Announcements

An Update on How Lattice Will Show Up in the Fight Against Racism

June 20, 2022
 — by 
lattice team
Lattice Team

In June of 2020, the world reacted to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery with Black Lives Matter protests. Many companies made commitments and pledges to do more to help end racism and social injustice, Lattice included. In our post "How Lattice Will Show Up in the Fight Against Racism," we committed to supporting anti-racism groups through contributions and to never tolerate racist behavior in our organization.

We leaned in and listened to our employees to help determine new opportunities that would support our commitment to creating a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace and community.

We'd like to share our progress — the work that we are proud of as well as the work that still has a journey ahead.

Our Commitments to Fighting Racism

Partnerships and Hiring

Create a formal advisory role, both to partner with our ongoing internal DE&I work and to help guide future product development in ways that support DE&I.

  • In the fall of 2020, we hired Jen Fontan as a formal advisor to meet with employee resource groups (ERGs), the Lattice People team, and Lattice Advisory Services to support immediate change on making our company and processes more inclusive.‍

Start an internship program for Summer 2021 with a specific eye toward bringing three people from underrepresented backgrounds into tech.

  • Shayna Bulluck joined Lattice as a Recruiting Programs Manager, and will be leading the development of our formal internship program. This program will begin as a pilot with select teams for the first cohort.
  • Members of our recruiting team partnered with Path Forward for a Returnship program, from which two software engineers were hired (one of which has recently been promoted). We also participated in a sponsorship of Techtonica, a tech bootcamp for women and non-binary adults with low incomes. Lattice Engineers volunteered their time to support the cohort on projects, and Lattice interviewed members of the cohort and brought on one intern for 6 months. We recently extended a full-time offer to the intern we brought on.

Use platforms specifically designed to source candidates from underrepresented groups.

  • Lattice has used several new tools and platforms — including job posting and database Tech Ladies, job board and sourcing list Power to Fly, job board Rise, and Gem Analytics, which allows us to assess whether people move through each stage of the process equally and equitably.

Update our About Us page to amplify our DE&I efforts and appeal to a broader group of candidates.

  • We have added our diversity statistics and a listing for our ERGs, and linked to the original commitments blog post on our About Us page. We will continue to update this page and other pages on our company site to highlight our ongoing work around DE&I.

Conduct ongoing interviewing training for all Lattice employees around bias in interviewing.

  • All Lattice employees participating in the hiring process are required to complete training to understand best practices and expectations while interviewing. We have also implemented the use of interviewing scorecards, which are required for all candidates by all members included in the interview process. These ongoing training initiatives help ensure we are mitigating bias in the hiring process.

Employee Education

Host internal allyship and unconscious bias workshops to better educate our employees.

  • We are continuing to find opportunities to incorporate DE&I education resources into our long-term learning strategy for all employees.

Conduct manager training and provide resources related to DE&I.

  • We hosted a voluntary "Behaviors of Inclusion" training with LifeLabs in February 2022 (FY'23 Q1) to educate employees about working alongside people from historically excluded communities to achieve equity, inclusivity, and justice. These topics are also being incorporated into our learning programs.

Drive fluency in relevant ideas such as intersectionality.

  • We have begun to discuss how intersectionality in data will help to drive decisions. Intersectionality is more integrated into our safe-space monthly "Community Conversations" events.

Transparency and Accountability

Publish our compensation philosophy and conduct bi-annual pay equity reviews.

  • The People team finalized and internally shared our compensation philosophy structure and philosophy with the entire company, and ran its first fiscal cycle during FY'23 Q1.
  • Lattice conducts pay equity analysis annually and whenever there are significant shifts in our compensation strategy.

Publish our diversity statistics and initiatives publicly.

  • The People team shared our diversity stats to the entire company internally and added these stats to our website. These stats will be updated quarterly.

Lattice Culture and Policies

Offer Lattice for free to nonprofits that are doing work on behalf of racial and social equality.

Observe Juneteenth annually.

  • Juneteenth is now a Lattice company holiday for U.S. employees, as well as a federal holiday.

Make U.S.Election Day a company-wide holiday in presidential election years.

  • Lattice offered this holiday in 2020, and our People team actively provided resources to the company related to voting. This is not currently an official annual company holiday, but employees are encouraged to use paid time off to vote throughout the year as needed.

Create opportunities for new hires to share stories and insights about their originating cultures or families.

  • All new hires are encouraged to learn more about our ERGs and join during new hire orientation. Our ERGs host monthly Community Conversations that create safe spaces for people to share experiences, and discuss ideas, and raise awareness on important topics.

Embed the core concepts of DE&I into our company Core Operating Principles.

  • Lattice has developed a DE&I philosophy and guiding principles that support our company's Core Operating Principles to drive our long-term commitment and initiatives.

Highlight our LOUD (Latticians Organizing Unity and Diversity) ERG members and host educational fireside chats during All Hands meetings.

  • Lattice featured anti-racism speakers in our All Hands meetings lineup to educate employees on different cultural perspectives and experiences. Just this year, we’ve hosted several dedicated fireside chats with speakers across the anti-racism spectrum — including poet Azure Antoinette during Black History Month and radio host Meena Kim during Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month. We’ll keep working on it, with a continuing focus within our All Hands content strategy.

Product

Improve content and features in our tools to help People teams, managers, and individual contributors learn — as well as improving data visibility, planning, and follow-through to drive action.

  • This commitment of course is the hardest of all, but we feel excited about the progress we’ve made! 
  • We’re actively working on features that could help companies adhere to the core underpinnings of pay equity. Plus, our Grow and Marketing teams also rolled out a template gallery of competencies that could help customers create a more equity-driven career matrix program across their companies. 
  • And finally, the Lattice Advisory Services team is working with DE&I consultancy Peoplism to help customers drive more equitable performance reviews and feedback. Peoplism also worked with the Marketing team on our ebook, HR's Guide to Making Performance Management More Equitable.

Employee Resource Group Program Enhancements

As we grow as a company, we realize that our DE&I needs and programs need to continue to grow with us. Here’s how we have further enhanced our ERG Program:

Increased ERG resources & support in 2021‍‍‍

  • A huge part of our internal work on these commitments has been shouldered by our ERGs made up of employees from marginalized groups. Since this work is largely volunteer-based and often goes on alongside employees’ full-time jobs, we wanted to make sure ERGs and their leaders are fully supported.

Give each ERG budgets.‍

  • Each ERG has a dedicated budget in order to provide more flexibility and autonomy for programming.‍

Compensate ERG leaders.‍

  • ERG leadership work is real work with real value to Lattice as a company and a significant time investment, and we need to treat it like that. Each ERG can create up to two compensated roles that would each be paid additional compensation annually.

Invest in ERG leadership. ‍‍

  • ERG leadership is a role that people take on  without the dedicated, formalized support that we might provide for other roles at Lattice, like onboarding or training. Now, ERG leaders have optional access to additional manager training, learning and development stipend, and mentorship.

Recognize contributions to our culture in performance reviews.‍‍‍

  • We’ve added an explicit question in performance reviews covering contributions to Lattice culture. These can be through ERGs but also through organizing team events, taking on actions from engagement survey action plans, onboarding and training, as well as other ways folks go outside of their job description to strengthen and evolve our culture. 

Building for Sustainability

While we have achieved a lot in the first 12 months of these commitments, we have truly been humbled by the work. Here at Lattice, we are now more than ever committed to fighting racism. We're still committed to using our platform and our product to inform and educate others, as well as learning and bettering ourselves.

In May 2022, we hired Global DE&I Leader Kris Bell to drive our long-term commitment and develop our Diversity, Equity & Inclusion team. We are building for impactful, sustainable change in our organization and the world. We are proud and truly humbled by the immediate impact our teams were able to contribute. Lattice is still committed to being part of the change. We're still committed to using our platform to lead by example and our product to inspire others to join us on the journey.