The Story of WorkShield: Building the Future of Workplace Safety
The Me Too movement of 2017 exposed a fundamental problem in corporate America: workplace misconduct reporting systems were broken. While companies claimed to take harassment and discrimination seriously, their internal reporting processes often routed complaints back to the same departments where the issues originated. For Jared Pope, a successful employment lawyer, this represented both a crisis and an opportunity.
“It started really around November of 2017,” Jared recalls. “Really diving into what is the existing system? Is it broken? Can it be fixed? And if it can be fixed, can it be scalable?” These questions led him to leave his law practice and, along with his wife Jennifer, launch WorkShield in February 2018.
The transition from law to entrepreneurship wasn’t entirely surprising. Like many lawyers-turned-founders, Jared had grown disillusioned with traditional legal practice. “Hitting the clock every year at zero, and you got to start over and you do all of it for maybe a $20,000 bonus, but yet you’ve made the firm over $1.4 million. It just didn’t seem like it was a fair shake.”
But his legal background provided crucial insights that would shape WorkShield’s approach. In law school, he learned about the “role of apology” – a study showing that 99% of plaintiffs who won multi-million dollar settlements weren’t primarily after money: “All I really wanted was an apology, but they just weren’t willing to give it.”
This understanding shaped WorkShield’s core philosophy. Instead of just building another reporting tool, they created a platform that combines technology with human expertise. “We have a very hard line about any company that’s trying to solve workplace drama, toxicity, HR misconduct, through chatbots, through technology alone,” Jared explains. “When these issues come up, voices want to be heard, and there’s got to be another human voice on the other side of that line.”
The early days were intense. While maintaining his law firm to pay the bills, Jared worked until 2 AM building WorkShield. The first pivotal moment came when they decided to invest in PR – a monthly retainer that exceeded their mortgage payment. It was a bet on building credibility over quick growth, choosing organic channels over paid advertising.
The COVID-19 pandemic tested their model but ultimately validated it. While many assumed remote work would reduce incidents, WorkShield saw the opposite. “People got really bold in their actions,” Jared notes. Virtual interactions emboldened bad behavior, and when people returned to offices, “they forgot how to act.”
Today, WorkShield protects over 160,000 employees across 300 companies, handling investigations 70-80% faster than the industry average. Their data has revealed surprising insights, like the fact that homogeneous departments (all-male or all-female) experience more issues than mixed-gender teams.
Looking ahead, WorkShield aims to become more than just a misconduct reporting platform. “We want to be the preeminent platform that employers can go to not only make sure their HR drama misconduct issues are handled, but they can handle all their other issues as well, their ethics, their fraud, the whistleblower,” Jared shares. They’re so confident in their process that they plan to guarantee their service by covering insurance deductibles for clients who face lawsuits.
This vision – of creating a comprehensive platform that protects both employees and companies while maintaining the human element – represents a bold bet on the future of workplace safety. As Jared puts it, “when you got to rely on human behavior, and human behavior always makes mistakes, I think we’re in a good business.”