Why We Replaced Annual Reviews with Peer Feedback Using Lattice 2026 and Glint

For years, our annual review cycle was a source of frustration for managers and individual contributors alike. The once-a-year process was plagued by recency bias, relied solely on manager feedback, and delivered insights too late to drive meaningful growth. By the time reviews rolled around, employees had forgotten key wins, managers struggled to recall six months of work, and the resulting ratings felt arbitrary to 72% of our staff, per our 2024 internal engagement survey.

The Case for Peer Feedback

We knew we needed a continuous, multi-rater feedback model. Peer feedback addresses the core gaps of annual reviews: it captures day-to-day contributions, reduces individual bias, and gives employees a clearer picture of how their work impacts cross-functional teams. Research from Gartner backs this up: teams using regular peer feedback see 14% higher performance outcomes than those relying on annual manager-only reviews.

But we needed tools that could scale this process without adding administrative bloat. After evaluating 12 performance management platforms, we settled on a integrated stack: Lattice 2026 for feedback collection and workflow, and Glint for engagement measurement and sentiment analysis.

Why Lattice 2026 and Glint?

Lattice 2026’s latest release was a game-changer for our use case. Key features that sold us included:

• AI-powered feedback prompts that guide employees to give specific, actionable input (no more “you did great” vague comments)
• Automated peer feedback cycles that sync with our project management tools, triggering requests when cross-functional work wraps
• Bias detection algorithms that flag potentially biased language in feedback before it’s submitted
• Real-time dashboards for managers to aggregate feedback and identify skill gaps across their teams

Glint complemented Lattice perfectly by tying feedback data to employee sentiment. Its pulse survey tools let us measure how changes to our feedback process impacted engagement in real time, and its sentiment analysis engine flags when teams are feeling over-surveyed or under-supported. The integration between Lattice and Glint meant we could correlate feedback quality with engagement scores automatically, no manual data entry required.

Implementation: How We Made the Switch

We didn’t roll out the new process to all 1,200 employees at once. Instead, we ran a 3-month pilot with 140 employees across engineering and product teams, who reported the highest dissatisfaction with annual reviews. Our implementation steps included:

1. Mandatory 90-minute training for all pilot participants on giving constructive, bias-free peer feedback
2. Customizing Lattice 2026’s feedback templates to align with our company values and core competencies
3. Setting up bi-monthly feedback cycles (shorter than our original annual cadence, but not so frequent as to cause survey fatigue)
4. Integrating Glint pulse surveys to run 2 days after each feedback cycle closed, to measure immediate sentiment

We also retired our annual rating system entirely, replacing numeric scores with qualitative feedback summaries that employees could reference for growth planning.

Results After 6 Months

The pilot was so successful we rolled out the process company-wide in Q1 2025. Six months post-full rollout, our metrics show:

• 32% increase in employee engagement scores (measured via Glint)
• 18% reduction in voluntary turnover, particularly among high-performing individual contributors
• 89% of employees report feeling their performance is evaluated fairly, up from 28% under the annual review system
• Managers save an average of 12 hours per quarter on review administration, per Lattice 2026’s time-tracking feature
• 42% increase in cross-functional collaboration requests, as peers get visibility into each other’s work

Challenges and Lessons Learned

The switch wasn’t without hurdles. Initial pushback came from employees worried about “peer politics” influencing feedback, and managers who were used to having full control over performance ratings. We addressed these concerns by:

• Using Lattice 2026’s anonymous feedback option for the first 2 cycles, to build trust in the process
• Running calibration sessions where managers reviewed aggregated peer feedback together, to align on evaluation standards
• Using Glint alerts to identify teams with low feedback participation, and offering additional training to those groups

Final Takeaway

Replacing annual reviews with continuous peer feedback was one of the best HR decisions we’ve made in the last 5 years. The combination of Lattice 2026’s workflow tools and Glint’s engagement insights removed the guesswork from performance management, and gave our employees the regular, actionable feedback they need to grow. If your team is still stuck in the annual review cycle, we highly recommend testing this stack — the results speak for themselves.