On September 19, Lattice drew thousands of HR professionals for the fourth annual Resources for Humans Virtual Conference. The event featured insights from more than 50 thought leaders and innovators across the HR landscape. Speakers addressed topics including artificial intelligence, performance management, and C-Suite alignment — all supporting this year’s theme, a culture of excellence.
Want to relive the event? You can replay the sessions on demand. Here are our top three takeaways from this year’s conference.
1. Lattice announced a new HRIS launching in 2024.
Lattice CEO Jack Altman shared the company’s biggest announcement in its eight-year history, revealing a plan to deliver an HR information system (HRIS) built to work seamlessly with the Lattice Talent Suite. The new offering will be available to people teams in early 2024.
“Our vision for an HRIS is a world where every HR process — from the way you are onboarded, to the way you’re promoted, to the way you take vacation, to the way you change managers — it’s all connected back to the central belief that people are at the core,” Altman explained.
"An HRIS is the backbone of every HR team, but Lattice HRIS can be the backbone of your entire workforce. Lattice is where achievement happens,” said Eric Schuchman, Lattice’s chief product officer. “Our products, now including Lattice HRIS, work seamlessly with the other HR tools you currently use to tie every aspect of your employee experience together — helping your company adapt to change, exceed goals, and outperform your competitors."
Lattice’s HRIS will empower HR leaders to bring about profound change within their organizations by simplifying their tech stack and giving people leaders and employees intuitive software they’ll love to use daily.
Ryan Hinshaw, director of product management for Lattice HRIS, shared that the platform was designed with a people-first approach. “We engineered our platform from the ground up to put employee data at the center and create a living graph of your workforce,” which includes workflows, document storage, onboarding, data reporting, and more.
Lattice is also partnering with some of the most highly respected companies in the payroll, recruiting, and identity management fields — Gusto, ADP, Okta, and Greenhouse — to support HR teams in all their functions, from onboarding new hires to delivering paychecks on time. The Lattice platform will continue to support existing product integrations with Jira, Slack, Salesforce, and other best-of-breed software.
For now, US-based companies with 50-1000 employees can join the waitlist for Lattice HRIS or learn more about the product.
2. A culture of excellence starts within HR.
In a session with Lattice’s Chief People Officer Cara Brennan Allamano, renowned leadership expert Simon Sinek discussed the link between high performance and fostering a culture of excellence.
“If you look at high-performance organizations, they tend to be highly team-oriented, values-based, and team-focused, which then yields high performance,” said Sinek, who is the author of bestselling books The Infinite Game, Start With Why, and Leaders Eat Last. “When I hear ‘culture of excellence,’ it sounds like it's an excellent place to work.”
He explained that a culture of excellence requires performance and trust — the permission and support to do one’s best work while trusting team members enough that they’re empowered to do their own work and make decisions as well.
Sinek outlined two crucial steps HR teams can take to build and sustain a culture of excellence: hiring the right people and developing human skills.
“Too many companies do not have enough curriculum to teach people things like how to give and receive feedback, how to be an active listener, how to have difficult conversations, or how to have an effective confrontation,” Sinek noted. “We just throw people into these positions and expect them to be good at it. We have to teach people human skills if we want them to be good at them.”
And when HR teams get bogged down in the details of their people programs, Sinek encouraged them to anchor themselves in their mission and values.
"We're here to see the people in our organization rise,” said Sinek. “Our job is to figure out all the ways — formal, informal — all of the ways that we can work to see that our people can be the best versions of themselves.”
3. Alignment with the C-Suite requires mutual trust.
Allamano also led a conversation with members of Lattice’s new Chief People Officers Council on how they build productive, trusting relationships with the rest of executive leadership.
“Trust is often built in small increments over time,” explained Gianna Driver, chief human resources officer at Exabeam. “When we can go to hard places and lean into conflict — but be really mindful and thoughtful about how we do it — most often there's a stronger and more trusting relationship on the other side.”
The group agreed that the goal of developing trusting relationships isn’t just to push HR’s agenda, but broadly to build strategic partnerships and mutual understanding of each other’s goals, all of which tie directly into business outcomes.
While many HR leaders may feel inclined to wait a few quarters to gather data on the ROI of new people programs, Allamano noted that “folks who have been able to jump in and prove outcomes early are the folks who end up getting that trust from a business side.”
“It's about actually delivering value for a CEO,” said Alan Cairns, CPO at GoCardless. “Be really clear about what you want to achieve…building a roadmap that says what you're doing now, what you're going to do next, and what you'll do in the future is a great way to be able to show people the thing that matters most to them.”
Building strong one-on-one relationships with leaders across the business can help HR professionals be seen as crucial strategic partners for delivering business outcomes.
“Trust is not a given,” explained Valentina Gissin, CPO at Garner Health. “When you actually earn it, not only are you able to be just as strategic and make just as much impact, but you actually can see it through and know that it's happening and track the impact.”
By tracking that impact and building the confidence to demonstrate it, HR leaders can position themselves as a trusted partner, prove ROI, and deliver better outcomes across the business.
“Any business decision — whether it's a new product, a release, a strategy — involves people,” said Driver. “And that is then our opportunity to enter the conversation.”
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Those were just some of the highlights from this year’s virtual conference. To get the full picture, replay the sessions on demand.
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