From Social Work to Social Impact: Growing at 1Password

Beep beep. My pager goes off. Then the phone rings. Meanwhile, there is a client sitting in front of me who needs a place to sleep tonight. Looking at my schedule, the days are blocked back-to-back with clients for the rest of the week, and there’s a long list of patients waiting for an appointment in my inbox. And it’s only Tuesday.

For seven years, I was a social worker in community mental healthcare, and I was passionate about helping my clients with counseling and connecting them to necessary resources. Helping folks with psychosocial needs was meaningful and important work, but I felt anxious, tired, and overwhelmed most of the time. It took some reflection, but I slowly realized that I wanted to use my skills in a different way.

A friend connected me to someone who worked at a cybersecurity startup called Kolide. They asked if I would ever want to bring my people skills to a people operations role at a B2B cybersecurity SaaS startup that had recently raised a Series B round of funding. I went home to Google some words: B2B, SaaS and Series B. I quickly realized I didn’t understand half of what I was reading, but knew I needed a change. I took the People Operations role with the hope that some of my relationship-building skills would translate to a new setting. I didn’t really know what that meant at the time. 

After my first meeting at my new job (which was called an All-Hands, new to me), the list of concepts I had to Google got a lot longer (what is dogfooding?). I had never used Slack before (when do you post in a channel vs a direct message?). I looked up definitions, read books, took free webinars and somehow, managed to figure some things out. Over time, the initial shock of working in such a different environment wore off and I realized the skills I'd built as a social worker enabled me to create positive connections and a supportive work culture. 

After two years, our startup was acquired by 1Password. From there, I had the opportunity to apply for a new role in corporate social responsibility, which would enable me to work on the company’s community impact, including educational programs, corporate giving, and employee volunteering.  

Working at 1Password

Taking on so many new types of projects at 1Password was challenging, but I realized that some of my skills from my social work days were needed here too. My ability to quickly write client notes and treatment plans were needed when I had to create project plans for company-wide volunteer events. I was able to lean on my experiences working in community care when choosing organizations to make corporate donations to, and when  supporting one of our discount programs, 1Password for Nonprofits. 

Going from working in a busy hospital clinic every day to working behind a screen with remote coworkers from all over the world was a big change, but there were some similarities. A hospital clinic is a high performance environment – you have to move quickly and efficiently, triage and assess risk, and always put the needs of the humans you are serving first, similar to what we do here at 1Password. This work requires building relationships across teams to understand their perspectives in order to work towards our goal of a safer, simpler digital world for everyone. I partner with our Strong Unique Voices program to help Employee Resource Groups make donations that support their communities, and team up with our Marketing department to promote our programs in the press and on social media. 

Instead of facilitating group therapy, I now facilitate conversations with our 1Password for Good Committee. We are focused on our company’s impact on the world, ensuring that we create equitable ways for our employees to engage with our philanthropic work and give back to their communities.

How 1Password supported my transition

1Password has given me the environment to learn, grow, and take risks in a new field. The company invested in my development, providing support for my education so I could earn a certificate in Sustainability and Social Impact from CU Boulder. I got the opportunity to dive into a different team’s work when a colleague took parental leave, which gave me exposure to many areas of the business and the ability to build relationships with cross-functional stakeholders. 

At 1Password, you can bring who you are now and who you were to work. I’m still advocating for equitable systems and promoting positive impact, but I am doing it in a different setting. Like a hospital, 1Password is an environment where we have to work together with a common goal, while always keeping our values in mind. The stakes and the rewards are high. 

Here, we value diverse perspectives, respect transferable skills, and are provided a supportive environment for growth. 

A few years later, I’m happy to have traded in my pager beeps for Slack pings, therapy sessions for Zoom meetings, and the ability to positively impact many through our 1Password for Good programs. I still have to search the internet for words and acronyms I don’t know, but the list is much shorter these days.