Tori Barnes is a senior corporate communications professional with a blend of agency and in-house experience focused at the intersection of healthcare and technology. She currently leads Headspace’s Communications and Social Media team, which includes all of their internal and external communications work, as well as social media. Tori’s previous experience includes communications roles at ReviveHealth, athenahealth and Burson-Marsteller.
In this Studio Session, Tori and Mixing Board Founder, Sean Garrett, talk about lessons from a merger and the opportunities and challenges of combining two teams; creating consistency during periods of uncertainty; sifting through the noise in the crowded mental health space; and, lessons learned on supporting comms people with their own mental health.
SG: Tell us about your current job, how you found your way there, and what you're doing now.
TB: My current role is VP of Communications and Social at Headspace. I started my career at Burson-Marsteller cutting my teeth in the tech world working with brands like HP and SAP, and eventually stumbled into the intersection of healthcare and tech. It was the early days of the digital health industry, and I quickly developed a fascination with the role of technology in solving incredibly complex problems in healthcare, and helping organizations to tell those stories. I helped build the agency’s digital health team, and my last client during my time there was Fitbit. I fell in love with their engaging brand and ability to drive powerful health outcomes through a wearable device.
From there, I went on to lead executive comms for a few years at athenahealth, and then back to the agency side working with a variety of different brands across healthcare, ranging from hospitals and health systems, to virtual care providers. I've hopped back and forth a bit from agency to in-house roles, but have always remained focused on this intersection of tech and healthcare, where I've really found my passion.
The spark came full circle when I got a call in 2019 from my former client at Fitbit, looking for a leader to build out the communications function at a company called Ginger. At the time, Ginger was a Series C startup focusing on on-demand mental healthcare. It was pre-COVID, so before this big boom in the mental health crisis, but still an incredibly critical inflection point in the dialogue around mental health.
I went in as a team of one and built out a team and function as the company went through an exciting period of rapid growth. I got the call that we would merge with Headspace the night before my C-section with my son. The night after he was born, I was in the “Cat Marina”, one of Headspace’s top Sleepcasts, trying to fall asleep that night with a newborn and realizing, wow, this is an incredible consumer product. How am I going to manage this team? I had a ton of imposter syndrome.
Today, I lead all of our communications internally and externally. That external comms is divided between a D2C team that supports the growth of our consumer app, and then a more B2B focused team where we target health plans, employers, and strategic partners. Social media has recently become part of my team. And of course, employee communications, which is a critical function at Headspace. We're really big on operating from the inside out.
Our collective Headspace team is over one thousand people around the world, ranging from coaches, therapists and psychiatrists, to Emmy-award winning producers. It’s a dream job for me.
SG: What attracted you to going into this nascent intersection of tech and mental health?
TB: At the outset, I was attracted to an industry that was incredibly complex and ripe for change. The fact that 1 in 8 people globally struggle with a mental health disorder, and half of counties here in the U.S. don't have access to a single provider boggled (and continues to boggle!) my mind.
I was also intrigued by the stigma lifting around mental health and the uptick in conversation, even before COVID. I was hearing so many interesting stories of people getting into therapy, starting meditation, or even just talking about their emotions more openly.
Shortly after joining Ginger, I went through my own journey of finding mental health support. I quickly realized just how complicated, time-intensive, and costly it can be to find high-quality care.
My personal experience, along with the countless stories from friends, family and at work, has deeply motivated me to continue telling these stories and advocating for change. Headspace is by far the most mission-driven company I’ve ever come across. You really feel the change that we make in members’ lives, and there’s something about being so close to the front lines of care that’s been incredibly powerful for me.
SG: Tell me about that transition from stigmatization to a place where mental health is now almost on trend. On one side, people are scared and want to look away. On the other side, there’s performative TikTok therapy. How do you think through that?
TB: It's both the beauty and the downfall of stigma being reduced. Now we have all of this conversation around mental health, which is wonderful, but it can be hard to sift through to find quality information, and ultimately quality care.
One of the biggest things I'm focused on with my team right now is getting our care providers - our meditation and mindfulness teachers, our mental health coaches, therapists and psychiatrists - out into the world to provide that trusted education that consumers are seeking.
We're also doing a lot of education on how different types of mental healthcare and wellbeing support work together. And the reason for that, ultimately, is to show that world that mental health doesn't always mean going straight to into therapy. We have an amazing opportunity as a society to start thinking about mental health in a more preventative way. Just like we think about taking care of our physical health to prevent diabetes or heart disease, we can think about mental health tools like meditation and mindfulness to help build resilience to get through life’s tougher moments.
SG: One of the hardest things about healthcare communications for a lot of companies is how complex the various audiences are. You’ve got everything from providers, insurers, consumers, partners – it’s a wide spectrum of folks. A lot of companies now are facing these complexities because they touch so many different layers of things. How do you best organize all these different audiences and have them compliment each other as much as possible?
TB: This challenge is top of mind for me right now, and for so many other healthcare comms leaders that I talk to. We sell directly to consumers, through payers, through employers, and through many different types of strategic partners. The way we very tactically divide my team now is a consumer team that knows how to do that work. They know how to reach the consumer in the places that they are, the lifestyle outlets and all the media they consume. Then we have folks that have more of a corporate B2B background, that are really out there at the industry trade shows, at the payer forums, and the benefits space.
However, many of the stories around how peoples’ lives are changed by getting the right form of mental health support are universal. When you tell those stories, oftentimes it resonates with anyone from a B2B buyer all the way through a consumer member. So we do a lot of cross-pollination in storytelling, through the form of our members, that resonates with everybody.
SG: What's this source of truth on that? How do you guys make sure that those stories are aligned?
TB: I'm a huge fan of the mantra, “fewer, bigger, better”. I believe in the power of activating thematically on a couple of big initiatives per year and rallying around them through the full marketing funnel. I get pushback on this from time to time as we have a bit of a “champagne problem” at Headspace. We have so many amazing stories to tell, and so many audiences to serve. But the truth is, if you’re known for everything, you’re known for nothing. It's taken some time, particularly on the heels of a merger and bringing together two cultures, two teams and two marketing/communications styles, but we’re getting really good at narrowing our focus. This is something that communications leaders can strive for, regardless of how many audiences or what types you serve – to try and rally around key moments, defining what those moments are, making them big enough to resonate for multiple audiences. Especially in the absence of massive advertising budgets.
SG: What are some lessons you learned from the merger? Especially from an internal comms lens – how did you and your team approach this and what did you learn along the way?
TB: When we merged, we came together as a small and scrappy team, and that was actually a really beautiful thing. We were fortunate to have the right talent in place, the right institutional knowledge from both sides, and a shared culture and passion for our mission. As tough as mergers are, when you work in mental health, you have cultures of compassionate people who are really open to having all of the right conversations. With that shared culture, we came together as a comms team pretty quickly and built out an incredibly talented team, appropriate to our size and scale.
We doubled down first on employee comms, and a lot of that work was focused around communicating as transparently as possible through a moment of significant change. There was executive turnover, there was a lot we needed to figure out about the product, and there were a lot of gray areas. We had to figure out how to be as transparent as possible, while also keeping employees focused and grounded.
It was a challenge in the initial year or so. Today, we're at a really interesting point where the product is coming together in a beautiful way. We have so much momentum to share. We’ve been seeing these teams, that once were operating independently, come together. So we've made a lot of progress in figuring out how those teams operate, what they benefit from hearing from the top or when does a cascade strategy work? When does it not work?
Our care team has a ton of different needs than the corporate side of the company. We have content producers and engineers who consume information differently than our therapists and care providers. But there are commonalities and things that we can all lean into, which for us are our mission, our impact and most importantly, our members.
SG: Let’s talk about that gray area, because that’s a very common experience after an acquisition. In the lead up, there’s only so much information you can share. And then once the merger is done, there's an expectation that everything's just going to come together now. But the full acquisition period takes time – then there's the closing of the deal, then there's figuring out who works where, and what do people do. That can take at least a year. And yet, employees are naturally like, "What's happening now? What's happening next week? What's happening next month? How does my job fit into all this?" How do you best balance that?
TB: I heard this from a salesperson once. People want the WIFM. What’s in it for me? What's in it for my immediate team? What does it look like around us? People want those answers, especially in periods of uncertainty. As we brought these two organizations together, we tried to think about the WIFM for each of these audiences. And then we looked at where there was commonality, and where we could create consistency and certainty during what felt like an uncertain time.
This is hard work, I won't sugarcoat it. We’ve gone through a couple of really tough periods of change as an organization, where we had a sense of certainty that disappeared, and you have to build it back up again. We, like so many companies, are a work in progress. I'm a work in progress in figuring this out. I really rely on groups like Mixing Board to bounce these ideas off of and learn from.
For me, it all comes back to consistency in communications. Relying on the channels that we know work well, and testing and experimenting a little bit with the ones that might be new and different for us. Then going back to that WIFM. What's in it for each of these audiences? What's changing for them? And where can we lean in to support the audiences most affected by that change right now? These are the questions we’re constantly asking ourselves as a comms team.
SG: We’ve talked previously about the importance of mental health or comms people in general. This is obviously a well documented, stressful job, with lots of uncertainty. You've been in a comms role focused on mental health, which gives you a lens into this intersection. What have you seen to be beneficial in even exposing this conversation to comms folks who tend to get pretty focused at times?
TB: I love this question. Some of the greatest skills among communications professionals I've worked with are also some of the most highly correlated with burnout. Multitasking, overworking, the "say yes" mentality, being in multiple places at once – so many of these traits are proven to have a negative impact on our mental health. It’s not uncommon to hear about burnout within this field, or folks just taking significant time away. I’ve heard a lot of, "Oh, I had to take a huge break after that job."
I'm really passionate about acknowledging this, and opening up this conversation within the industry. I think collectively that we can make some significant progress in bringing the right tools and resources to communications professionals early on in their careers, whether it’s in agencies or in-house.
SG: Are there any first steps that you suggest?
TB: The first step truly is opening up the conversation around mental health. One of the most simple things I do with my team is sharing our “highs and lows” at the end of every week. This creates a shared understanding and acknowledgment of some of the tougher moments to help support one another, and sometimes just gives us something to smile and laugh about. I’m also big on acknowledging with my team that this can be an incredibly stressful profession at times, and reflecting on the work that led to those stressful moments. Sometimes we’ll even write the “headlines you never saw” when reflecting on our results for the quarter, to help put a label to the work that doesn’t always appear in the numbers or the highlight slides.
It’s also so critical for leaders in this field to model strong boundaries. I'm an East Coaster and most of my team is on the West Coast. It feels so simple, but blocking that time and coming back truly focused goes such a long way. Instituting these sorts of boundaries really early on can be so valuable, along with modeling strong work-life balance and prioritization skills. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m still figuring this out myself!
I also have to make a shameless plug for meditation and mindfulness. We do a lot of that on my team. Especially in moments of crisis, when our instincts are to just go deep into the work right away. But instead, taking a moment to breathe and reset can be so powerful. It's one of the most impactful tools out there for so many people and professions, and particularly for those in high stress roles like communications.
SG: If someone new to comms is like, "Wow, Headspace is the coolest, that would be my dream job." How does someone find their way into doing what you're doing? What recommendations would you give?
TB: Call me! Seriously, I’m always interested in talking with anyone who has a passion for this space, and really believe we need more communicators out there to move the needle on the mental health crisis. At Headspace specifically, we’re on a journey into the depths of healthcare, to fix a system that’s very, very broken. With that in mind, we’re looking for not only a deep passion for mental health, but for the healthcare industry more broadly. I’m interested in working with storytellers who are really interested in leaning into complexity, getting into the weeds, and fixing a massive problem in society.
SG: How do you maintain this passion? How do you stay purpose-focused while also being realistic about the challenges and burnout? Healthcare is a massive, complex hairball that has to get completely disassembled. It's not going to happen overnight. So if you come in with all this energy thinking, "I'm going to change the world,” and then you discover that this thing is broken, these people don't talk to each other, and incentives are all wrong. How do you maintain that spirit in the face of complexity?
TB: The hairball analogy is perfect. That is healthcare, and specifically mental healthcare. You turn one corner and you realize, "Wow, there are barriers here, and here and here." I am just amazed about how complex it is, and how many issues there are to basic care access, good quality care, and affordability. These are basic things that our healthcare system struggles with.
Knowing this complexity, maintaining the passion is so important. For me, it always comes back to rooting ourselves in our members. No matter how many bumps in the road we have, when you pull back and listen to individual stories, you can’t help but be motivated to dig in deeper and drive change. Just yesterday, we had a coach explain how they helped prevent an individual from dying by suicide. There's nothing more grounding or humbling than these life changing stories.
Another strategy is to give back. For my team at Headspace, this often involves leaning in to find innovative ways to support our care providers on the front lines. For other teams, this might mean leaning into a company impact program or giving campaigns. It always feels energizing to take a step back and focus on our greater purpose. We also do a lot of mental health education within my own team, including bringing in our meditation teachers into our meetings from time to time to help keep us grounded. We’re lucky to have so many incredible resources to do this at Headspace, but I'm also equally passionate about getting these tools out to other comms teams so they can do the same. At the end of the day, no one can pour from an empty cup, and definitely not in the field of communications. Taking the time to take care of ourselves is so critical to maintaining our energy and focus, especially in the world that we’re operating within.
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