Andrea Cooper, Chief People Officer at Talkspace

Show Notes

How do you build one culture when half your workforce is therapists and the rest are tech and corporate?

Andrea Cooper, Chief People Officer at Talkspace, shares how a remote-only, publicly traded mental health company aligns a mixed workforce while scaling People Ops from startup to enterprise.

Andrea explains Talkspace’s care model from asynchronous messaging to live video, audio, and live-text sessions and why blending W2 and contracted therapists ensures access and coverage.

She details why Talkspace combined clinician and corporate all-hands, how they tailor follow-ups by role, and how a mental health-first environment normalizes therapy while reinforcing boundaries for HR.

On the operations side, Andrea breaks down the team’s shift to bring previously outsourced processes in-house, the impact of a Jira-powered service desk, and how BambooHR’s compensation module plus a company-wide career framework creates transparency and speed.

Expect pragmatic, scalable practices: using ticket data to fix communication gaps, designing systems that free HR from firefighting, and hiring creative experts to push the function forward.

Key Timestamps

• - [00:45] – What Talkspace offers: async messaging, live sessions, and workforce makeup
• - [03:31] – One company, shared all-hands: connecting therapists and core teams
• - [05:35] – Treating therapists as the frontline: tailoring expectations and comms
• - [06:47] – Mental health at work: openness, free therapy, and healthy boundaries
• - [11:20] – 2026 priorities: bringing People Ops processes in-house with a small, mighty team
• - [14:54] – From startup to public: why the team and tech are now ready for in-house HR
• - [16:52] – Systemized service: Jira ticketing to route requests, document, and surface trends
• - [19:10] – Career frameworks in BambooHR: comp transparency and faster, fairer decisions
• - [21:44] – Leadership advice: surround yourself with people who out-create and out-think you

Takeaways

• - Unify culture by sharing forums (one all-hands) while tailoring follow-ups to each role’s realities.
• - Centralize HR requests with a ticketing system to reduce firefighting, track SLAs, and spot communication gaps.
• - Bring People Ops in-house when team maturity and tooling support quality, compliance, and speed.
• - Codify a career framework and load comp data into your HRIS to drive transparent, consistent decisions.
• - Normalize mental health access while setting clear HR boundaries; leverage clinical experts without “playing therapist.”
• - Hire for creativity and expertise beyond your own to accelerate change and deliver better business outcomes.

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What is HR Voices?

HR Voices is a scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who’ve actually had to make the call.

Each episode brings experienced HR and People leaders into realistic, anonymized workplace scenarios—the kind you recognize immediately. Performance issues. Messy conflicts. Investigations that don’t fit neatly into a policy box. Instead of talking about their own companies, guests react to outside cases and walk through how they’d think it through in real time.

There are no right answers here. What you’ll hear is judgment: how seasoned leaders balance risk, fairness, legal reality, and humanity when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious.

HR Voices is for HR, People Ops, legal, and leaders who want to hear how other smart humans actually handle employee relations—without confidentiality breaches, hypotheticals that feel fake, or a lecture on “best practices.”

Emily Fenech (00:35)
Welcome to HR Voices. I'm your host, Emily Finick, and today I get to chat with Andrea Cooper, Chief People Officer at Talkspace. Welcome, Andrea.

Andrea Cooper (00:44)
Thank you so much, thanks for having me.

Emily Fenech (00:45)
Yes, Andrea Talkspace is a platform that connects people with licensed therapists. Can you tell me a little bit more about the platform itself, what it is, the employees that work there, and your role as CPO?

Andrea Cooper (00:59)
Yeah, absolutely, would love to. So yeah, as you said, TopSpace is a mental health platform. So we are a remote only, so a virtual therapy company. I've been around, gosh, I think about 12 years now. And we actually, I think what makes us unique is we started the notion of async or being able to send messages back and forth with your therapist. So if you've ever done like traditional therapy, you you go maybe every couple of weeks or once a month or whatever is needed for you.

And there are often, at least from my own experience, there's often things you think about in between those sessions, like aha moments or concerning feelings or whatever it is you're working on. And historically, you just have to kind of wait for your next session. What I love about Talkspace, I think again, that set us apart from the beginning, is this ability to just pull out your phone and you can text your therapist. And within a reasonable time, they're gonna text you back. And so you can have this back and forth conversation just when you need it. ⁓

Emily Fenech (01:50)
the

Andrea Cooper (01:51)
which I think is really special. I personally have found it really helpful with my own therapist at Talkspace. We also have, of course, live sessions, which is probably the most common practice of how our clients and our members engage with our therapists. So you could do a video session, you could have texting, you could also do just audio, and you could even do, as a mom of a teenager, you can even do live texting sessions. So if you don't want to see somebody, but you want it to be...

Like if you and I were texting right now with friends and you want to know that person's engaged for the next 30 minutes with you, that's an option as well. ⁓ So we really try to find solutions that meet the needs of our members wherever they are. And again, we find like teens versus older folks, men versus women, know, parents, whatever life experiences they're going through, their needs can be different. So we try to meet them. Our employees, so we have altogether about 600 employees.

Emily Fenech (02:20)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea Cooper (02:41)
We are a publicly traded company and about, I don't know, close to half, a little less than half are what we call our core employees. So those are people that you think of with any tech company, Engineering, product, marketing, finance, you know, all of those things. And then a little bit more than half of our employees are actually full-time therapists that are, you know, W2 or employee therapists with us. We also have over 5,000 contracted therapists that work on the Talkspace platform as well.

So we really offer a mix of contracted therapy. So when you think about from an HR perspective, that offers a lot of flexibility without having to have everybody be full time, but it also means a little bit less control or management of their time. So we like to have a blend, right? So that we make sure that we can provide the volume needs that our clients ask for. So that way, if you wanna go sign up and you live in, I forgot what state you're in, or you're out west somewhere, I think, right?

Emily Fenech (03:35)
I'm in Tennessee, Nashville.

Andrea Cooper (03:37)
you're not, okay, in Tennessee, great. Okay, so if you're in Tennessee and you wanna find a therapist, we wanna make sure that you can quickly get connected and match with a therapist and get your first session going. So by having a blend of both employee therapist and contract therapist, we feel like that serves us well.

Emily Fenech (03:53)
So what's it like building culture and designing programs and the many, many hats that HR leaders wear when half of your workforce are therapists? How does that look?

Andrea Cooper (04:04)
That's a great question. In some ways, there are unique things, right? Like there's the clinical, the clinician space that is different. I'm certainly not a clinician, but I have such a deep respect for that expertise. But in a lot of ways, they're employees, right? So we like to make sure that we connect and that we update and that we interact. So for example, you we have an all hands meeting and historically,

We would have done that, we've done like at all hands with our core employees and all hands with our therapist employees. And about, gosh, a year and a half ago or so, we stopped that because it really, doesn't matter the hat you wear, you're still an employee of Talkspace. And one of the things we found is that both sides, both core and the therapy side, wanted to know what was going on with each other and there wasn't really a good like method to do that. So we've really been working hard to find those connection points to share with each other.

And I think all hands is just one example of how we find that there's a lot of commonality. We share core values across the company, but we do try to be mindful that the experiences aren't the same. So when we do surveys, for example, we do employee surveys, we survey all of our employees, but the conversations we're having with the therapist are probably gonna be different than the follow-up conversations with the core employee, because their needs are different, their day-to-day is different. If you think about being a therapist, gosh, know, like,

you're in front of a video providing therapy or on your phone providing therapy for your shift every day. Like that's a lot of mental energy, a lot of emotional energy. And it also means you don't have a ton of flexibility and like when you can just jump on a call or a huddle and slack, right? So we try to be a little bit, we try to customize expectations, but also make sure that we're bringing everybody in together as like we're all part of the same company and we want each other to feel like connected and aware of what's happening across all parts.

Emily Fenech (05:47)
Yeah, as I hear you describe this, it's not too different actually from other organizations that have a front line. It's just that your front line are therapists.

Andrea Cooper (05:53)
Exactly.

Yeah, I think that's

a really good analogy. you know, most of my career, well, for many, you over 20 years was on the retail side of things. And yeah, I think that's exactly it. So when we were, when I was in a home office role, the day to day was different than when I worked in a store, right? And so you have to remember the flexibility, the structure, the, the, again, just that emotional and mental energy, it's all very different. And as long as we're aware and understand that, we've been able to find, I think, pretty good connections where people feel part of the same company, but also uniquely represented in

and what they need and want to talk about.

Emily Fenech (06:29)
I'm curious, what do mental health conversations look like at your organization? Because I know that it's, you know, society, AI, there's a lot of things sort of putting pressure on people, change. We're all dealing with, you know, navigating an extreme amount of change and uncertainty is the best way I can put it. So as you think about that within the context of working at Talkspace, which is a product dedicated to mental health.

Andrea Cooper (06:38)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Emily Fenech (06:52)
Right? How do you sort of navigate those topics within a company dedicated to mental health? Does it look different or are you, or do you feel that you're having maybe the same challenges and conversations that every other organization is having with their employees?

Andrea Cooper (07:04)
You know, I suspect it's not radically different. I think maybe a key difference is that we are a mental health company and so we have to be mindful of that in all the decisions we make, right? We don't have the excuse of like, well, maybe we never thought of that or like, this is just a business kind of thing, right? But I would say that when I consider the companies I've worked for over the years, I would say that this is not radically different. Like our employees are experiencing the same challenges to your point, disruptions.

know, uncertainties. Like I think that our folks are experiencing that just as much as anybody. I do think it helps that, you know, like for our employees, we offer, you know, free therapy, three talks, you know, our folks have access to free therapy for them and another person in their household. And so I think just...

prioritizing that and making sure. And honestly, maybe what is different is like, if I meet with my therapist, I'll just put on my calendar, know, Andrea therapy meeting, where in other companies, you might feel like you have to be a little bit more covert, or, you know, it's not something you share openly. So maybe that is the difference is that we work in a company that's focused on mental health and people don't come here by accident.

And I think they come here because they want to work in this space. And so we want to create the ability for them to talk about things in an open way. But I don't think the specific challenges they're dealing with are really any different than anybody else. I think maybe we just make a little bit more room for that to be part of the conversation without any kind of negative connotation.

Emily Fenech (08:22)
Yeah.

without oversharing.

Andrea Cooper (08:26)
Yeah, you know, it's something it's funny you say that because, you know, I've had conversations over the years and I bet you have too. In the HR space, sometimes we kind of become the people that carry the burden, right, of other people's things. Like we were not therapists, but sometimes we get a lot of that. And it can be that trauma dumping thing, right? It can be really hard to navigate. And maybe that's where I feel really grateful for a place like Talkspace that when my team is experiencing that, because we will, we have resources, we have colleagues.

we have ways to make sure that we are getting the support and kind of the recharge that we need in a way that maybe in a typical company, an HR team wouldn't have that easy access.

Emily Fenech (09:03)
Yeah, I often hear like, who's HR for HR? You're therapists.

Andrea Cooper (09:06)
Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. It's that, you know, it's that like the Cobbler's children have no shoes kind of thing, right? It's like, and so, you know, I mean, I think to be honest, I've never worked on an HR team that doesn't have that dilemma a little bit. But I feel, again, we're pretty lucky that I could, I could just call our chief medical officer and be like, hey, I want to run something by you about my team. What do you think? Right. And to be able to have that kind of expertise for support and just

Emily Fenech (09:12)
Exactly.

Andrea Cooper (09:30)
that feeling of mental health is part of who you are and it shouldn't be kind of kept separate and distinctly different from work, I think is a pretty special thing.

Emily Fenech (09:38)
Yeah, live brainstorm here. This might not be a great idea, but what if every organization had a therapist in the C-suite so that HR didn't have to be the therapist, right?

Andrea Cooper (09:42)
Let's do it.

Yeah,

I don't want to misrepresent. If our chief medical officer ever heard this, she's like, she's not my therapist, right? I'm not treating her that way. But I feel like in that clinical and in our whole clinical team, I have the ability to ask experts about things, right? And to your point, yeah, I like that idea of like the access for HR, because we shouldn't overstep, right? And I think that a lot of what brings people to HR, and just speaking for myself, what brought me to HR is I...

Emily Fenech (09:57)
Yeah.

Andrea Cooper (10:18)
funny enough, I was a social work major at the time. So I had this internal desire to help people and to be involved in something that for me felt really personal and meaningful. And so I have to watch myself though, right? Because it's not my job to solve people's problems. It's not my job to provide therapy. I don't have the skillset for that. And so I think that for me to be able to have colleagues that I can reach out to and kind of talk through things so that I don't overstep and I don't get out of my lane in a way that's not appropriate is really fortunate.

Emily Fenech (10:47)
Yeah, so maybe it's not a terrible idea after all. I'm going to put a pin in that. Might think about it. As we are all thinking about 2026, we're planning ahead, what's on your mind right now? What are the biggest challenges that particularly your people team are facing as we go into the new year? What are you thinking about?

Andrea Cooper (10:49)
No. Yeah.

Yeah, you I thought about this ahead of time as I was prepping for this. And I will tell you that the way that our team set up, have, you know, recruiting and people ops. That is kind of what makes up the people team at Talkspace. And so our people operations team, which is like a mighty six people, right? So we're small but mighty. We are going through some significant change. So we are making some...

we're taking action that essentially without going into all the details is going to bring in more of the people operations processes and systems and decision points and all that more in-house where some of it we have outsourced at this moment. And it's been, it's a ton of work, but it's really special moment in our time in my opinion, because what it's done is it's forced me to step back and look at everything.

right, to say, what are the, you we have these systems and tools, but are they the right ones? You know, we have this current organizational structure and this number of employees, is that the right amount? Are those the right roles to have on the team? And it's forcing me to go through and make some difficult decisions, but I'm already starting to see the benefit of those hard decisions. And we don't really even fully go live with all these changes until January of next year, but it's been really fun. So when I think about, you know,

the technology piece, right? And you mentioned, know, like these, all the dilemmas companies are going through, right? With 8i and you know, that type of work right now, it's been really fun to go and demo things, right? And to really explore and question what's best for us, what's best for our employees, what's best for our people leaders, and then what's just best for the business all around. I always think of HR, I've always felt this way, like.

whatever you call it, HR, human resources, people ops, people team, any of, whatever, right? I feel like our role is to enable the business and to create like really positive and meaningful employee experiences. And sometimes those things can feel at odds with each other. And so I think going through this exercise has really helped me to find better tools that are better for the business from an operating expense and operating process, but they're better for employees as well.

And so that has just been really exciting to be able to find those win-win solutions and to be able to bring the team along and to really engage with them. The People Ops team, it's really helped me to realize maybe more than ever just how special it is to work with a group of collaborative and supportive experts in the People Ops field and people that are open to change and are open to new things.

So yeah, so there's a lot, like our people on team is going through a really unique time. If you'd talked to me last year at this time, I probably would have given you a little bit more generic answers, but right now we're going through tremendous change and it's really a combination of being better, more efficient, providing better service, using technology better and just delivering strong results in smarter, more efficient ways. So that involves lots of moving parts, other partners in the business, but...

It's been a lot of fun. And again, it's like that pressure of, know you're gonna make a change and you pull that bandaid off all the way. Are you ready? Let's go, you know, kind of thing. And it's a lot of work, but again, I think it's really gonna pay off.

Emily Fenech (14:01)
Yeah, I'm curious the context behind the change, right? Sounds like you had some functions, some processes outsourced, the decision was made. Let's go ahead and bring this in-house. Is the reason because the technology is getting better at enabling you to do that and maybe taking some of the, automating some of the manual steps that, you know, were maybe prohibitive to bring in-house? Is that the reason? I'm just guessing, reading between the lines.

Andrea Cooper (14:22)
No, no,

I'm happy to share the reason. As I mentioned, we've been around, I think 12 or 13 years, I should know that more precisely, but over 10 years. And if you went back in time several years, we were more of a startup, right? So like, startup, we probably had one person in the PeopleOps team that did everything recruiting PeopleOps, all the above. And over the years, we've grown and matured. And then, I think it was like 2021 maybe, so call it three or four years ago, we went public.

And there's a lot of things, if you're a publicly traded company, there's a lot of the standards and the reporting and the compliance, all these things. So I think we've just grown up, right? I think we've grown up and we've matured and along the way we've put in place systems and people that have really demonstrated their ability to handle things. And so I think we're just at that point where I was like, we don't really need to outsource this anymore. Like it's unnecessary because our team's ready.

and the systems are ready. And then to your point, there's certainly because we've made that decision and we're looking at systems, yes, I would say things have improved. In the time, you know, like when you go back 12 years, why did we not do it all in-house versus now? One of the levers certainly is better technology and kind of ways of working are definitely better.

Emily Fenech (15:35)
Yeah, that's great. I wanted to ask sort of any cool experiments. You've mentioned that you've been taking demos and having fun. What I love about that is I met with another chief people officer yesterday, Kate Kemp from Restaurant 365, and she said the same thing. Like, I loved her approach. She's having a blast right now, exploring technology, and so is her team. And the way that she's positioned it as something fun and like an opportunity.

I just loved it. I got the same sort of flicker of energy when you mentioned that. And so as you think about the things that you're exploring and you're having fun, like what's captured your attention or what are you excited about right now?

Andrea Cooper (16:14)
Yeah, you know, I'm gonna sound like a little nerdy, but I am an HR nerd and I'm okay with that. I wanna go back like a year, about two years, and I won't go into a lot of detail, but two years ago, I've been at Talkspace three years, so call it two, two and a half years ago, something like that. What we had is when you wanted to like say, get something done from the PeopleOps team, you wanted to promote someone, you wanted to deal with an employee issue, you had a benefits question, right? Like fill in the blank issue.

You might've sent it on Slack, you might've sent it an email, you might've had a conversation with somebody that you hope would pass it along to the right person, but it was pretty disjointed and pretty inefficient. And so maybe I got the same email that you as my colleague got and we're both working on it unbeknownst to the other. So, you know, over two years ago, we shifted and created a service desk through Jira that our tech team already used Jira, right? So we're like, okay, here's the technology we have, let's use it for our own team.

And so we set up and it took a lot of work to get that set up, right? To figure out who's primary, who's secondary, who, you know, all the things you gotta do. But we now have a system where an employee knows, they click a link and they submit a ticket and whatever their question is, right? I need to hire a new person. I had a backfill, I have somebody resign. I have a benefits issue. I wanna promote someone, whatever. All the things we do every day will come through that. And what's really nice is the way we invested in setting it up, it automatically gets sent to the right people who should own it.

the approvals that need to happen automatically go to the right people to get it fully done. And so everything is documented, everything is captured, but it creates a more seamless experience for everybody. And so that is not exactly sexy, right? Like that's not like, ooh, you've got a ticketing system, right? But what it's done is it's put process and rigor in our PeopleOps team that has really just, I think, kind of fueled the ability to do all these other things. It's given us head space to imagine

What demo should we be looking at? What system should we consider? And, you know, for example, one of the ones I'm excited about, so we use BambooHR, that's our HRS, and they have a new, I don't know if this is the right term, but a new module that basically is all like comp and benefits. And so over the last year and a half, we've been doing a big project on career framework, which essentially is a look at the whole org and says, you know, what is the right structure? What are the right roles? What are the right levels? Not just for right now, but for the future.

So that when we have somebody that wants to get promoted, we're not starting from scratch. We already know what that path looks like. We already know the Radford code and the comp levels and all that. But what I'm really excited within BambooHR is they now have the ability for us to upload all of that work we've done. So instead of operating off of Google Sheets and Google Docs and you know, the world we've been in for a long time, it's gonna be there for us. And so instead of one person on my team being like the compensation expert, everybody in PeopleOps can go in and see what's the market ratio of this person. You know, when was the last time there was some...

person was promoted, what level should they go to next? All of those details that typically in a company are owned by a small group of comp and bin experts can actually be more transparent and visible for our whole PeopleOps team that again, will just increase our ability to serve the business. So those are like, for me exciting, maybe not the average person would find those things exciting, but really creating space to get better and build tools and processes that work and deliver what the business needs is just the most fun, I think.

Emily Fenech (19:22)
Yeah.

And you mentioned that a ticketing system is not sexy and it is not. However, you know what I mean? I don't think that I don't think that all work necessarily. Like, that's not the number one thing I'm looking for. like, does it free up your time to go and be more innovative or to be more empathetic or to take care of yourself? Another hour to like breathe and eat a sandwich. Imagine.

Andrea Cooper (19:26)
Yeah.

Exactly.

Imagine. Well, and I

agree with all that. And I would say what it's helped us do is we start to see themes, right? So when you have a ticketing system, you can look at reporting, you can be like, okay, we just rolled out open enrollment and we've gotten six people asking this same type of question. We obviously missed something in our communications. Let's go out and fix it. So it's like, it allows you those things versus constantly firefighting and chasing, which I think is often the world of people ops, right? We're often in a position to be very reactive, very firefighty.

And I don't think that it has to be that way most of the time. There are gonna be always those things you can't plan for, but I think that we are in a much better position now to be more thoughtful and consistent and creating this great experience, but also to your point, have a chance to take a vacation if you want to or eat a sandwich during the day. It's really nice.

Emily Fenech (20:26)
Yeah. People always

talk about AI efficiencies freeing up time to do more meaningful work. And I'm like freeing up time to eat a snack.

Andrea Cooper (20:35)
Yes,

a snack. Or to go for a walk, maybe at end of your day, right? Instead of just continuing to be on your computer, like incessantly.

Emily Fenech (20:37)
⁓ go for it. Go.

Well, I've really enjoyed our conversation. Andrew, do you have any sort of final words of advice or anything to sort of, you know, we have an audience of HR listeners, anything you want to leave them with today?

Andrea Cooper (20:54)
Well, I think that what I would say is I'm not, I would never claim to be the most innovative, the most like exciting person. But what I do feel really strongly about is if you surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and have more creative abilities in you, it will lead to really awesome outcomes. And I think this team at Talkspace has really proven that to me. I probably it's obvious, anybody who actually listens to this, I'm super pragmatic. I'm pretty like logical, rational thinker, which is helpful.

But it's not enough, right? I think that you need people that are very innovative, very creative, willing to try new things and make change happen. And so I think for me, maybe what's brought me the most joy is being a leader of a team that is ready to do it. They jump in, we aren't worried about the hierarchy or who reports to who. We're just like getting things done in a way that is rewarding personally, but really has such a good impact on the business. So to me, if I was gonna leave anybody anything, it would be that. Don't be afraid to...

really advocate and hire people that you actually think probably are smarter than you and more creative than you and have maybe more runway than you because it only benefits everyone.

Emily Fenech (21:58)
Mm-hmm. I love that. Well, thank you, Andrea. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Andrea Cooper (22:01)
Yeah,

yeah, me too. Thanks so much for having me.

Emily Fenech (22:05)
Take care.

Andrea Cooper (22:06)
Thanks.