional employee experience and boost retention.  

“We needed a single self-serve platform. All the other providers we looked at— including Bamboo, Culture Amp, and 15five —were good at individual parts. But only Lattice was holistically good across everything,” says Anna.

Using Performance and Engagement to Boost Retention

“Retention is a big issue for all companies. When someone moves on from Mind Foundry, we’re not only losing a valued employee, but we’re also losing a huge amount of knowledge. So, we’re constantly asking ourselves whether people are happy and engaged in their role. It’s critical that as a people team, we always know what we’re doing well and what we need to do better,” says Anna.

This was the starting point for their Lattice journey.

Mind Foundry has implemented a six-monthly performance review cycle. A culture of healthy feedback assists the people team in actively seeking opportunities to help each employee contribute their unique skills and expertise to achieve collective organisational goals and ensure they feel empowered and supported to perform at their best. “We have visibility and understanding of each individual’s performance and have fostered a new level of communication that demonstrates our commitment to helping them be as effective, and as happy, as possible in their roles,” explains Anna.  

Anna believes performance and engagement are intrinsically linked. So in addition, the people team have used Lattice to build an engagement programme that is making a huge difference to total performance. Another initiative Mind Foundry has implemented is 'Shout Out Fridays', where each week employees praise and recognise each other's work via Slack and Lattice's integration. This is a great way to boost morale and engagement.

Engagement surveys help the people team build a real-time understanding of what they are doing well and what they can do better. Uncovering deeper insights on how engaged and happy people are in their roles, and any issues they may be encountering when it comes to training or management support, helps them devise programmes that make a tangible impact to employee wellbeing, happiness and performance.  

“Feedback is vital to us. It helps us create measurable, tangible targets for improvement, and helps identify the things that matter most to the employee experience, and therefore retention,” Anna explains.  Mind Foundry’s approach works—retention rates are incredibly high, with many employees over five years in tenure; a huge achievement for a company that is only eight years old.

Being able to manipulate the data for advanced insight, and make comparisons with previous surveys, also assists in focussing efforts in the right places when it comes to goal setting.

Smart Goal Setting

Mind Foundry has implemented a Goals and OKRs framework that is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound (SMART). Performance reviews and engagement surveys form an integral part of the process and help drive the right actions at the right times for focussed alignment.  

Mind Foundry’s people are team players who thrive on sharing ideas and co-creating solutions.  Setting clearly defined goals and OKRs that play to individual and team strengths maintains focus on the overriding strategy, without damaging the employee experience. This has led to outstanding achievements that can be measured and refined over time.  

“We’ve created a framework for continuous improvement. Our people are aligned around the achievement of our organisational goals, and with Lattice mapping the process out for us we’ve created the right ownership, as well as clear and achievable objectives across matrixed teams,” says Anna. “Importantly as a small people team, Lattice lets our teams self-serve the process, whilst we maintain an overall view on individual and collective achievements—this is important for growth and reward.”

Growth Conversations that Count

“Grow is a really interesting tool for us,” says Anna. “It allows the creation of career paths and development plans that add value to the employee experience. When done well, these are key retention tools. ”

Mind Foundry ties together performance, goal achievement, and data from employee surveys to support meaningful and actionable career conversations, whilst also supporting transparency and providing their highly-talented people with the development and learning experiences they crave.  “We’re empowering our people to be the best in what they do, by investing in their professional and personal growth. In turn this ensures we grow as a company as well,” Anna explains.

These conversations also feed directly into recognition and reward. “We need to get these two things right if we are to attract and retain people,” says Anna.  

Mind Foundry was previously hampered by a very manual and time-consuming process of exporting data out of various Excel spreadsheets. “Lattice Compensation has given us a much slicker process, with salary bands aligned to frameworks, and data from performance reviews empowering managers to think more holistically around recognition, reward and compensation. I no longer dread compensation cycles—this is a big win!” explains Anna.

Game-Changing Impact

Mind Foundry are delighted with the results achieved by using Lattice so far.  

“Lattice makes our people team more efficient and more valuable in terms of the success of the business as a whole,” concludes Anna. “It’s a one-stop-shop— and whilst that’s not always a good thing, and sometimes a compromise, this is not so in our case. Everything is interlinked, and having visibility over every individual’s performance, engagement, growth, and goal attainment is fantastic and helps ensure they collectively achieve our mission of solving the world’s most important problems with AI.”

Mind Foundry believes that Lattice has the potential to be game-changing for them.  It’s a business that by nature pushes systems hard, and Lattice will be no exception. The people team will continue to push the boundaries of what they can achieve by utilising new tools such as Lattice AI, which like them brings humans and machines together to solve problems.

Takeaways

• Intrinsic links between performance, engagement, growth, and compensation=a market-leading strategy for high performance.
• SMART goal setting and OKRs ensure employees align their unique skills and expertise towards organisational achievement.
• Attainment of an incredibly high retention rate in a high-stakes environment.