128 | HubSpot's Culture Code and Leadership Insights for Hybrid Work Success | Eimear Marrinan

We work here to help HubSpot win. We can do that in really empathetic ways where we're really flexible for our employees. But if we break that mantra that where we're doing something that is not going to help HubSpot win, like we're not doing right for a company.

At Inspiring Change, we're here to help build work cultures that bring out the best in people. We created this podcast to share real stories and insights from people shaping better workplaces every day. So grab a cuppa or pop in your earbuds wherever you are. Welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast. We're excited to have you with us. Really nice, as I say always, to have you here if you are a first-time listener, or to have you back if you're a returning listener. And if you are a returning listener, thanks for returning. Quick piece of an ask, I guess, before we kick off. As usual, if you're listening to this on Apple or Google or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, if you can give us a little rating and maybe just a quick comment, that'd be really, really helpful. It does really help to get the podcast out there, and that would be fabulous. Thank you so much. Um, today's guest, um, I'm really excited about because I'm, I'm a bit of a fanboy, um, of this organization and have been for a while. Um, so I was really, really excited to be at an event, gosh, earlier on this year, um, at, at Grant Thornton where Eimear Maronan spoke at the event. And I'm really, really excited to have her on the podcast today to talk about all things culture, something that I know, um, is, is very close to their hearts in the organization that they have built that really successful organization over the past number of years. It's an organization that we often cite when we're running culture workshops as a really good example of what corporate culture can be and perhaps some of the building blocks that have to be put in place to make that happen. So, with that in mind, hello, Eimear.

Hello. What an intro. That was fantastic.

You're welcome. Well, listen, let's— why don't we kick off by doing this as I always do. Rather than me do an intro of you, which I always think is a bit weird because you're kind of sitting there looking at me, why don't you tell us a little bit about you? Give us a couple of minutes on Emer, on your career, and on your role today.

Yeah, perfect. Happy to. So first, thanks so much for having me on here. This is such a great way to start my day. So appreciate it, Scott McInnes. My career is a little bit funny, actually. And I think, um, it's a perfect example of a career that is not linear but wildly curvy. Um, and so I actually started my career in finance, would you believe? Um, I trained as an accountant, as a chartered accountant, and also worked, uh, in Deloitte at the same time. So I worked in the financial consulting leg of Deloitte for almost 6 years, actually, and spent all of my time working in kind of different multinationals, um, primarily in the finance transformation place. But as with anything, when you're con— when you're a consultant, I would say you're a bit of a jack of all trades. So you work with different clients on various, uh, different things, which is a perfect way to start your career. But I was definitely craving, um, I would say like a level of stability. I was in my 20s pretty much working out of a suitcase in different industrial estates, um, and so I decided to make the move and actually figure out if I was going to be a good accountant. And so I worked in Bank of Ireland for a while, um, and my last role there, I was Chief of Staff to the Director of Finance. And it was interesting because through that, uh, period of time when I was there, I realized that actually I was never going to be a good accountant, which was probably the best advice that actually the, uh, my boss Jim at the time gave to me. When I was Chief of Staff, I spent all my time working on his communications and kind of culture initiatives and really change management initiatives. And so I started to realize that actually there might be something there, and that's some advice that I actually should really take. And I will say that the world of people and the world of HR was never something that I think we'd heard much about, like, certainly had not heard much about, um, from, you know, college perspective or as a career. I just assumed that it was super transactional and admin-based, um, and so at the time, tech, the kind of tech world was really, uh, starting in, uh, to kick off in Dublin, and I got the opportunity to move into LinkedIn, um, in a finance initially, so working as a project manager in payroll and stock admin. And the reason why I always call that out is, for me, I knew that actually the industry that I did want to move into was more kind of tech-based, like fast-paced, that up-and-coming kind of startup feel where I could build something. But to move straight into a people world was going to be really hard. And so, I always thought about what was my transferable skill, and my transferable skill was really project management as I thought about my career in Deloitte. And so, I moved into payroll and stock admin, worked as a project manager there, but a lot of the projects that I did really cut over into the people world. Like, we were starting up new benefits, starting up new stock programs. So, I worked really closely with the people team. And so, I then got the opportunity to move across and make that shift into the people org, where I set up— we called it the GTO PMO, which stands for the Global Talent Organization Project Management Office. So, I ran that for EMEA and JPAC, and so, ran all their international projects. And through kind of numerous projects, I ended up working really closely with the then, uh, CHRO, so global CHRO, Christina Hall, and I got the opportunity to actually work as her chief of staff, which was amazing. So I actually did that from Dublin. Christina was based in California, um, and again, I always call that out. I think that's really important to me to show that you can do big global roles out of the US, especially when you're working for a US-headquartered company, um, and I think, look, being frank, I had two children during my time at LinkedIn, so Rose, uh, Fia, and Evine, and working West Coast hours out of Dublin just became too much personally. Um, and then this epic company HubSpot came knocking on the door. And what I loved about HubSpot, first of all, was that it was still that tech company. It was growing and scaling. Um, they only had at the time about 800 employees in Ireland. We now have, um, over 1,200 employees in Ireland. And they were also East Coast based. And so again, from a personal perspective, I was able to do what I wanted in that global role, but actually the hours are much more, um, you know, personally friendly to me. And so I moved across into into the role— I was Director of Culture at HubSpot. And also, like, what a cool job title and a cool opportunity to go in and do something that was culture-focused. And I've been at HubSpot now for 5 years, um, and again, like, my role has gone through many twists or turns, but what I work as now, I'm VP of People Experience. And so really, my role is to ensure that all of our employees are engaged and productive and that we're providing experiences that really activate our culture and bring our culture to life. And so under the People Experience umbrella, we people operations, so that, you know, really making sure that our employees have an easy and frictionless service and they, you know, they know where to go if they have a question. I have what we call inclusion and experience, and so the team that bring our culture to life through various experiences and also look after all of our ERGs, our employee resource groups. I have sustainability, and then also internal comms and employer brand, and so really being able to tell the story and the narrative both internally and externally to our employees. So, I think that was probably more than a 2-minute overview, but I always think there's interesting snippets in there that I like to call out.

There are totally interesting snippets. You sound like, with those 4 pillars under your job, are like the busiest person in Ireland. So that's a wide remit, a wide, wide remit. But I guess the thread that goes through them all is that whole idea of people experience, because of course, sustainability sits in there, ERG sit in there, internal comms sits in there. So, you know, it's a really nice thread that runs through everything. Um, let's talk about HubSpot's culture because, you know, if anybody hasn't seen HubSpot's Culture Code, and we'll put a link to that actually in the show notes after if you want to go and have a look at that, it's kind of famous. And a line that we use often when we're talking to clients about culture, it's a line from your Culture Code book actually. It's that idea of we hire, reward, and release people based on the 5 attributes, which what I see from that culture code are your values, effectively. So we'll hire on our values, we'll reward on our values, and we'll actually let people go if they're not actually living their values. Tell me more about that culture code and where it came from and why it's so important and how you bring it to life every day.

Yeah, amazing. I love that you call that out, Scott, because I think sometimes companies shy away from that. And it's the one thing that I really value and appreciate about HubSpot, that we see our culture, and also that culture code is like an external manifesto to understand if you want to work here, but also if you don't want to work here, because sometimes that latter is actually much more important. And it has to be a two-way thing. Like, it's about us attracting talent, but it's also about employees and prospective candidates figuring out if we're the right fit for them. But just a bit of history around where it came from. So, the author was Dharmesh Shah. Dharmesh is one of the co-founders of HubSpot. And like, really early on, back in the early days, Dharmesh and Brian Halligan, again, our two co-founders, are really invested in our culture and wanted to write down what we thought our culture was, basically. Internally, we see culture as our internal product. And so, we're obviously, you know, a product-based organization. We're a SaaS software company. Our customers are at the forefront of everything we do. And so, internally, culture is actually really the product that we're selling almost to our employees. And what that culture code does, and I think, again, this is important, we're actually on version 38, Scott, of that culture code.

So, it's a living, breathing— it's a living, breathing document.

It's a living, breathing document. And the reason that it is, is because this whole product ethos. So, your product doesn't stay the same. Your product evolves as your customers evolve, as like the macroeconomic environment evolves, and your culture has to evolve too. And so, seeing your culture as a product means that we feel really comfortable about iterating that and evolving it as the company grows and scales, and as the world around us changes, or even as our direction changes. And so, I think it's like version 38 8.9. We just— Dharmesh actually just rewrote the culture code last year as we were going through a bit of a culture kind of evolution. Um, and so yeah, I— but I think for us, number one, how cool is it that you have co-founders that are so invested in your culture? They made my job much easier because they wrote down like a set of values and guiding principles as we think about our culture. And so it made it much easier to then embed that into our org, which I know we'll talk— I'm sure we'll talk about later on. And we literally use it, like we reference the culture code in everything we do. And like I said, we think about the culture code, especially from a recruiting perspective, like, you know, is this company right for you? Or, you know, is it not right for you? And so, that's why it was super important to publish that externally, and also not just use that as an internal document that we reference for our employees.

I love that idea of the whole hiring and promoting and releasing people, because it's not about necessarily saying to somebody, 'Well, if you're not living the values, then you're going to get a 1 in your end of year performance review, and if you get 2 of those, you're gone.' Actually, it is about having a grown-up conversation, which is, 'This is the type of organization that we want to shape here. This doesn't feel like the right place perhaps for you to continue your career,' which is to the benefit of both the organization and to, to the individual. And you've experienced that firsthand when your boss in Bank of Ireland said to you, I'm not sure that you're gonna be, you know, that you're cut out to really be an accountant. What a bloody brilliant piece of advice, you know. And if you hadn't have got that, you might not be here now. You might still be trying to be an accountant.

It's in— like, feedback for some many people is actually something that is almost triggering. I think it's like this dirty word. I think the best parts of my career have been when someone gave me really candid feedback. I also think that takes the individual who's giving giving feedback and accepting the feedback to have a real growth and kind of trusting mindset. And that's not easy to do. So, I'm a big fan of just practice, practice, practice, practice, be really, really clear, but actually, by being really, really clear, what you're doing is being really kind. But I think the really important thing for us, having those conversations, again, throughout every part of the employee lifecycle, so, from the minute that we're recruiting to, you know, going through performance, promotions, and then also when someone is leaving the organization, like, we really want to be a transparent organization. That's one of our core values. Our cultural values. And so if we say that a core part of our cultural values is to be transparent, like, we have to do that, we have to model that, we have to live and breathe that. So we have to have those candid conversations. Now, I will say the interesting thing, Scott, about our— of the values within our culture code is we also have a value, um, focused on empathy. And so what we found in the last year in particular is that, uh, it— we were leaning really heavily in on empathy, and that meant at times, truly, sometimes we weren't those candid conversations, and we weren't being really direct with feedback. And so, what we always try to do is test and measure what we're doing, and then understand actually what levers may, you know, do we need to pull to make sure that all of our values live together in harmony. So, we are absolutely being transparent and being really candid. We're doing it in an empathetic way, but we're not kind of letting empathy override transparency, if that makes sense.

Makes complete sense. And I think that when you think about it, sometimes your value, if you're not aware of it as an organization and as an individual within an organization, in that example that you just cited there, what your values were doing was actually kind of turning against you nearly. When empathy got too loud, it was actually stopping you having those conversations. It was getting in the way of you having transparent and open conversations with really honest feedback. So yeah, I totally get get that. Totally get that. Let's rewind a couple of years because I think that organizations went through obviously a huge change during the pandemic where we all, those of us who worked in regular 9-to-5 companies were suddenly said, grab your computer, go home and stay there for 2 years. And we'd been used to working in an office environment, but of course, HubSpot, as an organization, since its inception, has largely been remote-first. I wonder, so, you know, I guess listeners might think, well, that must have been really easy for them then, because, you know, if they were remote-first already, then actually working remotely would have been fine. What gaps did you see that the change of how we worked, what challenges did that throw up? And how did you address those challenges?

God, it's so interesting. I always just find it weird to think that we've been through this wild complete, like, shift in the last 5 years. It— in a way, it feels like we've always worked like this. In a way, it feels like, oh my God, we've actually so much more work to do, by the way. So I, I do want to say we are still on our journey, which I think is a testament to how long it takes to get this right, because we did have a portion of our workforce remote pre-COVID. So just for context, pre-COVID, about 10% of our workforce were remote. And I think, and, you know, when the pandemic hits, obviously, everybody went to work in a virtual environment. During COVID what we did really, really quickly is we made a decision around what our future work models should look like. And the reason that we did that pretty early on was there was so much that our employees just could not control, and there was so much worry and stress out there. And also, people were making life decisions, and they were making life decisions decisions based on what they're, you know, what they were doing right now. We needed to give them some level of comfort that actually when the pandemic was over, that things either would or wouldn't change. Like, they needed some form of certainty. We sent out a survey to all of our employees because, again, a core part of our culture is act like an owner. So we actually, you know, and like I said, transparency. So we needed to give our employees a level of, uh, I guess a level of autonomy, but really tell us what they actually wanted in the future. So we actually took feedback from our employees and said, hey, what's your preference? Like, you know, as we think about the future, do you all want to go back to an office? Do you all want to work remote? Or like, you know, tell us, tell us the story. Overwhelmingly, Scott, our employees said that they wanted a level of flexibility. And so with nobody— like, we didn't have, you know, 100% of people saying we wanted to return to an office. We also didn't have 100% of people saying we wanted to be remote all the time. Like, that core part, like flexibility, was absolutely front and center for us. And so that's how we designed our work model, and that's in, in practice today. So, um, we have 3 work preferences today. We have at office, and so you're at office if you basically go into an office 3 or more days a week. We then have at home, so they're employees that work from home pretty much, I would say, 95% of the time. You might go into an office 2 or 3 times a quarter. And then we also have our third work preference, which is at flex. That gives employees the flexibility to go into an office every now and then or to work from home. So I'm at flex. I go into an office maybe once week or once every 2 weeks. Um, and so it's really good. Well, first of all, it's great having that because it, uh, it, like I said, it gives people this, the certainty control. It's helpful for us because we were able to manage our, um, like offices and our office space and capacity in a much better way. It's been a game changer from a talent attraction and diversification perspective. I can talk about that in a separate way or in a different way. So now we knew what our work model was going to be. We needed to figure out how we were going to actually make that work in practice. And I definitely think we really found out very quickly that even though 10% of our workforce were remote, we were just remote by default. We were not intentional at all in the past around how we had designed our operating model. And actually, if you— if we look back, our remote employees were, at the time, were probably the least engaged. Flash forward to now, Scott, our remote employees at HostSpot are the most engaged. So, we pulse people every quarter, and we make sure that we're look— looking at things, by work preferences, again, to make sure that we're doing the right things. Our remote employees are some of the most productive and the most engaged, and that's because we really had to think about, like, intentionality and what we had to do to make sure that we were truly remote-first and not remote-ish. I would say there's probably 4 things that we did at the time where we realized we actually were not good at, and again, just wanted to call it, call it out, we're definitely still on that journey. I think the first was making sure that our managers understood how to manage teams in a hybrid environment. I think we weren't— we just assumed that people could do this. Again, because we've always been a globally distributed company, we're like, "But, you know, we've kind of always worked like this. I've always worked with people in the US, so like, what's the difference?" And you could definitely say, "What's the difference?" But we weren't really being intentional about equipping managers with what they needed to do to create a sense of belonging, to create a sense of psych safety, even how, how to coach and performance manage people, have really difficult conversations with someone, you know, even if someone was leaving the business. How do you have that conversation when you're not in the same room as someone, where you know when that conversation is over someone's going to put down their laptop and all of a sudden they're left by themselves in a room? Like, you need to be excellent, like, have an excellent kind of EQ and emotional intelligence to kind of manage that conversation. So, you know, building toolkits for our managers and making sure that we had kind of training to support that. I think the next thing was then around our operating system and communications. Again, because we had like 90% of our workforce were pretty much in an office pre-COVID, we had to be really thoughtful around how we, um, set ourselves up as a company. So how we created forums to align cross-functionally, how we created forums to get work done in a really, um, clever way cross-functionally. That's our greatest opportunity still, by the way. Like we're, that's where we have most room to grow and we're doing a bunch of work this year to get that right. Um, from a communications perspective, like, what we found in the last 5 years is when you're not in the same room as someone, what you lose is context. And what we found the biggest gap is from a director down to an IC level, or ICs, and even our managers are really suffering from that context gap. So I would say it's really easy if you're like a VP or even a director to actually get the context. You're almost in that virtual room really quickly. But our leaders to be excellent communicators, and they have to be excellent context translators to make sure that all of their ICs who are distributed around the world actually understand what's going on, understand the purpose and the mission. So, that's kind of the leadership communication. And then, we needed forums to better communicate and, you know, make sure that we were excellent at async communications. Again, I would say we're still not— we're on a journey, and we've done a lot to improve. We are a very overwhelming culture because we've leaned so heavily into async comms. When someone joins, like, you know, they get 7,000 thousand wiki links, and they're added to all these Slack channels, and it's really hard, I think, to understand where to go first. But we've done a lot there. And then I think technology, so really investing in new technology. And so, a couple of examples, we lean heavily into Slack, obviously, internally, and also into technology like Looms, so that you can create really simple video snippets to send out to your team, again, to make sure that you have that context. We're starting to experiment a lot with AI. It was super cool. I saw a video video that our MD in J-PAC just sent, and he had translated his voice using AI technology called HeyGen into Japanese. And so, he was able to pass down a strategy to our Japanese-speaking employees, again, using AI. How super cool is that? And then, even investing in technology in our meeting rooms, because one of the things that we are really afraid of, Scott, is when COVID ended and actually this new work preference when this model came into place that, you know, people that were not in an office would be disadvantaged and that this kind of, like, close proximity bias would come into play. And so, we really leaned into data to make sure that we were doing what we could to uncover any gaps, but even changed our meeting rooms so that if you're in a meeting with 3 people and you've got 5 people up on screens, simple things like the screen will split the meeting room in 3, so it looks like there's 8 virtual boxes instead of having 3 people who are potentially having side conversations.. And so, just little teeny things like that. But I would say they're the things that have worked the most for us and kind of where we have room to grow.

Amazing. Amazing. Um, before I ask you a quick question about intentionality, for those that might not know, tell me what the difference is between asynchronous communications and synchronous communications. When you use those terms, what do you mean?

Yeah, perfect. So asynchronous communications is communications that happen when you're actually not in the same room, or communications that might happen, um, when when you— trying to think of the easiest way. So a really good example is you have a global team, you need to make sure that your global team has, uh, context and, uh, gets access to communications when they're not all awake. And so a really good way to do that, um, could be again, you're going to record a video instead of holding a live meeting, and then you're going to pop that video into a Slack channel so that regardless of your time zone, regardless of whether you're online or you're working, everybody has access to that same thing. So it's again communications that people can access when they're not all available at the same time. Does that make sense? Synchronous communications, I think, is when people are there and they're all together. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that makes, that makes complete sense. So it's kind of that the broadcast comms versus the everybody in the space having a conversation at the same time comms.

That's a much better way of describing it than my rambling.

At Inspiring Change, we help our clients to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting their people first. We do that through a focus on strategic internal communications, employee engagement, and leadership consultancy. If you're struggling with change or getting your people aligned behind your purpose, vision, or strategy, then get in touch. Simply visit our website at www.inspiringchange.ie for more. I think what I loved is that, that word that you used used, you used 2 or 3 times, you said the word intentionality. And I think for me, that's the one thing that has been a big challenge for organizations, certainly that we know and we work with, is that whole idea of being much more intentional around working out what it is we want to have from our culture and then putting in place a plan to get there, covering all of those things that you just spoke about and absolutely categorically starting with the manager population. What, you know, to use that David Brent from The Office line, you know, to assume is to make an ass of you and me. And I think that we, as you said, we just assume that managers have these skills, that they have these abilities, that they're able to give somebody feedback online and they're gonna be closing down their laptop. And if it was, you know, what somebody might deem to be negative feedback, or if you want to call it developmental feedback perhaps, that, you know, they're gonna be sitting in that room on their own. And what does the manager have to do beforehand to make sure that person is okay. And I don't think that's something that people would generally think about unless they're given some upskill, some comms, a toolkit, something to help them on that journey. And I think that intentionality is so, so important.

Yeah, I think so too. And so, it's interesting, like a good statistic that we found recently is over two-thirds, Scott, of our managers at HubSpot have been internally promoted. And so, that The trouble is, that's really good from an internal mobility and a career growth perspective. It's also really scary because managers, over two-thirds have likely never managed before. And so, we need to make sure that we're over-investing and upskilling that group so that they actually know what they're doing. And I have to say, when I think about my career and how some of those moments where I learned how to be an excellent manager, it was also being, it was watching how it was done. There is definitely a learning by osmosis when it comes to being a really good leader And so, in a world where you're not in the same room as your manager all the time, you need to find different ways to train and teach your managers, and you need to get really clever and really, really intentional. You can't just assume, nobody just knows this. No one wakes up one morning and says, "Oh, I totally know how to give a really candid conversation." That takes practice, that takes role modeling, that takes watching. So, even shadowing, what we try to do, we try and have, we have a quarterly meeting with our people managers. Managers, we fully dedicate some of that space to actually role modeling, hey, this is a population that you need to rely on. Let's just role model a really tough conversation. Like, let's role model if you need to escalate to, you know, the— your executive, like, how would that conversation go? And what you're doing there is just creating a community and a really safe space to mess it up and then get feedback around how you can kind of course correct. And then you're also creating space to see what good looks like. And I also always think You will always mirror your manager's behavior. And so, again, if all of a sudden, two-thirds of our managers just don't know what they're doing, like, what's happening to our IC population? So, I think frontline managers have the hardest job. I think they're the most neglected in general right now. And I think they're like your secret to success, actually, when it comes to creating a really, really effective hybrid organization.

I couldn't agree more. I've been saying that for years. And yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think it's interesting that when you think about the challenge of a big chunk of our workforces not being in the same rooms as each other, not being in pods beside each other, not being in desks beside each other, actually being able to see, and this has been a big challenge, I think, with hybrid working now, is not being able, me as one of your reports, for example, not being able to see you, how you have an empathetic conversation with a colleague on the fly, not seeing how you perhaps might give somebody feedback in a meeting because I'm not physically with you anymore. And that's really hard, I think, for those people that are either new to organizations or new to role, particularly for leadership roles, that's really hard because that learning by osmosis piece is kind of gone. And that's hard. And I think that's why that whole idea, back to your point about the word intentionality, I think is so, so important because we have to work out if that's gone, what can we do to replace it in a way that's probably better than what we had before? And I think that's a big, big challenge. Let's move on a little bit because big tech has been under huge pressure in the past 12 to 18 months. We've seen job losses in the majority of the big organization, big tech organizations. You mentioned earlier on that in the past 12 months you had done a rewrite of your culture code to version 38.9. I wonder what you've had to do to evolve the culture in the face of that shifting landscape? Because, of course, our organizations exist in the context that we're in. You touched on that earlier on, which is why you have 38 versions. So, what's had to change recently?

Yeah. So, I think, you know, big tech has definitely been under pressure the last 18 months. And I think the world has just been hard over the last 5 years. I think, you know, you went from COVID to, uh, like geopolitical unrest, to a really tough macroeconomic environment. I think in general, the demographic of technology companies are lower than you would have in other companies. Um, and so a lot of people that have worked there, actually, as this is the first time that they've been through a situation where, you know, we've had to lay off employees, it's kind of been like the, you know, the good times have been great in technology. And I think it totally rocked the world to see different tech companies actually laying off, um, staff, which was really hard. And I think I think there's been a number of things that happened. So I think naturally, like, over the last few years, we've had to over-index in our employees. It was really hard to be— to work, I think, for many people. I think the level of burnout increased, the level of stress. Like, for caregivers, they were trying to survive during COVID like, worried about serious illness while having kids at home. Like, I remember myself, I joined HubSpot in the middle of the pandemic. My first call that I ever had was, we're trying to, um, we were again establishing our work preference, uh, our, our, you know, future guidelines. And I was on a call with our co-founder, you know, my first big call, and in rocked my middle child completely naked listening to Paw Patrol. And it was just one of those moments and you're like, okay, you're just either going to lean into the fact that we can laugh and enjoy it at HubSpot, or I'm going to crawl under the desk and be like, I work for a great company who are so supportive. Genuinely, I was like, don't mind the like naked butt that we have in the background when I'm on a board meeting. It's totally fine. But not everyone works for companies like that, by the way. And also, so it was just really hard. And so, we did totally over-index in our employees. I think we did it for the right thing, for the right reasons. However, then what happened was, the good times are kind of over, and businesses weren't overperforming. And it was really, really difficult for many companies, like big tech included. And there were layoffs. And I think that was really hard for many people. You went from a moment where actually we were going above and beyond to help our employees to a situation where we were laying off employees. And I think in a really, you know, interesting way, many employees felt like deeply hurt by that. For like, of course, I mean, they were losing their jobs, but I also think they felt that they were working for a family, and I think they were working for an environment that was not like a corporate environment. Um, so I think that was the first thing. I think the second thing was we are engaged— we, like I said, I think I said earlier, we measure engagement, um, every quarter. And what we noticed, Scott, was our engagement scores were not— like, they were reducing, basically. We weren't recovering. Like, naturally, you would expect your engagement scores to reduce during a layoff, but our engagement scores weren't recovering. So, we had to take a hard look internally to see what was going on. And really, we had lost the sense of our mission, and we'd lost the sense of purpose as an organization. And people didn't feel connected to our mission and our purpose. And frankly, I don't think people really understood our strategy, and our strategy as a company wasn't clear. And so, you know, we kind of came to this conclusion as our customers, who are most important thing and the reason that we're here, and also many of our customers, because we serve the SMB space first and foremost, are also really struggling. You know, when you're in the middle of a macro, um, when the macro is tough, it's your SMBs who are really gonna struggle. Like we had, we were doing them a disservice. They were almost on, you know, outside knocking on the door trying to get in. And actually what we were doing is we were inside just really, you know, over-indexing on our employees at the time. And so, we really took, again, a step back and said, what are some of the things that we need to do to evolve and course correct and make sure that, of course, the employee is incredibly important, but our customer is first and foremost the reason why we're there? Like, let's remind people that we're a customer-centric organization, like, we're incredibly mission-driven, but let's bring that to life and make that meaningful for people. And so, you know, we're still on this journey, but the 3 things that we did was, first of all, we— really thought about who our customer is, who our customer is that we're serving, and we really brought that customer to life with our employees. The second thing is we made it really, really clear what are the things that we need to do from a product and a go-to-market perspective to serve that customer. And so, you know, we use this concept internally called cartoon clarity. We gave our employees cartoon clarity around what are the priorities that we need to focus on to help our customer. And then the third piece was we were really, really clear with our employees around going forward what we're gonna do and what we're not we're not going to do. Everything from, like, you know, where do we feel we have a right to speak up if something happens from a geopolitical perspective? Like, that has to link back to our mission as a company. Um, where are we going to invest, even from a health and wellness perspective, going forward? How do we give employees, like, deep clarity around what it means to grow at HubSpot? Being really, really clear around expectations, which I don't think we've been super clear in the past. Um, and so I would say we're still on that journey, but we're definitely seeing tides turning. I think people are really— you know, the customer is always front and center, and even more front and center now of what we're doing. And so, that was some of the shifts. So, it was definitely some process work, like deep kind of strategy thinking. And even the way we're communicating and trying to remind people what we're about, I think, has changed too.

Interesting. And the one thing that I really picked up there was that whole idea. And we hear it all the time. We've got, you know, "Oh, it's so nice working here. It's like a family. And I'm like, that's not necessarily a good thing. Not necessarily a good thing, because that's really hard to have difficult conversations. It's really hard to have commercial conversations. It's really hard to go, look, we're down 10% this month. We've got to let 3 people go. Those conversations are much, much harder in those types of, if you want to call them familial cultures. And you realize that. And to use your words, you course-corrected.

Yeah, that's really hard. I think we ultimately, why do we work at HubSpot? We work here to help HubSpot win, and we work here to help SMBs win. And we use that tagline, I would say, in the last 6 months more than we ever have before. We can do that in really empathetic ways where we're really flexible for our employees, where we're providing different supports for our employees. But if we break that mantra, that where we're, we're doing something that is not going to help HubSpot win, like, we're not doing right for a company. You know, we're a public company, we have shareholders, we've invested like that. You know, let's just not lose sight of that. And I think that That is hard for many people because also, you know, if— even if I think about Ireland, the people that work here, like, with a high proportion of expats, like, their, their friends, many of their family actually are at HubSpot, and that can still exist. But the number one thing is here, we're, we're working here to help HubSpot win, and we just can't lose sight of that.

Yeah, that, that idea of a famil— it's okay to have a familial culture within the framework or the auspices of a commercial organization with, with, with KPIs and shareholder expectations expectations and all that stuff that businesses have.

100%. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So I could literally stand here talking to you all day, but you've got a job to do and so have I. So we probably should wrap it up at some point. And I think we'll wrap it up after this next question.

I know. I don't even know what time it is. That's perfect.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. In podcast land, there is no time. We just keep going until we run out of things to say. Exactly.

The limit is the That sky. does not exist.

Exactly. What is your— I mean, I think that people might look, and many of the people listening to this podcast and fanboy McInnes over here might look to HubSpot as a bit of a bastion and a bit of a kind of a guiding light in the whole area of organizational culture and what you've done. And you've outlined very honestly and very transparently and very clearly that actually it's not all good all the time and you haven't got the answer. And I wonder in the last couple of minutes, what would your practical advice be, based on your experience, for those organizations that are struggling to find that even keel?

Yeah, I think, uh, I think the first thing I would do is align your leaders around, uh, a set of principles and cultural values. So what are the most important things that you care about as a company, and how are those most important things going to serve your mission? Because ultimately, Ultimately, what a great culture does is it helps you guide decisions, it helps you manage performance, it helps you recruit and retain staff. So, what are those, like, 5 things that, as a leadership team, you're really aligned around? I think the next thing then that I would do is lean into data, like, truly. Like, how do you measure how you're doing against those things, and where do you have opportunities to grow? We do that every single year. We measure our culture, and we see again what levers we might need to pull or where we're not showing up in in the right ways. Once you have that data as your baseline, you can figure out what are the practical things and plays that you need to put in place to bring those principles to life. And they don't have to be these wild, like, you know, these wild, crazy things. It might be we need to change our recruiting process to make sure that we're attracting the right people and we're talking about the right thing. It might be we need to be really clear on leadership expectations so that our leaders are showing up and displaying the right behaviors, and then we're holding them accountable to that because we're building in those values into our performance management process. Or it might be we just need to find ways to celebrate our values. So, as an example, we have Heart Week once a year. Our values, just for context, equate to the acronym HEART, where we celebrate our values and we talk about them and we bring in customers, again, in the context of our values. All of our cultural activations technically should align back to our values. The way we speak, like, we're super transparent. We speak, we treat every employee like an insider. So, our employees will actually understand how we're doing financially before, you you know, many other people. That is us being super transparent. And so make sure again that you're putting activations and experiences in place so that you're living up to those values. I like— that's the 3 things I do. Like, figure out what those principles are, measure them and see what you're doing, and then put plays in place in support depending on where your gaps are.

Amazing, amazing. Work out where you want to get to, and then work out how you're going to get there and measure along the way. Spot on. Listen, Emer, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. I've loved having the conversation. As I said, I could stay here I could sit here all day chatting to you, but I'm sure you've got better things to do than stand here chatting to me. Listen, it's been great. Thank you so much for coming on.

Pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Scott. I appreciate it.

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