Building a high-performance and high-engagement workplace with mPulse Mobile

mPulse Mobile offers engagement and education solutions that help healthcare providers communicate effectively with their customers. The company’s larger mission is to help everyone live their best, healthiest lives — a goal that includes both mPulse Mobile’s customers and employees. Tiana Schliser, the company’s Director of HR and Talent Acquisition, works to carry out this mission each and every day at mPulse Mobile. “I see myself as a social worker,” she says. “At the end of the day, my team helps people and supports our employees by creating a more humane workplace.”

Tiana manages a team of six, composed of three HR business partners and three recruiters. Together, they work to build an exceptional end-to-end experience for the company’s 230 employees. That employee number has grown considerably in the last few years thanks to steady hiring and a few acquisitions. And yet, even as the company has scaled and switched from an in-person to a hybrid-flexible workplace, Tiana says mPulse Mobile hasn’t lost its family feel and collaborative roots. 

“Even though we’ve expanded to three offices and now have employees all over the United States, we’ve still found ways to bring our team together,” says Tiana. “We always have cameras on in the virtual world, and we meet as an entire company on Wednesdays. Coming together as a team is something that has stayed with the culture since day one and will continue to be a part of our culture moving forwards.”

Today, mPulse Mobile looks much different than the company Tiana joined over three years ago. In 2019, the company used two separate HR software solutions for engagement surveys and performance reviews, but Tiana felt neither met the company’s needs. Tiana was hired to introduce new performance management and employee engagement programs, and she knew the first step would  required finding an effective and user-friendly HR solution to drive the success of those new initiatives. 

During the evaluation process, Tiana thought Lattice stood out thanks to its performance management tools, like reviews and feedback, and its employee engagement survey tools. “I really felt Lattice was a more robust option than the other vendors we considered. Lattice is focused on performance management in many different ways, and being able to leverage Lattice for our 30/60/90-day onboarding surveys and employee development plans was a big selling point for me,” shares Tiana.

For an additional layer of complexity, mPulse Mobile had acquired a few companies that lacked any formal goal setting or performance management processes. Tiana knew Lattice could give the entire company the structure and framework it needed and help every employee feel more connected to mPulse Mobile’s culture and mission. Luckily, Tiana already had the unwavering support of her executive team and board of directors, so making the business case for Lattice was simple.  

Using Lattice at mPulse Mobile

Tiana and her team started using Lattice right away to administer annual employee engagement surveys and monthly pulse surveys. In one such survey, the mPulse Mobile People team discovered employees had mixed reviews regarding their employee onboarding process. 

“The surveys basically told us that there was too much information. Employees couldn't grasp it all in just two hours. They felt that wasn't enough time to get through everything,” states Tiana. Using that feedback, Tiana created what the mPulse Mobile HR team now calls the “New Hire Orientation Journey.” This journey grouped onboarding topics into six different, bite-sized modules on topics like company history, employee benefits, and even how to use the Lattice platform. 

Tiana’s next order of business was improving the company’s performance management processes. The mPulse Mobile HR team rolled out Lattice Goals to give employees more visibility into organizational objectives and ensure the overall business strategy was crystal clear.

“Initially, we had company-wide strategic initiatives, but we lacked clear goals,” Tiana explains. “To help, we started using the cascading goals feature last year, and now we have true organizational objectives that our departments and employees can use to create their goals. That's a big accomplishment for us because it's finally connecting the dots and giving our employees a more cohesive, collective goal-setting framework,” she adds.

Getting goal-setting up and running quickly was a necessity for Tiana and her team since the company relies on goals heavily during annual and mid-year performance reviews to determine an employee’s bonus. Luckily, implementing Lattice was a breeze, and the company had no issues incorporating it into its existing employee evaluation schedule. Since it’s been such a success, Tiana wants to switch her sales team to a quarterly review cycle by the end of this year.

Impact of Lattice

Since implementing Lattice, the most noticeable change for Tiana and her team has been the ease of using one people success platform for all their HR needs, rather than two point solutions that claimed to do more than they could. The mPulse Mobile team also worked to combine their historical engagement survey data with the new data they’re collecting in Lattice to maintain a holistic view of the employee experience and continue to track changes in employee sentiment over time.

“We like to keep an eye out every month to see how we're tracking on the pulse surveys so we can bump our annual engagement score up every year. In 2020, we had a score of 76. In 2021, it was 82, which is really high and way above the norm. We want to continue to keep those numbers high and our employees engaged, all while ensuring we're listening to employee feedback,” says Tiana. 

She attributes these score increases to one key Lattice feature: survey comments. Previously, mPulse Mobile’s engagement surveys only included closed-answer questions. With Lattice, mPulse Mobile employees can share additional qualitative feedback around their responses, allowing Tiana and her team to gain deeper insights into what areas of the employee experience are working well and which could be improved.

“Now, our people have a forum to leave comments that we can then use to make an impact where we need to. The more we can address concerns and make things better, the better for us. We’re able to drive better outcomes and keep our employees engaged,” says Tiana.

One such improvement Tiana and her team made based on employee feedback was the revamped onboarding process. Since introducing the “New Hire Orientation Journey,” mPulse Mobile’s new hire engagement improved almost instantly. “Our content became more digestible, our onboarding survey satisfaction scores spiked, new hire engagement improved, and we received tons of great feedback about the updates,” states Tiana. “Now, our people are receiving, digesting, and understanding the information a lot better. That's been a huge shift in the organization and has improved our onboarding program,” she adds.

And yet, Tiana says the best part of switching to Lattice is the sheer number of ways they’ve been able to use it so far. “We've been using Lattice in many different ways — like performance reviews, goals, 1:1s, and engagement surveys — and we also try to use it in ways that maybe we're not necessarily supposed to,” Tiana jokes. “We try to be creative and maximize our use of Lattice as much as we can. Every time there's a new feature, we're like, ‘Can we add that? Can we do this?’” she adds.

While Lattice Grow isn’t a new feature, it’s the latest Lattice tool Tiana and her team have set their sights on. “We're looking into adopting the Grow feature soon. We've gotten feedback from our pulse and engagement surveys that our development lacks a bit, so we’re planning to use Lattice and drive better training programs to help,” explains Tiana.

In addition to Lattice Grow, Tiana says she’s excited to eventually try everything the platform has to offer. According to Tiana, that’s what’s been so great about Lattice — there are always new products rolling out that  her team can leverage. “There are so many pieces of Lattice that we're very excited about, and we really want to continue to invest in and do more things with the platform,” she says.

Takeaways

• Lattice allowed mPulse Mobile to replace their existing point solutions with an one all-in-one people success platform.
• Using Lattice’s engagement survey comments feature, mPulse Mobile surfaced onboarding issues and helped the People team improve new hire engagement.
• Lattice’s annual engagement and pulse surveys have helped the company reach a record-breaking engagement score of 82%.
• Lattice’s cascading goals feature has helped employees feel more connected to the overall business strategy and better understand how their work impacts the business.