Lattice

Lattice exposes a wide range of HR objects: users, goals, goal updates, review cycles, reviewees, reviews, feedback, updates (1:1 meeting notes), departments, and competencies. This integration covers four object types — goals, goal updates, feedback, reviews, and 1:1 updates — which together support the most directly attributable performance indicators for employees and managers. Objects such as departments, competencies, or custom attributes are available in the API but relate to organizational structure and classification rather than to individual performance behaviors. Seven KPIs were retained, selected against three criteria: ability to attribute to an identified owner by email, resistance to gaming, and balance between leading and lagging indicators.

Goal execution: distinguishing momentum from outcome

Three KPIs cover goal execution. Goal Completion Rate measures the ratio of goals marked complete over all goals due in the period. Average Goal Progress measures the current average progress percentage across active goals. Goal Update Frequency counts the number of progress notes submitted per active goal within the period.

Goal Completion Rate is the lagging anchor of this group: it confirms whether objectives were achieved, not how. Taken alone, it creates an incentive for sandbagging — an employee who sets narrow, easily achievable goals will appear to outperform a peer who commits to ambitious objectives but falls short. Average Goal Progress and Goal Update Frequency address this problem from two angles. Progress reveals where contributors stand mid-cycle, enabling intervention before it is too late. Update Frequency reveals whether contributors are actively engaging with their goals or leaving them static. A high completion rate combined with low update frequency may indicate that goals were set too conservatively or that progress reporting was back-filled at cycle end. Conversely, a high update frequency combined with declining progress is an early warning of execution difficulty, surfaced weeks before cycle close.

Goal Update Frequency has a low gaming risk compared to goal count metrics because updates require substantive text input that is visible to the goal owner's manager and, depending on configuration, to the broader team. A pattern of superficial updates inflating frequency without content change would be detectable in qualitative review.

Review cycle compliance: two distinct accountability roles

Manager Review Completion Rate measures the proportion of manager-type reviews submitted by a reviewer over the total assigned to them in the cycle. Self-Review Completion Rate measures the same ratio for employees completing their own self-assessments.

These two indicators are structurally similar but belong to different accountability domains. Self-Review Completion Rate tracks employee engagement with the performance process: a pattern of low or late submission is frequently a leading indicator of disengagement, distinct from performance output on goals. Manager Review Completion Rate tracks manager accountability in the people management process: it is a direct measure of whether managers fulfill a core formal responsibility to their direct reports. Reading the two indicators together allows HR and senior leadership to distinguish systemic process failures — where both rates fall simultaneously, suggesting a cycle design problem — from role-specific gaps, where only one rate degrades and points to a specific behavioral or capacity issue.

Manager effectiveness: the 1:1 cadence and the feedback signal

1:1 Update Frequency measures the number of 1:1 meeting notes authored by a manager per direct report pair per month. Feedback Given counts the number of feedback items authored by a user in the period, covering both managers giving feedback to direct reports and peers giving feedback to colleagues.

1:1 Update Frequency is the most direct proxy available for manager investment in individual development. Research on employee retention consistently identifies regular structured conversation between a manager and their direct report as a higher predictor of engagement than compensation adjustments; Lattice's 1:1 updates object captures whether that conversation is happening and being documented. A manager with consistently low update frequency across multiple direct reports signals a structural management gap, not an isolated incident.

Feedback Given reads differently depending on the role of the user being assessed. For managers, a low count relative to peers indicates that direct reports are receiving limited developmental input between formal review cycles. For individual contributors, a low count indicates limited participation in the peer feedback culture the organization is trying to build. In both cases, the metric measures an output behavior — feedback written and submitted — not a sentiment, which keeps attribution clean and unambiguous. The combination of Feedback Given and 1:1 Update Frequency provides a behavioral profile of management practice that no single indicator captures alone: a manager who conducts regular 1:1s but gives no structured feedback treats the conversation as a status update; one who gives feedback but skips 1:1s treats development as asynchronous, which limits dialogue.

Scope and limits of the integration

Lattice tracks whether performance management behaviors occurred, not their quality. A manager review submitted at the deadline carries the same completion rate as one submitted two weeks early with detailed competency scores. A goal marked complete does not distinguish between a stretch objective achieved under difficult conditions and a conservative target met with minimal effort. Feedback Given does not reflect the depth or developmental value of the feedback authored. These qualitative dimensions require human judgment in calibration sessions and are intentionally outside the scope of automated KPI tracking.

Additionally, Lattice only captures what is recorded in the platform. Informal coaching conversations, ad-hoc feedback given verbally, and goal discussions that occur outside of Lattice's interface remain invisible to this integration. Goal progress, in particular, is self-reported and may not reflect objective completion when teams do not maintain update discipline. The reliability of all seven KPIs depends directly on the organization's platform adoption: teams with high Lattice usage will produce meaningful signals; teams that use the tool only to satisfy HR deadlines will produce data that reflects compliance rather than performance.