Introduction: Why Your Company Should Put People First

In early 2015, I experienced something of a professional crisis. The company I had worked for and loved for more than two years seemed to have lost its magic. It had quickly grown from a plucky start-up, with a vibrant company culture and clearly defined roles, to a stifling environment that was wrought with tension and a crippling lack of trust.

I remember while sitting at my desk one day, I just looked around the office and thought to myself, "What happened?"

To understand where it went wrong, we have to go back a few years. In 2013, I packed my bags, bid farewell to my 600-square-foot Manhattan apartment, and headed out to San Francisco to join this fledgling start-up. I suppose that you could describe it as risky, but I knew this company quite well. I'd been working from New York as an early-stage start-up investor, and Teespring (https://teespring.com/) was one of the companies in which I'd invested. I strongly believed that the founders and the business were brimming with potential.

My early days at Teespring represented the best of what's possible for a company culture. For one thing, we had a clear sense of purpose that was uniformly shared; we existed to help Internet creators make businesses out of their passions. We all knew what we wanted to accomplish as a company, why that would be valuable to the world, and what our roles were in making that a reality.

Another cornerstone of our culture was that we were all learning and growing at a rapid pace. Because the company was evolving so quickly, we were all constantly being thrown into new situations and we were determined to figure them out. As a result, most of us were improving our crafts and broadening our knowledge faster than at any other point in our careers. This was extremely gratifying and engaging, which created a virtuous cycle: invest more, learn more, feel great, be motivated to invest more, and so on.

Finally, because of our clear mission, shared values, and full engagement in our work, we built incredibly close friendships and a strong collective community. This too had a self-reinforcing dynamic, where our care for one another led to deeper investment in our work and vice versa. Even today, nearly eight years later, I am still friends with many of those early colleagues from Teespring.

Somewhere along the way, however, this company which my teammates and I held so dear took a bad turn. The culture shifted from one of clarity, optimism, and community to one of scattered priorities, fear, and territorialism. Our executive team meetings, which had once been focused on solving our most important problems, became full of interpersonal tension and disagreements about important strategic issues. Teams across the company became more siloed, and their connections became increasingly tenuous. We underinvested in HR and people management practices, so people didn't have clear goals or expectations, feedback was irregular or nonexistent, and the company didn't do enough to understand how its employees were feeling so that we could make course corrections.

In short, our culture lost its way. It was against this backdrop that the idea for Lattice was born (https://lattice.com/).

Eric Koslow was another early Teespring employee (he'll remind anyone who will listen that he was just a little bit earlier than me), and he and I had become good friends. Eric was Teespring's lead engineer, but he was also an astute observer of business dynamics and company culture. He also shared my love for what Teespring used to be and my pain over the direction things had been heading.

One of our favorite extracurricular activities was "exercising" together. I say exercise in quotes because we'd meet in the gym, and over the course of 90 minutes, maybe do 5 minutes' worth of exercise and 85 minutes' worth of talking. This time away from our phones and with the extra mental acuity from vague physical activity was a perfect breeding ground for countless start-up ideas. Eventually, we realized that the problem that we cared about most, and had some ideas for how to solve, was company culture and people management.

In the summer of 2015, we incorporated Lattice. We aimed not to just get back that feeling of clear mission, shared values, and passionate engagement in our work in a company that was our own. We also wanted to build a product that would help other companies invest deeply in people and culture that would make their companies the best places to work.

We also got the opportunity to try to build a company culture of our own that reflects the change that we were trying to see in the world. We believe that community, purpose, and growth are central pillars of a meaningful work experience, and so that is what we've tried to weave into the fabric of what it means to work at Lattice. And those pillars, we would later understand, are also at the heart of smart people strategy.

As I write this in 2020, I feel grateful that Lattice has been lucky enough to employ hundreds of people, serve thousands of customers, and raise about $100 million in venture capital. We've been able not only to ride but also to help shape the new wave of HR software and people practices.

Our first few years at Lattice were relatively smooth sailing; we grew steadily and evolved our product. But after a year of incredible growth in 2019 - revenue grew by nearly 200 percent, our team grew from 50 to 125, and we raised two new rounds of financing - the COVID-19 pandemic hit us and everything changed, literally overnight.

One morning in early March 2020, we awoke to a flurry of messages in our company chat tool Slack: early birds arriving at the office learned that the building was closed because a member of the building's janitorial staff had been on a cruise ship where many passengers had tested positive for COVID-19. As a result, the building would be closed for the rest of the week.

It was a chaotic day, but the company was good-natured, supportive of each other, and found their footing relatively quickly. I remember people making jokes in Slack, sharing articles about best practices for working from home, and posting pictures of their new makeshift home office setups.

By the following Wednesday, March 11, the tone of the whole thing changed. The spread of the coronavirus had already been very real in other parts of the world, but this was the day that it became very real in the United States, even though the country only had 1,000 reported cases. The World Health Organization declared the disease a global pandemic. The Dow Jones fell by almost 1,500 points. The first case of the virus was reported on Capitol Hill. A professional basketball player tested positive, and the NBA became the first major sports league to announce that there would no longer be fans at their games. That night, President Trump addressed the country from the Oval Office, and announced a travel ban with Europe. As we went to bed that night with our heads spinning, actors Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson shared that they, too, had contracted the virus.

The next few weeks presented an incredible challenge for Lattice, as they did for so many others around the world. As each day went by, we began to realize more fully and accept the reality that the world wasn't just going to return to normal, and that we'd need to settle in for a bumpy ride.

Our customers were also reeling as they scrambled to adjust to working from home and to make sense of what this all meant for them. The economy started to free-fall, with the stock market plummeting and unemployment claims going through the roof.

Lattice's business ground to a halt. HR software budgets got slashed, sales cycles slowed to a snail's pace as people focused on more pressing issues, and every day brought news of more and more layoffs. We'd been planning for hyper growth, and instead we were looking at a much different reality with no sign of when it would let up. Although the company's spirits remained surprisingly high, our numbers were telling a different story. Revenue growth went from lightspeed to glacial; cash burn went from manageable to high, and customer churn became a real concern. Our leadership team was worried. I wasn't sleeping well.

As April dragged on, the numbers told a grim story, and I was faced with a decision I hope never to have to face again: do I keep waiting to see more data and hope that the economy has a quick recovery, or do I swallow the bitter pill of a layoff and let go of people from sales and customer success to reflect the new pace of business and reduce our costs?

After weeks of deliberation, on the night of my 31st birthday, I made the decision to go ahead with a layoff. An hour after making that excruciating decision, I hopped on a surprise video chat with a couple dozen friends and family that my wife Julia had set up, but I didn't feel much like celebrating.

Two weeks later, we went through with the reduction-in-force, parting ways with about 10 percent of our team. Delivering the news to the entire staff was the worst moment of my professional career - made worse by the awkwardness of having to deliver it over video chat - and I barely kept it together as I explained to the company why I felt we had to do this. We gave generous severance packages and support, and we used our resources to ease the transition for those who were impacted as much as we could.

It was gut-wrenching, and I was fully expecting anger and outrage. But I watched in wonder as the...