Katya Laviolette

▶0:00HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. I'm excited to welcome Katya to the Built by People podcast. Katya, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:49GuestSure, I'm happy to be here, Dave. Thank you for the invite. I am a— I would characterize myself as a true HR professional. I've done pretty well everything in my 30-year-plus career in HR, a generalist. I started really working in publicly traded organizations, very large, always pretty well headquartered at a multinational. I started my career in the labor relations field negotiating collective agreements. And then I just spread out into other functions from the HR perspective. And about I'd say 6 years ago, 7 years ago now, I moved into private, the private world, working with founders and scale-ups and startups. My work from the prior phase of career was super instructive and helpful in helping me really what I'm doing today from an HR perspective. And so today I'm the 1Password Chief People Officer. We are a global company, 60 countries, approximately 1,400 employees, and we live and breathe the cybersecurity space.

▶1:56HostThanks for that great introduction. Could you tell us about a specific time when you had to adapt your organization's culture to better align with rapid growth? What strategies did you implement to maintain core values while scaling?

▶2:11GuestWell, that's, that's our reality at 1Password. So it's a very, it's a very timely question. So if you take a look at 1Password's trajectory, we're a 20-plus-year company. We're founded in Canada and in up until about 2019, we were basically focused on the consumer from a B2C perspective. And we had no funding and functions such as engineering and customer support were the main functions. We got our first round of funding in 2019 and the growth has been explosive. We moved into the B2B space and then just last year we focused in on becoming multi-product. We are in the extended access management space. The Password manager is the bread and butter for us, but we are much more moving into enterprise and securing every login for every customer that basically brings all their tools to work. And every tool you bring to work creates security issues. So our job is to keep people safe online, both from a consumer and a business perspective. And when I joined the company 3 and a half years ago, we were very much focused on building and scaling and bringing in all the functions. And so from a cultural perspective, there were back in 2019 with the first round of funding, less than 100 employees. So everyone knew one another, things didn't have to be written down. So we proceeded really on building all the operating functions of a larger scale business and codifying things. And from a cultural perspective, codifying how we get work done through our values, put people first, keep it simple, lead with honesty, and then enunciating what the behaviors were underneath them. Putting into perspective or into plan performance management and so forth. Fast forward today, here we are, it's 2025. We're moving up, we call it moving up into the enterprise business, into selling into very large-scale businesses. And we cut across, we're quite unique because we have B2C and B2B. And so our workforce is very diverse from that perspective. And what that means is your culture will evolve. And what happens is you want to be able to anchor into the points that made you successful in the past, keep those elements, and pretty well discard other elements that aren't, aren't working for you. And today, because we're moving so rapidly, the pace of change, I'm sure for all your guests, is very large in HR. And part of that is we want to be a very successful company. We have a great story to tell, and to do that, we need a high-performance culture. And so we're being much more intentional about what that looks like, what that means, taking some tough decisions, being somewhat more crystal clear or providing clarity. For example, when people come to work for us, I regularly interview executives who want to come and work at 1Password. And I give them the whole perspective, what's great about it, what you might not like, what you might just love, but you have to have all this reality. And so part of what we live today is really working towards that high-performance culture and creating a realistic perspective. And some people are going to embrace that. And some we have to assume might not because the age and stage of the company has shifted and respectfully, we have to have a discussion to say perhaps this isn't the place for you anymore and respectfully move on from each other and so forth. And that's tough. Those are not easy discussions, but that's part of change. And what I would hope that people either coming or people who perhaps have departed have loved what they've been able to contribute and are proud customers of 1Password.

▶6:03HostKari, thanks for that great answer. When was a time you encountered resistance while promoting a high-performance culture? How did you address the challenges and bring everyone along with the changes?

▶6:17GuestYou have to provide context. So even what we live today, I talk regularly to our executive team about we are in a cultural transformation. We're building, we're on this rocket ship that we're building. We're on our path, a path to a billion in revenue that we've said publicly and so forth. That takes a lot of grit. It takes a lot of It takes a lot of curiosity. And sometimes the executives are further ahead than the rest of the employee base. And so change is about making sure that people have context, they understand the clear expectations. And as we hear a lot about these days is about clarity, clarity in an honest and respectful way. And so resistance is actually, you get resistance every day of your life, personally or professionally. And so as an HR professional, I think It's important to be able to take a step back to figure out your audience, who you're addressing, what your messaging will be. Your messaging is going to be different perhaps for an internal employee than if you're doing pitch, pitches outside through marketing and so forth. And so you have to customize your message. You have to listen. You have to be clear and you have to follow up and you have to have a flow. Like you can't just assume that, oh, we're moving to high performance and it's one and done. It's a journey. And a journey that you have to consistently work at.

▶7:39HostKati, how did you approach a situation where direct communication and transparency were necessary to manage expectations? What were the outcomes and what did you learn from that experience?

▶7:53GuestI think I would use examples of just regular coaching and performance management of employees. I think that it's very important to be fact-based. To be relatively quick with your feedback. We face conflict on a daily basis, personally and professionally. So what I have learned over the years when I am working with my team or I'm coaching people is I'm very transparent. I give a ton of information at the time. Nothing should be a surprise. So we should have been speaking about things throughout the period of time of the performance review. And I always ask at the end, I say, so is this rating or this feedback, are there any surprises? And if someone says, oh yeah, there's a surprise, then I haven't done my job. And so taking that kind of concept of transparency and clear, clear communication, you should try and apply that in everything you do, speaking to employees, building out programs, working on cultural change and so forth. And I think if you have that in mind, make your job as an HR professional a lot easier.

▶9:01HostKatya, can you share a story about how you've balanced people's needs with business goals? How did you ensure HR was integrated into the broader business strategy?

▶9:12GuestI think, I think that it's really like I was saying at my intro about kind of my 30 years. So I've learned a lot. I've had some wins and some failures that I've gotten up and scrubbed myself off and moved along and learned from that. And I think that it's important that you have, as an executive leadership team, you first and foremost understand the business, and then you make the connection from the people perspective. So we don't manufacture widgets at 1Password. We are a people-led business. We build secure applications to make everyone safe online. And that doesn't, that's not something that you're just automatically processing every day. And so I think if you understand the business and then you're able to make those connections and connect the dots from the HR perspective, really able to integrate yourself into the business. And I think that I use the example from balancing people's needs with business goals is like, we just look at how we're scaling and we're scaling quickly. And so I'm always talking to my team about we can only bring on so many people at a time to help the business, otherwise you overload it. So our job is to make sure that everything is working correctly because if not, you can throw people at problems, then you're not moving any, any better. And so I think that from a workforce planning perspective, that would be a great example in terms of making sure that our business goals are met. We need the right talent at the right place, but we also need to onboard them. We need to check in and we need to make sure that the talent that we're hiring is going to meet the business goals. So we're like really core at the center, because as I said at the beginning, people make the business. And so I think that's a really real-life example of what we do every day.

▶11:10HostKatya, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶11:15GuestI talk these days about the importance of being resilient in HR. We've gone through a lot of iterations, a lot of changes as HR professionals, obviously COVID, and hopefully COVID's passed us, but now we're into the advent of AI. This is the next transformation that's going at rocket speed. And I think as an HR professional, it's very important to learn, be curious, and above all in this day and age, there's an importance about building your own personal resilience that helps you both in your personal life, but also in your professional life because everything intersects. And I think that will make, make the H function more impactful and more influential. And hence that equals a very rewarding and fulfilling professional career.

▶12:04HostThank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶12:09GuestPleasure to be here. And thank you again for the invite.