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Welcome to The Culture Code podcast. On this podcast, you’ll learn how to grow, shape, and sustain a high-performance culture with the CEO of LEADx, Kevin Kruse. From designing and delivering highly effective leadership development programs, to measuring and improving the employee experience, you will understand what it takes to cultivate a thriving company culture. Through interviews with Chief People Officers, deep dives into key topics, and recordings of our invite-only community sessions, we bring you cutting-edge, data-backed insights from the most desirable companies to work for in the world.
Kruse: Hello everyone! I'm Kevin Kruse. Welcome to "Culture Code." I'm delighted, as our guest today is the Chief People Officer of 1Password, Katya Laviolette. Katya, welcome! And where are you joining from today?
Laviolette: Thank you, Kevin. I'm connecting from the exquisite city of Montreal in Canada.
Kruse: Wonderful! Normally, I'm in the beautiful city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. No jokes; it truly is a stunning city. But I'm spending some time in California, so I'm a bit of a distance from you these days.
Very nice. Let's start because, as I mentioned before we recorded, we're actually LEADx, a customer of 1Password. For those who might not be familiar with 1Password, how big is your organization and in plain language, what do you do?
Laviolette: Sure. Well, we like to say that we really protect individuals and businesses online. And really, we're an identity security solution company. So what does that mean in plain language? The core product that we have—and obviously expanding—is password management. So in layperson's terms, you probably have—I don't know—maybe 300-400 passwords. And, you know, they're not necessarily memorable like "123". So basically, we offer something that is technology which encrypts your passwords. And we've moved into passwordless, which is our latest journey combining biometrics. So at the end of the day, you really don't need to log in all your passwords on a Google Sheet. And obviously, we're moving into different products; we have vaults to secure documents and special things that matter to people's lives. We are primarily a consumer and business product company. A bootstrapped company started 18 years ago by 4 founders just outside the Toronto area. Our CEO joined us just over a decade ago in 2019. I'd say we have just over a hundred employees in Canada and some other individuals spread across the globe. Then we got our first series of funding: Series A, then Series B, and finally Series C. In January 2022, and just 2 weeks ago, we hired our 1,000th Bit—as we call our employees. We have grown immensely. We're in 5 countries now. We've expanded into a kind of multi-product, we're on a number of platforms, and we have lots of plans for the future.
Kruse: Wow! What a success story! So I'm sitting right now, physically, in San Jose, California, Silicon Valley. And most people around here would lead you to believe that all great companies are birthed in Silicon Valley. So it's nice to know there's this incredible tech story from outside the valley. How about that?
Laviolette: That is a great thing to say. We're super proud to be, I would say, Canadian-founded, but obviously, we have a significant influence within, I'd say, Silicon Valley or the tech space. But we are, what I would say, one of the unicorns in Canada from a tech perspective. So we're very proud of that. Our Canadian roots are also very, very important to us.
Kruse: That's great. So we're here, obviously, to talk about your great corporate culture, and even just the definition of culture. How would you describe your company culture in just a few words?
Laviolette: Well, when I joined about 18 months ago, we were at 500 employees. So obviously, we've doubled since then. Probably, we'll start the year with around 1,200 or so. The culture is very entrenched. But when you scale and bring in a large number of people and build out functions and so forth, you want to make sure that you, I would say, in my own words, codify and document the culture.
So what we did last summer is we brought together cross-functional, diverse groups of individuals with the founders. And we asked them, you know, let's put this on paper. What does our culture mean to us? And we came up with, it was actually quite funny, our first miss actually describes a bit of our culture. We came up with our first subset, and one of the founders was like, "That's really corporate speak." Yeah, yeah, okay, I get that, I get that. So we went back, and we came up with just three very clear values: Keep it simple, lead with honesty, and put people first.
Since then, we've been delineating and putting, I call it, meat to the bones. And really talking about what behaviors drive those values and how those run through how we do things. So it's one thing to be able to perform and say, "I have done this" or the "what." But we want to know how you do it. So it's kind of ensuring that you have both axes, and you could be a stellar employee, but you have to do it within our values. So that's values-based leadership. That's really the underpinning from a cultural perspective.
Kruse: So it's a fantastic exercise! What are some of the ways you foster or sustain this culture? Any unique rituals or traditions related to your culture?
Laviolette: Yeah, well, it's interesting because we are a remote or distributed company 18 years in the making. So we're not one of those COVID companies that basically, you know, I say, from the evening before to the day after, they just, you know, you all go home. You grab your screens and your computers, and you roll your chairs home and you work from home. It was never like that for 1Password. It was the inception, it was. It was a remote-first company. So we're actually bringing people into a remote-first environment who have really worked in a face-to-face office environment. And so you're blending those, too. So it was really important that we are very intentional about our activities and our initiatives from a, I guess, human perspective.
So we do an annual kickoff. Been doing it for years. We're heading into January 2024. It will be an annual kickoff for all our employees to set our mission, really our North Star for the year, what we expect, and it's going to be called Beyond 2024. We just sent the teaser out when we were smaller. Everyone got together face to face on a cruise and kicked off the year. As you scale, you can't do that. But you want to be able to maintain the elements. So this year we're going into a really high-tech virtual kickoff. And then what we do is we delineate, and then each function does their own subsets of those throughout the year to make sure that the message really gets passed and that we're right. We're working on the right priorities and so forth.
So those annual kickoff activities leading into face-to-face meetings. As we kind of are getting back into that, it is really important. And so yes, we're remote first. But people do want to see each other. They do want to collaborate, and they want to be able to do it. As you scale in these departments, do they really understand what they are doing? Where does their work have the most value to what you're trying to achieve from a 1Password standpoint? We are onboarding. That's another activity. We are onboard every Wednesday. Very interesting. Not Monday. We do a 3-day onboarding because it's intense. We have a lot of systems, a lot of tools. There's a lot of people to meet, and we do kind of a pre-onboarding. Get all the swag out, get everyone ready, do all the letters, the welcome letters from the CEO, and so forth.
And then we say, we need you to think about just 3 days straight of just entrenching yourself in 1Password, the tools, and so forth. And then throughout that period, after that, there are check-ins from an onboarding process, and then obviously, individuals get into their jobs. And we're constantly iterating on that process to make sure that we are very intentional about what we expect of people from a values perspective. And part of that is an obligatory meeting with our founders. Our founders still meet monthly with all our new hires, and it's really, really important. We do things like donuts, which is like, I have meetings with employees as we're scaling. It just randomly selects who you want to meet and get to know people as you. You start, as you scale, to work within your function and need to ensure that you're cross-collaborating. And then we do a lot of activities across the company, virtually a lot through our ERGs from a diversity perspective. So those are just a few examples that we think make us special.
Kruse: I'm kind of known for my work around leadership development. 70% of engagement is correlated to the manager, and front-line managers touch more employees than any other leadership group. What are some of the ways you develop your front-line managers?
Laviolette: We're actually in a very privileged position. I have a relatively large team. I come from businesses that are actually not. The bulk of my career is not necessarily in tech. It's obviously in the HR field. In tech, I think it is very much more hands-on from a people perspective. And we actually have a small and mighty team that we call Employee Experience that focuses on engagement and focuses on leadership development. So we are actually doing things that very large companies that I've worked in have done. I think that's a great indicator of the investment we make in our people.
We do monthly meetings with all our 90 plus managers across the company. All hands, we do co-development groups. We just launched coaching at scale for all our senior directors and above with BetterUp. I'm really excited to see this pilot and how it can go down because I think coaching is essential, especially in today's environment. And your manager, yes, can coach. But sometimes it's good to have additional support to help individuals. We're actively working on. We've done like modules of leadership development. We have the typical LinkedIn Learning and so forth. But we're actually building custom in-house, our own leadership development program. We've also done a ton of work for all our leaders around. We're very proud of what we've done in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging, or DEIB. We have 6 ERGs, and we are growing. We have a great talent pipeline from a diverse perspective. And we do actually do a fair amount of work just on. So I would call it sensitivity, and just ensuring that we're actually operating in a very inclusive environment. We have not. And sorry, too. The other piece was, we have all our custom work, not just. We started with 1Password University for our customers. This is interesting for our customers when they're onboarding into the product. And this is like a Learning Management System. Well, we're also using that in the people function as well. So it's the best of both worlds.
Kruse: That's great. You mentioned the Employee Experience team. How do you solicit feedback from employees about the culture and their engagement (e.g., engagement or other surveys, town halls, ?)
Laviolette: We listen a lot. We do a lot of surveys here. You know, we have all the typical tools from an engagement perspective. Like we do our annual survey and then a pulse survey to check in. We have monthly-wide AMAs, all-company, and then each of our own executive teams have their own all-hands/AMAs in different formats. We also do a fair number of product-based all-hands where we bring the company together because the product is really centric to our business. So everyone is connecting the dots in that regard. And it's an environment where we will launch something, and we have to have the humility to be able to say, "Oh, that was really good" or "Maybe that missed the mark, and maybe we need to adapt a bit." So we're quite a feedback-rich environment. And then from an engagement perspective, we have a whole stream where we measure engagement. And then we have actual actions where HR business partners and executive leaders look at drill-downs of engagement by function, because it's kind of not a vanilla approach. There are different needs in different functions.
Kruse: You mentioned the pulse surveys, and I find when I'm talking to Chief People Officers, it's sort of a hot topic of like, well, how often do you pulse? I hear people talking about that when they're having little side conversations. So, how often are you doing pulse surveys?
Laviolette: Well, we do the typical engagement survey, the big one, once a year, and then a check-in which is less qualitative, halfway. I come from an environment prior to that in Tech, where we were pulse surveying like every week. And it was, frankly, my personal opinion was like, I don't know, like it just became like a check the box. And so we actually went to less frequency but more in-depth, where we could take the data. The other thing we're privileged to have from a people standpoint is we have a dedicated people analytics individual, a data scientist who works with us. Data informs a lot of what we do. I was talking to someone else the other day, and they were saying like they were actually asking me, like, when have you made mistakes in your career? And I said, well, I was thinking about this question, I realized when I made mistakes was because I never, I took the data. And I'm an intuitive person, and I never took it together. And so that's usually when I figure it out, I make mistakes and have to learn from them. So it's really good to blend both data and let it tell you a story. You have to interpret it, and then you do have to use some type of gut feel for what you want to do.
Kruse: I don't know. I do a lot of these interviews. I don't know that I've ever heard of a thousand-person company having a data scientist yet on board. So again, that's really incredible, the investment that the organization's willing to make. That's great.
Laviolette: People asked me why I joined, and I said, Well, you know, it's for me. It's kind of the sum of my full-time career. I believe I can have an impact and have some fun and make some change, and I believe that this company does really care about their employees, and they're in it for the long haul. When the business, when the tech industry started to dip, you all, sure you recall last summer we were on a big hiring freeze. But what we decided was to pull back very conservatively. We had fewer hiring wrecks, and we took in individuals in my team. I said, let's put them on projects, build their skills. Hiring will go back up, and we will have better people for it. And so it wasn't like this kind of stopgap. Okay, let's just get people out and let's move on, and then we'll have to hire them again. This company thinks about the future, and they think about the importance of people.
Kruse: It's a great position to be in. Related to culture, are there any special initiatives or results you’re most proud of?
Laviolette: I would just say, we're most one of the biggest things we're proud of is our diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. This journey started with our tagline, "Strong, Unique Voices." It started back in late 2021, grassroots-led. It's always been a culture of inclusivity, but as you scale, you need to think about it even more rigorously, like even in your talent acquisition pipeline. You're really looking at making sure that you have good diversity throughout your pipeline to come up with the best-qualified candidates. And we have built out an entire... We started more with initiatives and a bit of sensitivity training. Now we have a report that we will soon put into the external market for hiring. We have to collect data from candidates as well as internally when internal wants to opt in. And the data scientist that we have allows us to build programs. We now have a charter. We have an entire work council, and then our employee resource groups are really pillars. And you know, we're launching something we're like, "Hey, what do you think of this? Will this work?" and so forth. So I think that's one. There are many things that I'm proud of my team in terms of what they've accomplished. But that's one highlight that I think is really important to mention.
Kruse: And it stood up in like a record time. I mean, that's after not a lot of time.
Laviolette: Yeah, things move quickly and scale up. That's relatively new. I mean, I've been in tech for about 6 years now, and things move fast. So you have to pivot, and there's the beauty of that, because it's a great adrenaline rush. But sometimes you have to recharge yourself at the end of the week.
Kruse: Maybe speed is your unofficial fourth cultural pillar.
Laviolette: Possibly, yes.
Kruse: So, Katya, as you know, this is a short format podcast. We only have a few more minutes. But I want to hit you with a few more fun questions. What book would you recommend that your colleagues read? (or podcast, video, etc.)
Laviolette: I'm a runner who started running about 6 years ago, later in life. It's like my form of meditation. So Phil Knight's "Shoe Dog," Nike's founder, is a phenomenal book. It's about grit, about entrepreneurship, about never giving up. You can learn anything from it both personally and professionally, and you don't have to be a runner to read it. It's just a great story.
Kruse: Great book! What skill or behavior do you wish your employees did more of?
Laviolette: My people hear me talk a lot about, I say you need to connect the dots. And so a lot of my job is connecting the dots. So someone brings you something, I'm like, well, have you spoken to this person, this person, this person? And if you do this, this has an impact on this. And so, looking at things holistically rather than saying, Oh, I'm going to run off and do this, and it's going to be done and check the box. And I think that yeah, like, if I had a magic wand, and everyone could connect the dots and think about their work in a cross-collaborative, holistic way. Some things we might just completely take off the table and other things we might really double down on. And so I think that's something that's super important, especially in the people resources function.
Kruse: It's great. Final question. What excites you the most about your company right now?
Laviolette: I think I would call us kind of like we're leading the charge in the shift to passwordless, which is really at the forefront for us. We have innovative products. We work actively with the developer community to build these products into what our offerings would be to both consumers and businesses. I think that we are a mission-driven company. So we want to protect the lives of people. And that's what brings people to 1Password, is they're working on stuff that's going to make an impact for the future. And you know, coming up and being, you know, being acknowledged for that, like people in the business. You're a customer when you use it. When you use the product, you feel, we hope safe, and then it just extrapolates and continues from there. So just the innovation we work with is really, really smart, very high energy, curious people. And they really want to do their best, and I think that that's a great recipe.
Kruse: I love the product that you have today, and I'm looking forward to that day when I can just smile into my phone or my laptop and be granted access to wherever I want to go.
Laviolette: You can start if you go in. Some companies already have password keys. And so we have a Beta product out there. So if you have Paypal, Best Buy, and so forth, you can do that, and more and more companies are picking it up. And what's really cool about us, I think, is that we're kind of at the forefront of that. And it is. It's pretty cutting edge.
Kruse: Yeah, that's exciting. I just want to thank you again for your time. You know I said it before we recorded that times are the most valuable assets, so I don't take it lightly. Thanks for keeping my passwords and my data, my devices safe and thanks for creating, you know, great culture and sharing some of your words of wisdom. For your colleagues to learn from as well. Thanks for coming on the program.
Laviolette: Oh, thank you for having me, Kevin. It was a real pleasure and much appreciated.