HR manager Katie Thibeault says Cognition+ is 'sticking to our guns — and we find it to be very effective'
When COVID pushed office workers home almost overnight, many organizations rushed into remote work and are now in the middle of sometimes contentious return-to-office processes.
Cognition+, a London, Ont.-based insurance software firm, chose a different tack. Under HR manager Katie Thibeault, the company used the pandemic as a catalyst to reset how and where its people work.
Thibeault didn’t set out to become an HR lead — or part of a tiny HR department for a small company. She took a general business program at university and only moved towards people work after testing other options through what she calls a “process of elimination.” Co-op programs with a tech company involved training on the products, and this put her in closer contact with the company’s HR team. They eventually pulled her into recruitment and total rewards for several years, leading to an HR generalist role at another large company.
All of this led to the opportunity to join Cognition+, then known as MCCG, as the company’s first in-house HR person, says Thibeault.
“It’s been a wonderful journey for me to be able to create all the programs from the ground up with a really supportive leadership team,” she says. “I’m a team of one single HR employee, and we have about 85 employees.”
As a result, every core piece of Cognition+’s system – hiring, benefits, health and safety, social committee work, performance and engagement – runs through Thibeault’s desk. That concentration leaves little room for vague policies or experiments that leaders can quietly reverse when they get uncomfortable.
Lessons in collaboration and being a resource
Thibeault believes collaboration with other leaders is essential in a small company like Cognition+, and her lessons from other stops in her HR journey have come in handy.
“[It's about] always trying to be a partner with the business or with whoever I'm working with, and it goes back to the idea of trying to be helpful,” she says. “I think sometimes that's difficult for HR because it's the question of 'Am I on the employee side or the employer side?' and sometimes that's hard to balance — but that's something that’s stuck with me along the way, being that resource to help people.”
Thibeault takes that sensibility outside of her role, as she’s part of a mentorship program for newcomers to Canada with a local organization, having been part of the mentorship program for the Grand Valley chapter of the Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA).
“That's been an interesting experience for me, as at Cognition+, we have a pretty diverse workforce, so helping the two mentees I've worked with understand tips on how to break into HR and even just navigate a recruitment process, that's been something that's interested me,” she says. “Helping people along the way is important to becoming a strong leader, and how much I've learned from folks like that in my life.”
HR point person in small company
Being the point person as the single HR person in the company means being fully involved in company strategies, and one of her biggest challenges — that turned into a success — came when COVID struck. Before the pandemic, Thibeault says staff could work from home one day a week, so laptops and basic tools were already in place, but that illusion of readiness fell apart once everyone went remote and exposed subpar tools such as a “terrible” video conferencing system.
The company upgraded its technology and made a call many organizations avoided: full remote work with no planned return to the office, according to Thibeault.
She’s clear that this wasn’t a trial to be walked back later. “We’ve never made changes and then gone back on them,” she says. “We've gone remote-first, hired talent across the country, and we actually made our office significantly smaller, so the space doesn't exist anymore — we're sticking with it and finding new ways of leading and new ways of working, because it is different.”
Thibeault says she has seen employees jump to large tech firms based in Toronto, and then collide with commutes and family strain when those companies implemented return-to-office plans: “They've decided to not go there and then they come back to us, so we've benefited from sticking to our guns — and we find it to be very effective."
Culture and communication in remote-first model
Thibeault acknowledges that there are limits to a remote-first model. “When we say remote, it doesn’t mean never in-person, because we’re also aware that in-person sometimes is better and where those opportunities make sense, we’ll facilitate it,” she says, noting that onboarding is one circumstancing requiring in-person interaction. Cognition+’s onboarding process requires new hires to come into the London office so trust and expectations form fast, which Thibeault says is highly important for the company.
The real glue for the company is communication and having the right tools to have strong interaction, according to Thibeault. “We have monthly, virtual, company-wide staff meetings,” she says. “That’s a huge area of communication for us along with Slack, which we're constantly messaging in, and people have at least monthly one-on-ones with their leader and semi-annual performance reviews.”
Thibeault also runs an anonymous employee survey to keep the feedback loop open. “We really look at our employee experience in the same way as we do our software development experience — it’s all about continuous improvement,” she says, noting that recent surveys have delivered high employee net promoter scores and participation rates.
Thibeault acknowledges that company culture can be fragile when most interactions happen through a screen. “The last thing I want is people thinking, ‘I’ll get a new job and I’m just logging into a different computer, I don’t feel that sense of connection, purpose, or community,'” she says. That concern pushes her to keep communicating tough decisions instead of hiding behind general statements.
Mentoring, learning part of AI adoption
The other force reshaping Thibeault’s agenda is AI. “We’ve been talking about AI a ton, obviously, and we've been trying to highlight it as a tool for employees to use, but not this all-knowing expert that you shouldn't question,” she says. “It's like a colleague that you can chat back and forth with, question, and have conversations [with].”
To keep that concept at the forefront, Thibeault says Cognition+ has wired AI straight into employee incentives. “Part of our goals for 2025, which I helped to set as HR manager, is focusing our corporate training program for this year — which filters into employee bonuses — around AI,” she says.
Staff take a core course plus role-specific modules on themes like AI in software development or customer service, which enforces the company’s approach to look at AI from a number of perspectives: "It’s a tool for us as employees, but of course you need to use it responsibly,” she says.
The company’s AI transformation hasn’t changed Thibeault’s people-first philosophy and her emphasis on direct communication and mentoring. “We have an AI spotlight at our monthly staff meetings where someone will come on and say, ‘I use AI to do this really cool thing, let me show you,’” she says. “Continuing to talk about it, keeping it at the forefront, and trying to make it really practical for folks is that frontline priority of how I do these tasks?”
