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.

Sponsor

AllVoices brings all your employee relations work together in one place. No more jumping between spreadsheets, emails, and legacy systems just one place to document and manage reports, cases, investigations, and performance conversations. It helps you run a more consistent process, takes busywork off your plate with AI, and makes it easier to spot trends early, so you can work proactively, not just put out fires.

See a demo at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.allvoices.co/