Workday HCM vs Lattice: Which is a better fit?

Christos: My name is Christos. I am a senior compensation analyst, and I work for Braze Incorporated. And the headcount, I can give as well, which is 1,500 employees. Workday HCM, I would give a four out of five. Workday HCM is used for our payroll services within the company as just a generality. We use it to keep track of leave of absence, time off, bonus requests, just various different HR systems, things that we need. However, now we are using it to store salary bands, and that's more of where I come into play, where we're building out bands and storing them within job descriptions and job profiles within each individual employee and department. I just really enjoy the user-friendliness of the platform. It's really easy to navigate between the landing pages. Even for the compensation team, we have our comp dashboard, which allows us to pull this various reports that we're looking for, so that's very helpful and intuitive. But even as a user of just even being an employee of the company, it's very easy to go through my compensation, my pay history, my pay stubs, my bonus cycles, even just my managerial tree. It's an easy to navigate system, which I can appreciate. Especially if someone hasn't seen it before, it's easy to teach. I'm not necessarily the systems expert when it comes to loading in data and whatnot, but we do use a separate system for our comp cycles, which I understand can happen in Workday. However, from my experience, the reason why it wasn't a five out of five is just the way that the two systems read off each other. For me, Workday, even though it's intuitive when it comes to loading data, it's very fickle in certain circumstances since I've used it for the last three years, and I would just like to see a little bit more improvement in being able to be more modified towards these new systems that we're using, like the AQMS and the Oracles. I just found it rather difficult to... It's been the same for a while. I'd like to see a little bit more uplift when it comes to the loading of data. However, with that being said, I know there's room for improvement just from the platform's perspective on that, from a system side.

Lucien: My name is Lucien. I'm the VP of Go To Market. The company is Liven, which is a 200-employee company in Australia. And I would give Lattice a four out of five. So prior to Lattice, we were using a tool called Officevibe, and Officevibe is a fantastic tool for poll surveys, but we really wanted more functionality and features. A number of things that we wanted to do in the business, like one-on-ones and performance reviews, weren't in Officevibe at that time, so that prompted us to start looking into the market and understanding tools that had a poll survey capability but, in addition to that, had additional functionality specifically around performance management and one-on-one management. The primary reason we chose Lattice is that Slack is actually a lead investor in the platform. The reason that that's important for us is Slack and Lattice built a fantastic Slack integration. So when we're bringing technology into our business, obviously Slack is our digital town hall, so to speak, and our employees are in there every day, so we always want to ensure that a platform builds a Slack integration that enables our employees to not have to leave Slack but still be able to use the tool. So that's the primary reason that it won over a number of platforms with similar functionality. And then, as I said, we were looking in the market for performance management and one-on-ones, and Lattice had both of those features, and those features were very strong. When we brought Lattice into the business, I have to admit it was quite challenging, and the reason for that is that it just requires a lot of change management. So we brought in the technology really excited about what it could do, but if your company isn't doing one-on-ones effectively, then, of course, the tech isn't ever going to be used to its full extent. So the pulse surveys were fantastic. We plugged those in, and they were going straight away, and we were gathering feedback like we were previously, but the performance management features really required us to circle back and start implementing change management strategies with our employees to make sure they understood the impact and importance of doing the things that we wanted them to do before, of course, using Lattice to make those things better. So the tool itself is very usable. Again, the integration to Slack makes it a real game-changer, but the change management piece is something that we underestimated when we brought in the tool. If you're thinking about getting Lattice for your business, I do think it's a fantastic tool. What I would say, and this is really important for businesses that have used pulse surveys before and really value the qualitative data side of things. So with Officevibe, the tool we used prior to Lattice, it actually had a fantastic mechanism for prompting feedback. So what I mean by that is not only scoring five out of five for are you happy, but prompting a response. And actually, inadvertently, a challenge that we didn't see initially with Lattice was because the Slack integration was so seamless, so well-built, it was almost too easy to finish, and what ended up happening is we had a lot less qualitative feedback from our pulse surveys. We had a lot of data and a lot of dashboards, but we didn't have the qualitative feedback that we actually thought was incredibly valuable to understand, "Okay, well, this is the number, but what are the exact reasons, and then how can we follow up with that person on those particular reasons?" So my advice to anyone looking to bring Lattice into the business, brilliant for performance management. I know that the HRIS is being built and deployed as well, which is great, but on the pulse survey side, if you value qualitative feedback, just make sure you take that into consideration because, again, that's something we didn't necessarily think at the beginning and over time it did prompt us to consider whether we go back to Officevibe just purely because of the value of the social listening of our employees.