Talkspace, a company dedicated to offering accessible mental health services, recognizes the importance of mental health and well-being for all employees, from therapists to corporate staff. To support this, they've harnessed technology to foster a community-driven culture, providing the tools employees need to thrive.

Andrea Cooper, Talkspace’s chief people officer says that from the time an employee first joins the company, they try their best to meet them where they are and connect them with the technology and services to help them succeed. Cooper spoke in a thought leadership spotlight titled “Enhancing Employee Support and Engagement Through Technology and Community Building,” at From Day One’s August virtual conference.

Given the broad range of employees at Talkspace, about 50% are therapists and the other half are on the corporate side, she says it's important not to make assumptions. “Because we have a broad range of employees with a lot of different backgrounds, we shouldn't assume that people are going to be immediately comfortable with the technology that we’re asking them to use. And we shouldn’t assume that they know all the functionality available to them.”

The company uses some of the common business tools like Google Suite and Slack, for example, but they try to maximize those platform’s effectiveness by really understanding how to use the technology better.

Ahead of 2024, Cooper says her team took some time reflecting on strategic objectives and what OKRs (objectives and key results) they wanted to commit to for the new year. “We spent time reflecting on our people leader experience, and candidly, what we found is that it was inconsistent,” Cooper said.

“It wasn’t that it was not there, but it just could be better.” Cooper says they had to acknowledge that people leaders are critical to the experience that employees have. “[They] really often set an important tone for the company.”

Being fully remote, Cooper says their people leaders were not always pausing to take care of themselves. They had to self-reflect on what, as a company, they were doing, what they weren’t doing, and what they could do better.

Despite being a “Slack company,” they didn’t previously have a channel for people leaders. So, they created a channel just for their people leaders, and used it to communicate with them ahead of company news. “Historically, we would just send [news] out to all employees and leaders at the same time, and [we] didn’t really position them to support their teams effectively. So we use this channel as a way to give advanced communication to people leaders to make their job better and easier.”

Cooper says that in addition to giving advance notice of company news, they’ve opened their Slack channel as a safe space to simply ask questions, instead of everything being routed to one team leader. This has opened “the door to a broader support system for people leaders,” which has led to “more interactions and [a] sense of support and community.”

Talkspace also offers a drop in session once a month. It’s an informal Q&A format without an obligation to show up. “If you’re someone that enjoys the live discussion, join us. If you're someone who prefers to read and reflect on your own, here are the slides that we talked about,” Cooper said.

Finally, to bring it all together and connect the dots, Cooper says they started using tools like JIRA and Confluence to automate various aspects of the employee and people leader experience with their People Resource Center. 

Building Connection Through Community

“I’m sure we all have a clear memory in our mind, if you went to the office four or five days a week, and then that day in March of 2020 [when] many of us just suddenly started working remotely. If you were in HR, you probably also remember how hard it was to build culture and to maintain the sense of community in the absence of going in-person five days a week.”

To build community among their nearly 500 mostly remote employees, Cooper says Talkspace does an “all hands” meeting once a month. In July and August of this year, they did a Co-worker Feud, live classes (like cultivating healthy adult friendships), and tips on coping with loneliness, for example.

“We’re trying to meet people in all different places. Some people like to go to a live webinar. Some people like to do self-reflection with a worksheet. Some people like to join a game and just have fun and forget about work for 30 minutes,” she said.

Cooper points to three things she’s learned in how they’ve used technology to help with creating a sense of community and culture: 

1. Little things can have a big impact on employee experience.
2. People leaders need support and a safe space to learn and grow.
3. Investing in people and making time for connections isn’t just a feel good thing, it's essential to collectively succeed and deliver on business results.

“I hope that we continue to learn and grow and experiment in a way that helps our employees feel that sense of community and as they continue to be fully remote.”

Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Talkspace, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.

Matthew Koehler is a freelance journalist and licensed real estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in Greater Greater Washington, The Washington Post, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.