Moderna merges HR and IT, the price of office politics, and is sustainable scaling achievable?

In this episode, we explore three critical workplace strategy topics: how effective leaders can minimize office politics through transparency, accountability, and encouraging diverse viewpoints—strategies that seem obvious yet many workplaces still struggle to implement; Moderna's innovative approach to merging their tech and HR departments under a single "chief people and digital technology officer" role, complete with over 3,000 custom GPTs, representing a thoughtful years-long integration rather than a knee-jerk AI adoption; and the challenges of scaling a business sustainably, where the advice to build systems for 10x capacity sounds great in theory but often conflicts with the reality that HR infrastructure typically lags behind growth, creating a delicate balance between building too little too late versus over-engineering for your current stage.

Connect

Katya Laviolette on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katya-laviolette-6907b726/

Stacey Nordwall on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/staceynordwall/

Articles

• How Effective Leaders Minimize Office Politics
• Why Moderna Merged Its Tech and HR Departments
• Why Scaling a Business is the Hardest—and Most Important—Stage of Growth

Transcript

Stacey Nordwall (00:00):

Welcome to Toot or Boot, where each week we talk about news related to HR and the world of work. I'm your host, Stacey Nordwall, a serial joiner of early stage tech companies as their first in or only HR person. And joining us today, we have Katya Laviolette. Katya, welcome. So glad to have you here. Could you tell folks a little bit about yourself?

Katya Laviolette (00:22):

Thanks, Stacey. Really happy to be here with you and it was great to meet you in real life in the spring. So great to be able to reconnect on your podcast. I'm the Chief People Officer of One Password. We are a cybersecurity company in the identity space, so we protect individuals and companies online. We are in six countries. We are global. We're around 1400 employees. We are fully remote, scaling rapidly, and basically our premise is to ensure that these days there's a lot of obviously breaches. We hear about them every day. People bring their computers, their applications, they sign on to all sorts of things. And every time they do that within an enterprise or even just as a consumer, they create holes as I would say, in kind of simple terms that can lead to breaches. And so we work to protect that and make sure that people are safe and that obviously companies are safe.

Stacey Nordwall (01:21):

Yeah, I love that because I was like, great, I know one password, I use one password, but it's mostly just because I can't remember strong passwords. But I appreciate that you're like, no, there's a much broader reason.

Katya Laviolette (01:33):

Yes, we have a consumer, our password manager where one password was born and now we have extended access management, which is a much broader suite of tools for companies of varying sizes. And so we have a full suite offering, I would say.

Stacey Nordwall (01:49):

Awesome. All right, fabulous. Well, that's going to be good. I know that you are going to have some particular thoughts on one of our later articles about Moderna based on some of your experience, but we're actually going to start off with an article from Inc. It's called How Effective Leaders Minimize Office Politics. And the recap for this article, the author outlines strategies for leaders to identify and mitigate office politics, which they say left unchecked can erode trust and hinder performance. They say that leaders should not ignore office politics because ultimately they have a hand in shaping what behaviors are tolerated or rewarded, which includes things like how freely information flows to you, who you promote, how you take bad news, and if you encourage diverse and dissenting views, then they outline some strategies to diffuse workplace politics, like modeling transparency, holding folks accountable, being accountable yourself, encouraging a culture of feedback, setting expectations, developing a culture where people can speak up. So for me, I read this and I was like, yeah, sure. These are the things, there's nothing particularly groundbreaking here, but it also seems like a thing a lot of people experience have problems with and workplaces have trouble getting. Right. And I know this is one of the things you are really passionate about is building good, thriving, high performing workplace cultures. What did you think when you read this article and of the strategies the author laid out?

Katya Laviolette (03:19):

Well, I would say that this one I would certainly just in terms of your theme on your podcast is I would toot it. I think I would support that wholly just in terms of politics is around, it's around personally and in your professional environments and so forth. But at the crux of it, it it's around conflict. And there's stats around 85% of the US companies experience some level people experience some level of conflict. And so I think our jobs from an HR professional standpoint is to be able to address these things head on, get the facts on the table, take the emotion out of it. These days, the workplace is so fluid that so many views and so forth kind of intersect into the business as well. And so I just thought it was a great article. It was practical clarity of communication, making sure that people understand context, people are accountable, they understand how they contribute to the greater good of where the company is going.

(04:21):

Those things are important. And I think just that whole being crisp and clear on direction and so forth is very important to kind of try and not try, but to mitigate those politics. And I think as an HR professional, you got to push back and you have to be very, very at ease dealing with conflict. Remote environments actually are even harder because you see this zoom all the time. But you see, I talk a lot about you see this part up, but you don't see everything else happening in the background. Meetings are short, they're concise. And so that also can contribute to difficulties in terms of managing conflict or just getting things on the table

Stacey Nordwall (05:09):

Because so much of the context is stripped out.

Katya Laviolette (05:13):

Absolutely. And so you have to, as a leader, I think bring back the context, bring people along, address why people are feeling uncomfortable, and make sure that you check in regularly and you kind of read remote or in person. You have to be very astute reading the body language and the messaging.

Stacey Nordwall (05:34):

And you know what? I am so glad you brought that lens to it because it didn't even occur to me until you said it. That underlying kind of level of conflict, which I know can sound big, but conflict can also be very small misunderstandings or things like that as well. But I didn't really bring that layer of conflict into office politics. So I think that is really fascinating. They didn't mention it. It's not something that I hear particularly talked about when people are talking about office politics is how to manage that level of conflict that people are having and frame it in a way where it's like there is healthy conflict. There

Katya Laviolette (06:18):

Is, and some people might interpret office politics, that is a negative term, but there is healthy conflict. And I think that also it's part of culture and making sure that people are challenging you, you're challenging back in a respectful way, being direct. So there's a very positive angle of conflict. The office politics side is negative, so you should get it on the table, put the facts out, address it, be very clear on what your expectations are. But it shouldn't be people just assuming that, oh, if there's conflict, well it should be gone. No, there's a part that's really positive about conflict,

Stacey Nordwall (06:56):

And I'm thinking too, you mentioned the context of one password being in multiple countries. There is also always that aspect of culturally people just communicate differently and do things differently and that's can be uncomfortable, but also again, can result in deeper understandings, healthier, healthy exchanges, all of that kind of thing. If you have somebody like you're saying that's there to, okay, let's get together, let's put it on the table, let's have a clear discussion about it

Katya Laviolette (07:29):

And getting to know your audience or your team, how do they work? What's going through their minds? And again, it is somewhat harder sometimes in a remote environment, so you need to take the time to do that. And yes, we're in a number of countries, so there's this cultural element that's different. And we're Canadian based, company Canadian roots. We're about now we're 48% in Canada, so we were much higher in kind of our 20, 22 days. And we were obviously expanding globally, but Canadians might as a whole from a, it could be quite stereotypical, but have different behaviors than an American or that someone in the UK and so forth. So that's all about the beauty of different cultures. And I think as a leader, you need to be very, very good at putting yourself in other people's shoes, having curiosity, learning about those different cultures, and you'll be better to address some of that, those things that you might think are conflict.

Stacey Nordwall (08:33):

Yeah, I really love that lens on it for sure. And I think going back to the article also, the thing that has come up repeatedly on Toot or Boot is this concept of workplace culture is ultimately what you let people get away with and what you reward people. And that's something that I think was underlying all of this too, is ultimately office politics. A lot of that is what you let people get away with or what you reward people for

Katya Laviolette (09:07):

The behaviors and what do you stand for. Exactly. And then that culture of a company, it really doesn't stand still. It evolves as you as a company evolve too.

Stacey Nordwall (09:18):

Yeah, absolutely. All right. I think we will move on to our next article, but I really, I'm like, oh, I love that idea of it just being to a certain extent about it's what you let people get away with what you reward, and also I guess how you deal with conflict ultimately,

Katya Laviolette (09:36):

What do you stand up for? I think it comes down to actually your values, and I guess we can talk about that in the next article because that's about scaling and culture and values all come through there.

Stacey Nordwall (09:48):

Fabulous. Okay, we're going to talk about Moderna first. This is an article that comes to us from the Wall Street Journal. Its title is Why Moderna merged Its Tech and HR Departments. The recap here is in response to all of these rapid developments in ai, Moderna has merged its technology and HR departments into a single function led by a chief people and digital technology officer. Teams across the org are being redesigned as they examine what tasks are best suited for humans versus what tasks are best automated. They said in the article, this has been a years long effort in the making with their CHRO and CIO working together closely prior to the creation of this new role. And the CHRO stepped into it, their partnership, through their partnership with OpenAI, they've also developed over 3000 GPTs that are used throughout the org, including, and I know people will be interested in this. They have an HR GPT, which can take employee questions and then route them to more specific GPTs focused on performance management, equity or benefits, things like that. So I'm interested to know what your initial reaction was to this news, and if you think other companies are going to try to follow in their footsteps.

Katya Laviolette (11:03):

Well, a couple of things. I think first of all, I think it's phenomenal for the HR profession to see someone like Tracey Franklin take on a role such as this from a strategic standpoint.

(11:16):

I personally, in the space that I work within, it's probably something that we would not adopt. So I would be kind of on the booting side of it, but it has nothing to do with the actual competency and what they're trying to do at Moderna. Moderna is a different space than what we work in. And so I believe that from our standpoint, at One Password, we're fully built on this massive custom tech stack where privacy and security is the integral part. And so AI is going to obviously affect in, we hope in a very positive way, building it into the product to support, continuing to be secure and private to our customers all over the world. And so from my end of it, there's the AI piece that's quite internal from a cultural perspective and from a tooling perspective. But then there's these other legs of AI for security.

(12:17):

And so in my world, no, I think that that would be either a chief AI officer, a chief data officer for now, given our scaling and where we're at, that's within our chief technology officer remit and chief product officer remit. But the world of the CHRO has a ton of input into that in terms of the cultural piece and the tooling piece and how we get things done, how we ensure that people understand what AI is going to do for us and how it's going to accelerate us and where we're going to actually keep people. We're going to be true to our mission of making sure that it's done in a way that's safe and secure. So I think it's great to see what's happening in AI around the world and how actually there is a lot going on with HR leaders stepping into those roles. It's just not something that I would see given our current, what we actually do as a business.

(13:13):

We have to be definitely at the table. We have to be very much weaved through it, but the technical nature, super, super important for ownership to be had in my mind with a different profile.

Stacey Nordwall (13:26):

Yeah, it is interesting that you mentioned that too, again, that there's an internal component, particularly with your company, an internal component and an external and product component. And these are different things to be handled differently, viewed differently. I think the reaction that I saw on LinkedIn initially when the news came out was like, oh, here we go. Here's some other company that's trying to merge these two things. And now every CEO who sees this is going to now want to merge into this and have HR own another thing. And you look at the article and it's really like, okay, they have a partnership with OpenAI. They've been developing GPTs for years. The CHRO and CIO have been working together closely. This isn't a reaction to a trend we've seen with some other companies, frankly. So it does seem like, oh, okay,

Katya Laviolette (14:25):

That's an important point, Stacey, is that this is exactly it for them. It's been something that is structurally thought out and planned and works for their environment. The challenge we see in AI these days is everyone's just jumping on the trend and unless, okay, we're going to do this, we're going to do this. And it's just think through the realities for what it means to your company, your product, your customer, your workforce, and do what makes sense for you.

Stacey Nordwall (14:53):

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that was exactly kind of the reaction that I saw as everyone was like, oh, no, now they're going to try to merge this together. And it's that. It's like if you look beyond the headline, which I don't know if a lot of folks did, the reality is this is something that they have thought through. It is embedded within their culture in the way they work. It has been kind of this change management over a number of years that now they're at this point, and it isn't a kind of kneejerk thing of now everybody, if you want to hire, you have to tell me why AI can't do it first. It's like, okay, well, have you done anything in your culture to get to that point? Have you done anything to upskill your people to get to that point? So I think it is kind of heartening in a way for me to see this is a very structured way to go about doing it, but I feel like I still have that hesitancy of some CEO is just going to read the headline and then throw it to their HR person.

(15:58):

Now we got to do this.

Katya Laviolette (16:00):

And I think that that is the danger because I think it is such a transformational movement that it needs a lot of thought, a lot of thought to it and a lot of opinions. You need to be open about it, you need to listen, you need to pivot. It's really not a one and done. It's evolving pretty well every day, maybe every hour these days.

Stacey Nordwall (16:23):

Yeah, yeah. Really, I was just thinking about, there was something I did recently that when I tried to do it three months ago, it did not work at all in terms of using some GPT. And I'm like, oh, three months isn't a lot of time.

Katya Laviolette (16:38):

Yeah. Well, we actually had an example the other day we were on, we have an AI strategic SWAT team as we build out this core competency across the business and within our products and so forth. And someone was using an example, actually not three months, they were using an example of a week and have it come back. And then they trained. They trained, I think they were on Gemini, and they trained it and it picked it up so it can learn.

Stacey Nordwall (17:11):

Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So I think I'm trying to decide, I'm like, did I toot this or boot this? I toot it. But I want people to read the full articles and not react to the headlines, which I think so often we can do. And that also means I'd want the CEOs to read the full thing too, to see all of the steps that they went through because it does feel like I've seen quite a few HR leaders say that just figuring out AI gets into their lap and without any the same experience we've had over many years where we just are now tasked with yet another thing without that resourcing or the structure or budget or all of those kinds of things. So this is not a change that's going to happen like that, not well. Anyway,

Katya Laviolette (18:11):

I would encourage your listeners on that article to go in and see all the threads and all the comments because that's where you start. You have the article, you read through it, and then you start to see the differences of opinions there. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. And then you can actually digest that and make it real and understand what it means for your reality

Stacey Nordwall (18:32):

And apply it to your org. All right, fabulous. We're going to move to the next article, which is from Fast Company. It's called Why Scaling a Business is the hardest and most important stage of Growth In this article, the author lays out what you need to do when your business is entering a phase of rapid growth, and that is build systems that work at 10 x capacity without breaking, prepare your team to view change as an opportunity and to equip your people to handle complexity without burning out. And the author says that if you aren't building something that will grow sustainably, or if you're viewing scaling like a trophy to be won, your business will start to crumble. So when I read this, I had this in my background, I've joined a lot of seed stage startups that have grown or early stage startups. So I was like, yes, totally agree that you do need to do things like this to scale a business in practice. I have never seen that happen. It's never happened like this. So did you think that this was realistic? I mean, it might be accurate, but is it realistic for what the HR experience is?

Katya Laviolette (19:43):

Yeah, I think it's a realistic litmus test. It makes, you should read it if you're in a scaling business. I think it has excellent advice and excellent reminders, reminders being a trophy and that it's not a one and done.

(20:00):

So I would toot it for those reasons because the messages are very clear that, oh my God, because sometimes, and you've said it yourself, you're in these scale ups and you're just going a mile a minute and you're not taking time to just, okay, let's just take a step back and understand what we need to get there. The article's really good around talking about even just systems. So when you come into a scale up and if it's just been funded, it's usually quite an opportunity to grow and grow quickly. And people just come in and they pick and choose and they're like, okay, let's go. And then a year later you're like, oh my God, this is not good. We need to then change the systems and try something else. And so it actually is a really clear article about maybe just take a step and breathe and think about where do you want to be? Sometimes you have to go quickly and put in things because it's got to be done now, but

(20:52):

I think always around that short, mid to long-term and long-term is not decades out, and how do you think about things? How do you unwind things? If we do this, it's not going to work. How do we unwind them as well, as opposed to having all tool proliferation and so forth. So it is a really practical article is the reality of what we do and scale ups exactly that. No, it can't be. That's just how it is. But I think it keeps you in check actually, Stacey, to say, oh yeah, I need to just slow down on this. Go faster on this. Think about this. And a scale up is not a one and done thing. It's like, if you really want to have success, you need to think about sustainability, long-term sustainability. What are you doing to make something, build something great that's going to be around for a long time?

Stacey Nordwall (21:47):

Yeah. I think this article really resonated with me from the perspective of, I have been in positions where I was trying to build ahead essentially like, okay, I'm going to build something that is going to really help us scale, get us future proofed in a way, make sure that we're thinking ahead, and then found out that it was just too much from where we were and we didn't grow at the rate that we thought we were going to grow. And people, it was too much of a structure shift from the loosey goosey early stage tech to trying to build ahead. And so for this, I was like, oh man, it's such a hard line to walk.

Katya Laviolette (22:36):

It is. But I think it's also like if you see it and you read that, you're like, oh, this is the ideal scenario, so let's keep that in the back of our minds, but let's have some level of reality that it's never ideal. But keep those principles there because those principles are really good and they're going to help you if you just throw those principles out. It will be, in my mind, not successful.

Stacey Nordwall (23:02):

And I think that is a lot of the challenge I feel like ends up happening is that people aren't thinking about that, and then they realize that there's in so much tech debt, HR, debt, the infrastructures haven't been built, the support systems haven't been built. And you end up with something that's just like you're so far in debt that you're going back and you're still trying to build the plane while you're flying it, but it doesn't have an engine. I don't know, I dunno what the metaphor is, but

Katya Laviolette (23:33):

It could be a real, always a real challenge. And I think that the other thing that we have to be, as HR professionals, you have to be super agile because it's like mother nature. You don't control what mother does that you're going to have a heat wave or a massive tornado or a hurricane. Well, it's actually the same thing for the market economy, like the actual market dynamics. Do we know that we could go into a recession? Do we know that we could have other things that upend our product, given everything that's going on globally and so forth? You, so you should be ready as an HR professional to be able to pivot. And so when you're scaling, you're thinking about those things, not in this isolated way because all those external forces also come into play. So you have to be ready to say, okay, we've done this. These forces are changing what we're doing, so let's move to this with continuing to have that view of sustainability in your mind.

Stacey Nordwall (24:32):

And I liked what you said about understanding what it takes to unwind things, because I think that's also a real challenge. You can build and scale and get to a point, or even if you're picking certain tools or whatever it is, or signing up with certain benefits person or whatever that situation is, and then finding out that it's really hard to extract yourself or it's hard to extract the data that you have or whatever it is to pull back and to make the changes that you need to make. Yes.

Katya Laviolette (25:02):

Well, sometimes it becomes so interlinked with all your other systems. And the other thing we have a tendency to do is we want to go after that shiny thing and we want to, I don't know, implement an HRIS that's like, wow, everyone else is doing it. I should do it. No, you should look at what you need, what your reality is, what your scaling is, and you should go out and find the right tool for your need. It doesn't necessarily have to be the Cadillac for everything.

Stacey Nordwall (25:26):

Yeah. Yeah. I think that seems like that is somewhat, the theme of today is really taking in whatever is out there, be it some advice, some whatever, somebody somebody's doing about ai, a tool, and really taking that in, processing it. What actually makes sense for us, for this organization, for the stage that we're in, for the resources we have, all of those kinds of things.

Katya Laviolette (25:49):

And that makes you then unique. You have a unique culture, a unique product, a unique workforce. You do it to build something. Yes. Unique in your space.

Stacey Nordwall (26:03):

Yeah. Awesome. Well, Katya, thank you so much for joining Toot or Boot. It was a pleasure to talk to you. If folks would like to connect with you and learn more about what you're doing or what one password is doing, how might they do that?

Katya Laviolette (26:19):

Oh, very simple. Just LinkedIn is the way to go, Stacey. Alright,

Stacey Nordwall (26:24):

Fabulous. And I will be putting a link to your LinkedIn in the show notes so folks can go ahead and connect with you there. Ed, thanks again so much for joining

Katya Laviolette (26:35):

And thanks for reaching out. It was a pleasure connecting.