1Password is a leading provider of identity security and access management solutions built for the way people work and live today. Among its solutions is its password manager, which offers a user-friendly platform for over 150,000 businesses and millions of consumers worldwide to securely manage their passwords and most sensitive information. With advanced encryption and security features, 1Password protects digital identities – making it easy for businesses and individuals to generate, store, and autofill strong unique passwords across all devices and platforms.

1Password challenges

Being at the cutting edge of a massively growing industry can challenge a company to find ways to optimize while still safeguarding their employees’ well-being. The high-pressure pace of innovation and competition demands efficient workflows and robust support systems to maintain high performance.

As a Senior Manager, Solutions Engineering at 1Password, Jeremy Rhoades leads 45 team members across the solutions engineering, solutions architects, and technical writing teams.

Over the past 6 years at 1Password, Jeremy and his team found themselves managing an increasingly demanding schedule packed with customer calls, internal meetings, and important ongoing project work. He noticed that he and his team were struggling to strike a balance between meetings and regular focus work, as well as protecting their own personal time outside of work.

One of the primary issues these teams faced was managing their recurring internal meetings. Finding suitable times for regular meetings across many busy calendars became a logistical time sink, and their rescheduling efforts often led to conflicts or missed meetings entirely. This posed a huge disruption to workflow and communication.

Also, as a heavily external-facing team, Jeremy needed his team to remain available for customer calls. But with team meetings and one-on-ones jamming up the teams calendars, they weren’t able to offer enough open time slots to customers. This often meant customer calls would overlap with internal meetings or personal tasks, therefore – leading to more rescheduling or missed project deadlines.

"We weren't solving the problems – that was the problem. We would try to do things with calendaring, but it was too rigid and didn’t really do much in the way of protecting time. We just couldn't figure out a way to get everything on the books anymore."

With so much on their plates, work-life balance became more challenging to manage, especially during jam-packed workweeks. The team tried to create flexible working hours to accommodate client calls and internal meetings, but this complicated the team's ability to have structured days that allowed for regular lunch breaks, exercise, or mindfulness practices – activities that ultimately help teams perform at their best and prevent burnout.

It became clear to Jeremy that he and his team needed a solution to address their scheduling challenges, improve collaboration and productivity, and better protect their time. 

How 1Password boosts work-life effectiveness & productivity with AI scheduling

• Uses AI to schedule meetings at a time that works best for everyone
• Defends flexible time for recurring work & personal activities so they can keep up with goals
• Auto-schedules breaks after meetings to avoid back-to-back meeting days

Jeremy discovered Reclaim through a recommendation from a 1Password colleague in 2022 and immediately recognized it as the solution to the scheduling challenges his teams had been facing.  

One feature that immediately helped 1Password save time was Smart Meetings (previously known as Smart 1:1s). The feature allowed them to put their recurring team meetings and one-on-ones on autopilot, ensuring these calls were efficiently scheduled at the best time for everyone without any back-and-forth negotiation. Also, when a conflict like PTO or an important customer meeting arised, Reclaim’s AI automatically reschedules their Smart Meeting to the next best time for them. 

Automating their meetings allowed Jeremy and his team to maintain the touchpoints they needed to stay in sync, while also being able to accommodate their clients and heads-down work during the week. Now the team could focus on having productive meetings rather than the logistics of scheduling them, and keep their time flexible for new important opportunities. 

"It's just the mental load that I used to have to place into my own calendar. I don't even think about it anymore. There are still some large departmental-wide meetings I have to manage manually, and every time I do that, I'm reminded of how terrible life was before Reclaim. The biggest benefit has been taking that load off my brain of having to figure out where things go."

Simply offloading the mental effort of manually managing their meeting schedules was already a huge win for their wellness, giving them back the time and energy needed for other activities. In addition, 1Password was also able to improve employees' work-life effectiveness every week by defending time for routines using Reclaim Habits. Habits auto-schedule flexible time for personal and work activities like lunch breaks, walks, catching up on email, coding, or anything else users want to routinely make time for. 

Prior to using Habits, these regular activities were often deprioritized, skipped, or rushed due to their hectic schedules, sometimes taking a toll on personal wellness and work performance. But by using AI to time block these Habits on the calendar as flexible events, the team could automatically find the optimal time to keep up with these routines without sacrificing their performance to do it.

To further improve their overall productivity with a wellness-first approach, the 1Password team also uses Decompression Time to automatically block breaks after meeting. This not only prevents long back-to-back meeting days, but also gives the external-facing team time to make notes, send follow-ups, and prepare and refocus between calls. This allows the 1Password team to maintain a higher level of productivity throughout the week and reduce the stress of jumping straight from one thing into the next.

1Password results

• Employees save 1.3 hours/week by auto-scheduling their recurring meetings at optimal times for all attendees 
• Employees protect 4.3 more hours/week for productive focus work
• Each employee avoids 18 back-to-back meetings/week on average with smart meeting breaks

Freeing the team from the burden of constantly rescheduling and cancelling their recurring meetings every week to accommodate customer calls has been a game changer for collaboration across the 1Password team. The Smart Meetings AI capabilities allow them to focus more on meaningful interactions and strategic discussions when they do connect, without the constant stress of scheduling conflicts. 

This one automation alone has saved each team member an average of 1.3 hours/week, which was previously spent on scheduling and rescheduling meetings. With that extra time unblocked, they can now funnel more energy into better supporting and building relationships with their customer base.

"We found Reclaim specifically to solve the struggles we had with calls and calendaring — making ourselves as available as possible while still trying to protect some personal time."

Reclaim has also protected the 1Password Solutions teams’ work time without sacrificing the demands of a meeting-heavy customer schedule. With employees defending an average of 18 smart breaks after meetings/week, the team is now able to effectively prevent back-to-back days that can sometimes contribute to mental fatigue and burnout in today’s remote tech workforce.

The most popular Reclaim feature at 1Password is Habits, with 72.1% of team members using AI to schedule flexible time for the things they need to get done. On average, team members defend an additional 6.4 hours/week for their core routines, creating 4.3 more hours for work activities and 2.1 more hours for personal routines. Whether it’s making time for work routines like strategic project planning, monthly metrics review, meeting preparation, or personal habits like lunch and meditation – the team can now automatically slot these core routines around everything else they have going on.

For Jeremy, simply being able to auto-schedule a half-hour lunch break was a massive improvement to his well-being and productivity.

“I often missed taking a lunch break before having Reclaim. It’s just one benefit of saying: ‘schedule me a half hour, sometime within this timeframe’. So now I get to take 30 minutes to sit on the front porch and eat a sandwich. There’s no doubt in my mind that this has made me more productive and less grumpy.”

These small improvements can make a big difference across an organization – a sentiment shared among other team members. Even initially weary IT Ops Analyst Carlos Lima has also been able to make more time for lunch, sharing, “I don't like calendars. I don't like things that happen automatically. I am distrustful of anything that says "AI." But I have really enjoyed using Reclaim. I've taken lunch more often because of it!!!”.

Jeremy estimates that using Reclaim has boosted his team's productivity by 25% just by automating their scheduling processes. 

Senior Software Engineering Manager Chis Sorrells reflects on the benefits he’s seen in having a prioritized daily plan built out for all the things he needs to get done in the week, “Reclaim's ability to help me understand the work I'm scheduling for myself day-to-day has completely up-leveled my ability to enhance my ability to focus on what I need to focus on. I will eternally be an advocate for Reclaim.ai." 

Jeremy’s passion for providing his teams with the tools they need to do their best has delivered results across 1Password.

“If you ask [my team] directly, they'd probably say Reclaim has been the biggest lifesaver they've had, and I hear that quite frequently from them. In fact, we had our engagement survey, and the biggest thing called out on our end was the addition of Reclaim as a tool. Work-life effectiveness was the category that they put that in. I would personally be devastated because I do not want to take that load back on.”

Since Jeremy first heard about Reclaim, he has been on a personal “crusade” to evangelize the tool to help his colleagues at 1Password. Today, all team members surveyed report they would be disappointed if they could no longer use the tool.  

As 1Password continues to grow, AI scheduling for employee calendars supports the company's scalability. By freeing up mental bandwidth and optimizing time management, Reclaim ensures that Jeremy’s team and other 1Password employees are able to focus more on strategic initiatives and high-value activities. This improves both individual and team performance, and also fosters a more sustainable operational model, positioning everyone at 1Password for long-term success.

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