List of Suggested Actions for Manager Action Plans

Following an Engagement Survey, managers can create Action Plans for their teams. Below is a list of some suggested actions managers could add to their plans grouped by themes.

Commitment to the company

• Recognize great work, accomplishments, and milestones. Celebrate employee wins in public channels and in team meetings.
• Send regular emails (bi-weekly suggested), summarizing your team's progress, projects, and outcomes. This creates a sense of transparency and allows for wins and contributors to be celebrated globally.
• Invest in initiatives that help improve team culture, including team-building exercises, offsite meetings, and shared celebrations.
• Company mission statements and values can help employees find meaning in their work. Ensure that your team knows the company's mission and values, and knows how their work is contributing to, and aligned with, both.
• Spend time during a team meeting reviewing how your team's goals and responsibilities tie back to the greater company goals. Give your team a chance to discuss and ask questions.
• To care about the company, employees need to see that the company cares about them. Connect with individuals on your team on their personal goals, and discuss how to support them. Explore how they might benefit from company policies such as learning stipends.
• Employees can sometimes view leadership as out of touch. Implement reverse-mentorships, where employees advise leaders on how their actions are perceived by others.
• Employees can sometimes view leadership as out of touch. Connect your team members to department or company leaders to give them an opportunity to advise leaders on how their actions are perceived by others.
• Make yourself available for questions. Instituting office hours and lunches give employees the opportunity for face-time and to ask questions.
• Invest in greater transparency. Team meetings are a great venue for you to communicate the thinking behind company initiatives and business decisions.
• Have an open and honest engagement survey results conversation with your team to uncover additional insights. Share these learnings back with your leadership team.

Engagement

• Help give a sense of purpose by helping your team members understand how their work positively impacts your customers.
• Create a celebratory spirit by creating public spaces to share praise for employee wins, like a recurring agenda item in team meetings or a space in a recurring team update email.
• Create an SME (subject matter expert) Program to ensure that employees have leadership opportunities that let them shine outside of their day-to-day jobs.
• Use your one-on-ones to dig into whether your team members are feeling under-supported in some way, or disconnected from the company mission, and address those issues individually.
• Promote work-life balance by encouraging your team to not work (send emails, messages, etc.) after hours and on weekends.
• Use Updates to track how employee sentiment changes over time, and ask your team what activities they are enthusiastic about in a given week.
• Set a "no meeting" day or days to allow employees time for deep focus and better opportunity for time management.
• Encourage mental health breaks during the day to do activities like a workout or to meditate in order to help prevent burnout.

Feeling valued

• Implement competency frameworks and have managers discuss role expectations with individual employees, both when they start a new role, and periodically as work changes.
• Implement a program where you give your reports the opportunity to pursue one independent project per quarter. These assignments give employees the chance to leverage their unique skills and learn new ones.
• Create growth plans with your employees consisting of the skills and talents they want to develop. Actively track these plans to ensure that employees are updating progress.
• Implement competency frameworks and discuss role expectations with individual employees, both when they start a new role, and periodically as work changes.
• Rewards, incentives, and gifts are a great way to recognize and motivate employees. Consider offering them ad hoc or on a recurring basis.
• Not every role has a highly visible output. Ask employees to provide a weekly update on what they've accomplished and what they're working on. They can share these updates with teammates, too.
• Encourage employees to use Lattice's Feedback tool weekly to help their coworkers develop. Managers should lead by example.
• Consider a no-interruption rule to ensure every employee has an opportunity to share their thoughts.
• Not all employees feel comfortable speaking up in meetings. Encourage your team to share what's on their mind in writing, verbally, or otherwise.
• After creating your action plans, communicate them to your team and connect them back to survey results, so that employees know they are being heard.
• Create a celebratory spirit by creating public spaces to share praise for employee wins, like a recurring agenda item in team meetings or a space in a recurring team update email.
• Send regular emails (bi-weekly suggested), summarizing your team's progress, projects, and outcomes. This creates a sense of transparency and allows for wins and contributors to be celebrated globally.
• Praise from peers helps empower belonging. Challenge your reports to recognize at least one peer a week, be it in writing or in person.

Fit and belonging

• Openly discuss and embrace diversity in working styles, including introducing work style and strengths assessments such as MBTI, StrengthsFinder, or similar. Review your team member's preferences and identities, and create opportunities to take advantage of those differences.
• A low score on this question often means you need to pay closer attention to diversity & inclusion initiatives. Help underrepresented employees (ie: culturally diverse, women, LGBTQ+, parents, etc.) feel supported by creating Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Encourage employees to lead the ERGs, and leaders to sponsor them.
• Celebrate non-standard holidays and events (such as Black History Month, Equal Pay Day, Pride Month, etc.) by bringing in speakers, setting aside time in team meetings, or hosting a social event with your team and your company ERGs.
• Ensure that your team embodies your company values by tying feedback to them, including them in team communications, and linking activities and rewards to them.
• Help give a sense of purpose by helping your team members understand how their work positively impacts your customers.
• Recognize great work, accomplishments, and milestones. Celebrate employee wins in public channels and in team meetings.
• Create an employee-led Diversity, Equity & Inclusion task force that is representative of the employee base and task them with sharing ideas, learnings, concerns, and ideas with the executive team.
• Have each team member create an "operating manual" on how to working with them — what their preferences are on communication, cadence, timing, tools, etc. Have each team member present their manual to the rest of the team and keep all manuals updated and accessible.
• Lead internal meetings by asking team members to share a personal check-in. Small teams can go around the room, while large teams can divide into groups of 3-4 to give everyone a chance to share.

Job satisfaction

• Recognize great work, accomplishments, and milestones. Celebrate employee wins in public channels and in team meetings.
• Create growth plans with your employees consisting of the skills and talents they want to develop. Actively track these plans to ensure that employees are updating progress.
• Weekly one-on-one meetings give you a way to diagnose and address engagement issues. These meetings should be used to regularly check on how employees are doing.
• If a deep dive into comments reveals a problem with communication, openly discuss and embrace diversity in working styles, including introducing work style and strengths assessments such as MBTI, StrengthsFinder, or similar. Review your team member's preferences and identities, and create opportunities to take advantage of those differences.
• If a deep dive into comments reveals a lack of collaboration, consider running a team goals alignment exercise that helps your team recognize their shared direction and plan how to achieve their goals together.
• If a deep dive into comments reveals a lack of personal connection, foster deeper bonds by bringing your team together outside of work. Field days, dinners, and team outings can help build relationships.
• One of the most critical aspects of management is to set expectations around roles, responsibilities, and individual and team goals. Ensure you have an effective framework to ensure you are setting appropriate expectations with your team.
• Use updates to capture roadblocks that team members are facing. Respond to those roadblocks directly, and bring them up in their next one-on-one.
• Create growth plans with your employees consisting of the skills and talents they want to develop. Actively track these plans to ensure that employees are updating progress.
• Create opportunities for your team to meet with and learn from other teams in the company by hosting combined team meetings with another manager. Have team members present on their work such that both teams benefit from the updates.

Management

• Encourage employees to use Lattice's Feedback tool weekly to help their coworkers develop. Managers should lead by example.
• Create growth plans with your employees consisting of the skills and talents they want to develop. Actively track these plans to ensure that employees are updating progress.
• Weekly one-on-one meetings give you a way to review development progress and growth plans. These meetings should be used to should regularly check on how employees are doing.
• Employee expectations are shifting to more frequent feedback and reviews. If you don't already have a semiannual performance review cycle, consider adding a lighter-weight review between the annual cycle that currently exists.
• Feedback is only useful if it's delivered often, and you need to follow up to track progress. Use Lattice's feedback tools, and create reminders for yourself to remember to give frequent feedback.
• Use updates as a way to stay informed on your team members' progress, and reserve one-on-ones for them to set the agenda and drive the conversation. Encourage them to share how you can support them in achieving their goals.
• Hire a coach or consultant to conduct a 360-degree assessment for managers that scored low, and to work with them on identifying and addressing areas of concern for their teams, peers, and leaders.
• Identify a senior manager whose style and results you admire and form a mentorship relationship with that person, asking for their input and coaching around challenges you are facing.
• Review your method for setting team goals. Set a regular cadence to review team goals with your team and get their feedback to ensure they are up to date and accurate.
• Share team goals out to every team member, put them into Lattice, and make them part of one-on-one meetings going forward. If OKRs and goals are front and center to your team's success, they'll be more clearly visible to everyone on the team.
• Weekly one-on-one meetings give you an opportunity to provide actionable feedback. These meetings should be used to should regularly check on how employees are doing.
• One-on-ones are the most important meetings of the week. Use recurring talking points in one-on-ones to regularly provide your team members with actionable feedback.
• Send regular emails (bi-weekly suggested) to your team, summarizing recent updates you have received from leadership. This establishes visibility into the progress and updates of the senior leaders in the company.
• Make yourself available for questions. Instituting office hours and lunches give employees the opportunity for face-time and to ask questions.
• Reference your competency framework to understand the technical expectations of your role and create a growth plan to address the gaps in your knowledge.
• Openly discuss and embrace diversity in technical abilities. Conduct skill mapping exercises to identify where you and your team members spike in specific technical areas, and use those exercises to capture the gaps in your technical knowledge. Carve out time to learn these technical skills independently, or from your team members.
• Seek out a coach through an on-demand coaching platform (if your company has access to one) or use your development budget (if you have one) on an independent coach.
• Use your development budget (if you have one) on training sessions focused on decision making and prioritization.
• One-on-ones are the most important meetings of the week. Use recurring talking points in one-on-ones to ask your team members what they need from you to be successful.
• One of the best ways to support your team is to provide them with thoughtful feedback. Commit to giving your team members feedback on a regular basis (start with once per week for each individual) to show them you're invested in their development.
• Have employees set at least one "stretch" goal per quarter that's aspirational in nature. This goal should ideally tie to the part of their job they are most enthusiastic about.
• Encourage employees to pursue learning and development opportunities, particularly if your company offers a development stipend.
• Check-in with employees regarding their roles and responsibilities at least once a quarter, to identify how to best align their work with their strengths and desired areas of development.
• One of the most critical aspects of management is to set expectations around roles, responsibilities, and individual and team goals. Use a consistent framework to ensure you are setting these expectations with your team.
• Growth comes from feedback. Ensure you are giving feedback in one-on-ones and ad-hoc. Encourage your team to also request feedback from their peers.
• Once team OKRs are set, share them out to every team member, put them into Lattice, and make them part of 1:1 meetings going forward. If OKRs and goals are front and center to your team's success, they'll be more clearly visible to everyone on the team.
• Set a "no meeting" day or days to allow employees time for deep focus and better opportunity for time management.
• Openly discuss and embrace diversity in working styles, including introducing work style and strengths assessments such as MBTI, StrengthsFinder, or similar. Review your team member's preferences and identities, and create opportunities to take advantage of those differences.

Self-efficacy

• Create growth plans with your employees consisting of the skills and talents they want to develop. Actively track these plans to ensure that employees are updating progress.
• Encourage employees to pursue learning and development opportunities, particularly if your company offers a development stipend.
• Growth comes from feedback. Ensure you are giving feedback in one-on-ones and ad-hoc. Encourage your team to also request feedback from their peers.
• Use your one-on-ones to set expectations and check on progress. This is also a great opportunity to revisit job expectations and align on growth areas with your team.
• Give employees clarity. Have them set goals that are specific and measurable. When things aren't going well, you should be able to provide feedback along the way.
• Implement competency frameworks and discuss role expectations with individual employees, both when they start a new role, and periodically as work changes.
• If a deep dive into comments reveals that employees require certain technology or tools to be more effective in their work, make a case for additional technology or operational budget, evaluate vendors, and make the purchase.
• If a deep dive into comments reveals that employees are stretched thin, identify ways to reduce or redistribute workload or make a case for additional headcount.
• Make it easier for employees to see how their work contributes to the bigger picture. OKRs help make this clear because of their tiered approach.
• Company mission statements and values can help employees find meaning in their work. Ensure that your team knows the company's mission and values, and knows how their work is contributing to, and aligned with, both.
• Recognition fosters pride. Celebrate employee wins in public channels and in all-hands meetings.
• Set a "no meeting" day or days to allow employees time for deep focus and better opportunity for time management.
• Are there obstacles or inefficiencies preventing employees from doing their best work? Discuss these in your recurring one-on-ones.
• Check-in with employees regarding their roles and responsibilities at least once a quarter, to identify how to best align their work with their strengths and desired areas of development.
• Have employees set at least one "stretch" goal per quarter that's aspirational in nature. This goal should ideally tie to the part of their job they are most enthusiastic about.
• If a deep dive into comments reveals employees feel their work is a negative challenge, examine whether there are obstacles or inefficiencies preventing employees from enjoying their work.
• Implement a program where you give your reports the opportunity to pursue one independent project per quarter. These assignments give employees the chance to leverage their unique skills and learn new ones.

Team Culture

• Give employees time to learn from their coworkers directly. Invite team members to lead peer-to-peer lunch-and-learn sessions on topics related to work or a personal hobby or interest.
• Openly discuss and embrace diversity inabilities. Conduct skill mapping exercises to identify which employees are knowledgeable in specific areas, and match those employees with coworkers who need support via mentorships or office hours.
• When it comes to building trust on a team, giving ownership and credit goes a long way. Identify and appoint subject matter experts on your team that other team members can turn to for answers to common challenges.
• Create more shared and team-oriented goals to encourage teammates to appreciate one another's efforts, help each other through challenges, and "like" and "comment" on goal updates.
• Implement competency frameworks and discuss role expectations with individual employees, both when they start a new role, and periodically as work changes.
• Implement competency frameworks and discuss role expectations with individual employees, both when they start a new role, and periodically as work changes.
• Are there obstacles or inefficiencies preventing employees from doing their best work? Discuss these in your recurring one-on-ones.
• Celebrate wins within the team. These smaller-group recognition moments will highlight team member accomplishments that may otherwise go unnoticed.
• Create more shared and team-oriented goals to encourage teammates to appreciate one another's efforts, help each other through challenges, and "like" and "comment" on goal updates.

Psychological safety

• Projects or initiatives should be followed by a post-mortem meeting. Institute a post mortem process, and in advance of the session, have organizers circulate a survey asking for feedback.
• Give employees a means of submitting questions or concerns anonymously if they don't feel comfortable speaking up. Team meetings can provide an opportunity to address these concerns.
• Make asking for help part of your team norms. As part of their regular status updates, ask employees to identify where they need additional support.
• When projects fall short, encourage employees to single out where checks and processes fell short, not people. Make the "blameless" model part of your culture.
• Recognize employees for trying new things and taking risks — even when things don't go well. Lead by example and make it a cultural norm.
• Encourage your direct reports to take on at least one experimental project per quarter. Celebrate the effort and creativity that goes into the projects, and the learnings that come out — while success is welcome, it's not the expectation.
• When projects fall short, encourage employees to single out where checks and processes fell short, not people. Make the "blameless" model part of your culture.
• Make sure you are following the golden rule of management: praise in public, criticize in private. Employees will be more comfortable taking risks without worrying about mistakes being broadcast across the team.
• Foster an environment where creative thinking is encouraged. Make this philosophy part of your culture, be it through deliberate creative activities or time dedicated during team meetings to outside-the-box thinking.
• A low score on this question often means you need to pay closer attention to diversity & inclusion initiatives. Help underrepresented employees (ie: culturally diverse, women, LGBTQ+, parents, etc.) feel supported by encouraging them to join or create Employee Resource Groups (ERGs).
• Openly discuss and embrace diversity in working styles, including introducing work style and strengths assessments such as MBTI, StrengthsFinder, or similar. Review your team member's preferences and identities, and create opportunities to take advantage of those differences.
• Revisit your onboarding process. How can you make new hires feel more included? Introduce new practices, such as having team members take new hires out to coffee or lunch, or pairing new hires up with "onboarding buddies."
• Work relationships improve morale and collaboration. Encourage employees to expense coffee dates with colleagues or new hires to bond and get to know each other better.
• Make asking for help a team norm. During weekly meetings, have direct reports share what they're working on and where they need help. Lead this exercise by asking for help with your own initiatives.
• Employees are more inclined to collaborate when they're working toward the same end. Ensure that team members are aware how their individual goals contribute and work together to accomplish team and organizational goals.
• Break up politics and silos by organizing team initiatives and social events. This helps team members build empathy for each other and collaborate better.
• Incorporate company values into your feedback and reviews. Make it clear that values like humility and integrity are just as important in measuring employee performance.
• Lack of clarity surrounding roles and responsibilities can lead employees to reach beyond the scope of their role. Implement competency frameworks and discuss role expectations with individual employees, both when they start a new role, and periodically as work changes.

Team Learning

• Projects or initiatives should be followed by a post-mortem meeting. Institute a post mortem process, and in advance of the session, have organizers circulate a survey asking for feedback.
• Challenge your processes regularly. Set the expectation that every team process is reviewed on a regular (try biannual to start) basis, and that feedback is collected from everyone involved.
• Allocate budget for L&D, conferences, etc, and set goals around usage of budget across the team. Add a question to one-on-ones and updates: "Where do you think we could be seeking out more information as a team?"
• Work relationships improve morale and collaboration. Encourage employees to expense coffee dates with colleagues or new hires to bond and get to know each other better.
• Identify a senior manager whose style and results you admire and form a mentorship relationship with that person, asking for their input and coaching around challenges you are facing.
• Ensure your team has access to customer feedback and that there is an opportunity to review it, discuss it, and suggest changes to products or processes via appropriate channels.
• Involve more team members in the planning process. By including more voices in the initial phases of planning (whether it be new processes, initiatives, or goals) you introduce new perspectives that might challenge long-standing norms.
• Dedicating time to reflect on projects together can unearth critical insights about team communication, creativity, progress tracking, and more. Host project retrospectives with key stakeholders across teams to gather learnings for future collaboration.
• To help your team to be more creative or innovative, you may have to get them out of their standard work routine. Set aside time for regular team or department offsites that allow your team to brainstorm and learn together, particularly around important changes.
• As part of your project timelines, host a cross-functional review forum to allow a project team to review their progress, get feedback, and crowdsource solutions to problems or questions they have.
• Add specific points in the agenda of your internal planning meetings to challenge the assumptions and decisions you have made. This helps ensure every decision considers all potential side effects.
• When projects fall short, encourage employees to single out where checks and processes fell short, not people. Make the "blameless" model part of your culture.
• Create and identify meetings or communication channels for brainstorming and bouncing ideas off of each other with no judgment. Innovation often comes out of speaking out and testing assumptions.
• Foster an environment where creative thinking is encouraged. Make this philosophy part of your culture, be it through deliberate creative activities or time dedicated during team meetings to outside-the-box thinking.

Work relationships

• Employees are especially susceptible to loneliness when starting a new role. Starting a "buddy" or mentor program gives new hires someone to talk to on day one.
• Remote employees often feel like they're on the outside looking in. Bring them into the fold by leveraging communication tools and organizing virtual social events.
• Create growth plans with your employees consisting of the skills and talents they want to develop. Actively track these plans to ensure that employees are updating progress.
• Partner with other managers to make random, cross-departmental coffee dates part of your culture so employees can build connections at work. Make it taboo to “talk shop” during these informal meetings.
• Weekly one-on-one meetings give you a way to diagnose and address engagement issues. These meetings should be used to regularly check on how employees are doing.
• Bring employees together in social situations that don't involve work. Field days, dinners, and other outings encourage team members to talk about more than their day-to-day.
• Give employees the opportunity to lead a lunch and learn about a personal project that’s near and dear to their heart. This can be a small session or you can partner with other managers to share learnings across teams.
• Lead internal meetings by asking team members to share a personal check-in. Small teams can go around the room, while large teams can divide into groups of 3-4 to give everyone a chance to share.
• Partner with other managers to make random, cross-departmental coffee dates part of your culture so employees can build connections at work. Make it taboo to “talk shop” during these informal meetings.
• Share regular updates summarizing your team's projects and initiatives. This gives your team a clear view of progress and who the subject matter experts are.
• Give new hires clarity early on. As part of your team onboarding process, ask other team members to present on their areas of expertise and the initiatives and processes they own.
• Employees need to know where to go for help. Establish clear escalation paths so employees can properly get the support they need when they have a knowledge gap.
• Make "shout-outs" a part of your team meeting culture. Have each team member recognize someone in each of your weekly meetings, for example.
• Recognize accomplishments and milestones in front of the whole team. Celebrate employee wins in public channels and in team meetings.
• Help employees build meaningful relationships with their peers through team-building offsites and activities. Make these inclusive so team members don't feel left out.

Diversity climate

• Work with your HRBP to set clear diversity and inclusion goals and share them with your team. Partner with a sourcing platform that connects companies with diverse candidates. Check-in on progress at team meetings like you would other business targets.
• Empower your team by encouraging them to join or create Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). These help employees spread awareness of the issues facing BIPOC, LGBTQ employees, working parents, and other groups.
• Employees can sometimes view leadership as out of touch. Connect your team members to department or company leaders to give them an opportunity to advise leaders on how their actions are perceived by others.
• Educate yourself and your team on the company's commitment to diversity, inviting leaders to come to speak with your team about it, or requesting that it be brought up more frequently in company-wide communications and events.

Fairness

• Sign up for a course on review-writing technique, including the importance of specific examples when writing reviews. Updates, tracked goals and ongoing feedback can make a big difference by providing you with reminders about your team members' performance, and help ensure that employees aren't caught by surprise.
• When evaluating your team members in performance reviews, recognize that unconscious bias may be at work. Consider getting trained on unconscious bias, or asking for such training from your company. Your fair evaluations ensure equity in ratings across the company.
• You can only see and know so much about your team members' work life. In advance of performance conversations, ask your team members' peers for feedback to ensure you get a complete picture of their performance.
• When evaluating your team members in performance reviews, recognize that unconscious bias may be at work. Consider getting trained on unconscious bias, or asking for such training from your company. Your fair evaluations ensure equity in ratings across the company.
• Work with your HRBP to set clear diversity and inclusion goals and share them with your team. Partner with a sourcing platform that connects companies with diverse candidates. Check in on progress at team meetings like you would other business targets.