How Lytho Keeps its Global Team in Sync
Lytho is on a mission to help creative teams excel in their work and achieve better content outcomes. Its creative operations platform provides visibility, control, and coordination across complex teams and processes, helping its customers get everything in one place.
As a global, remote-first organization, Lytho is dedicated to delivering a digital employee experience that supports its diverse and talented employee community. We recently met up with Charlotte van der Maat, HR and Office Manager, and Perin Marcus, Senior Human Resources Director, to learn how Lytho keeps this talented team informed, connected, and engaged.
Asked what drew her to Lytho, and what keeps her excited to be a member of the team, van der Maat had an easy time answering. “For me, it was definitely the people,” she said. “During my interview process, everyone was raving about their experience working at Lytho. From my outside perspective it felt like Lytho had a brilliant culture, which drew me in, and I still feel the same way to this day.”
Marcus agreed, adding some additional context. “One of the best things about Lytho is that we value people for who they are. This way of thinking influences every decision we make, and the discussions we engage in. It’s knowing that while we’re working and focused on achieving business goals, we’re treating people as human beings, before anything else. People find that authenticity attractive.”
Although those key cultural elements shine through daily, the working community van der Maat, Marcus, and the Lytho team engage in generates its own magnetism.
“We’re also growing as a company, and that’s always exciting,” Marcus noted. “We have a lot of flexibility in what we do and how we approach things, which provides a lot of opportunities for people to show their skills and creativity. All those things together make Lytho a really exciting place to be.”
"while we’re working and focused on achieving business goals, we’re treating people as human beings, before anything else. People find that authenticity attractive."
Flexibility, trust, and autonomy have been core to Lytho’s success. The team leans on the unique experience and knowledge of each member to tackle challenges. As a result, van der Maat shared, “Letting People Run” became codified as cultural bedrock.
“One of our values is to let people run, and I definitely got to experience that in my role,” she said. “I started in a narrower role, focused in the Netherlands, and now I work on a global scale. Being able to keep pushing and growing professionally is part of what keeps me excited to work here.”
This structural support and potential for growth generates a lot of interest from talented candidates, looking to make an impact with their work. As someone who interacts closely with those candidates, van der Maat has a unique vantage point.
“I lead Lytho’s global recruitment and speak to people on a daily basis about this value, and a large percentage of people mention that’s what drew them to us. Not many companies are really offering a place where you have the tools to do your job, and take it as far as you can. If you have big goals, we’ll help you to bring them to fruition.”
As Lytho continues to attract and engage a talented workforce dedicated to building, growing, and redefining expectations, the team’s momentum only builds.
“I see it in my colleagues all the time,” van der Maat said. “They have ideas they want to try, conversations they want to have, or projects they want to lead, and I can’t think of a time Lytho didn’t support them. Timing, or other details might need to be adjusted, but it’s never just a ‘no.’”
"Being able to keep pushing and growing professionally is part of what keeps me excited to work here.”
Operating a globally-distributed team offers myriad benefits, both for employees and the organization as a whole, but it does come with some unique challenges. Just like any other challenge, the Lytho team was ready to find a creative solution.
“As a remote company with employees across different time zones, we had some challenges to solve,” Marcus said. “Bringing consistency and supporting employee autonomy were key considerations.”
As a result, the team set out to find a solution that would support all these goals, and help the Lytho employee community do their best work.
“One of our HR colleagues had done a ton of research, met with several vendors, and Haystack was her recommendation,” Marcus shared. “The final decision came down to either building our own solution, or adopting Haystack.”
As a company that builds software, developing a solution internally wasn’t out of the question; however, as Marcus explained, building in-house comes with its own trade-offs and costs.
“Our internal version had to be something we could build in a matter of months, so it would have been a more bare-bones, makeshift solution with a very basic UX and UI. It would probably have fulfilled our most basic needs, but it would have been costly to maintain, and it would not have been such a thoughtfully-designed experience.
We didn’t want to take development resources away from our team in order to build and maintain an intranet. Ultimately, we decided we would go with Haystack. It looks great, and it’s easy for everyone to use.”
Even in an organization with an abundance of technical expertise, ease of use is a critical factor. “Most of my colleagues in the HR department aren’t tech wizards,” Marcus explained. “Even if I wanted to code, I wouldn’t really be able to.”
Importantly, bringing on a purpose-built employee experience platform would lift the burden from the development team, giving them more room to run in the areas where it mattered most.
"...we decided we would go with Haystack. It looks great, and it’s easy for everyone to use.”
After launching Haystack, the Lytho team found numerous opportunities to bring more efficiency to their workflows, and deliver even more value to their employee community.
“Previously, our HR resources were in Dropbox,” van der Maat shared. “Things were getting lost, and people couldn’t find what they needed—or they were finding resources that were outdated. We were spending so much time trying to find or share process documents with the right people.
Over the past year or so, we migrated all our process docs and resources over to Haystack. Simplifying our processes, and having them all in one place has been a massive game-changer for us.”
Having a centralized source of truth for knowledge is essential for any organization, but for globally-distributed teams like Lytho, it’s even more important.
“Because we’re all remote,” Marcus added, “we don’t have the luxury of turning around to quickly ask a colleague, ‘where can I find this?’ Haystack helps everyone to be more self-sufficient, and find what they need to find without having to go through different platforms and systems.
It’s also much easier to keep things up-to-date, so old versions of resources aren’t floating around. There’s always room for us to improve. We still sometimes get ‘where is this?’ type questions, but it’s much less often.”
In addition to having a reliable and up-to-date organizational knowledge base, Marcus also touched on the value of having an easy way to look back on the past. “I like seeing the historic content,” she said. “If we had a project or company communication a year prior, and want to do something similar again, Haystack allows us to work more efficiently by repurposing it.”
As a diverse and distributed organization, Lytho not only works across a wide range of time zones, but also disciplines and toolkits. Their implementation of Haystack provides individual departments with the freedom to use the tools that work best for them, while leveraging integrations to centralize core company knowledge and communication.
“I use Haystack a lot in our DEI efforts,” van der Maat shared. “it’s so nice to have it all in one place people can refer back to. I use Haystack for all those posts. It’s super useful because when I publish a post, it’s also delivered through email and Slack, so everyone can see it.”
“We’re not using Haystack as our sole method of communication,” Marcus said. “We still use Slack heavily in our communication, and we do still use email, though not as much. The Slack integration helps a lot, because not everyone checks email.
Also, some departments, like engineering, still use specialized tools like Confluence to organize, track, and manage their work.”
"It’s so nice to have it all in one place people can refer back to."
The flexibility remote work provides often comes at the expense of impromptu interactions, like meeting new teammates in the hallway. In addition to a global employee map and profiles that let members of the team share their unique interests and skills, van der Maat called out an unexpectedly important feature.
“It may seem small at face value, but I love the Name Game feature. When I first started at Lytho, that’s how I learned everyone’s name. As a distributed team member, I might go months without meeting a specific person, and if that game hadn’t been there, I might not have known their name.
So, when I’m onboarding new employees, I introduce them to the name game. Yes, it is fun, but it’s also a really useful tool for getting to know everybody.”
As a team that built and delivered an exceptional digital employee experience that serves a global team, we asked Marcus and van der Maat to share some tips and advice for others working to achieve a similar goal.
“For implementation, we compiled everything offline, and created a table of where things should go,” Marcus shared. “We had a lot of discussions about what is needed—going through emails and slack messages—digging through at least a year of information exchange, to create a system we could follow.
It’s important to structure information in a way that aligns with common sense, so even if someone doesn’t know exactly where to find something, it’s still in a logical place. We had a lot of conversations about what that logic looked like”
Marcus also suggested putting the platform in a smaller group’s hands first, before rolling it out to the greater population. “We did a soft-launch, giving select groups from different departments a few weeks to explore and they were able to share helpful feedback, or let us know if something important was missing.”
Even an easy-to-use system needs a good introduction and good habits need reinforcement, as Marcus explained. “We have a policy, where if someone asks a question, and we know it’s in Haystack, we share the link, rather than giving the answer, in order to help build that behavior and encourage them to go there.
If the answer really isn’t there, it’s a helpful signal for us that it probably should be. It helps us maintain our knowledge base on an ongoing basis.”
While that ongoing series of added updates helps to keep the system current, Marcus explained why it’s still vital to ensure that outdated information gets removed.
“I think outdated information is the enemy of a system like this. If someone comes looking for an important resource and finds something from 2020, you’ll lose them quickly. I know there’s a feature that adds a deadline where resources expire, but it’s still important to formally audit your content regularly.”
For van der Maat, there was one piece of advice that stood out above all others. “Keeping the main dashboard as clean and focused as possible is super important. Some people are reluctant to take an extra step, or click through a long path. Make sure the main navigation links go to the most important pages. If people are looking for something specific, they can always use the search bar.”
We’re excited to continue working with unique and innovative organizations like Lytho year after year. To learn more about Lytho’s creative operations platform, check out their website here. If you’re interested in becoming a member of the Lytho team, you can learn more here.
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