Offices in 2030 according to HubSpot

In this episode, Frank Zorn welcomes Loraine Lombardi, Culture Coordinator at HubSpot. How does HubSpot manage to maintain its strong internal culture despite exponential growth and the increase in teleworking?

"Hubspot is a company rooted in its values, placing its customers at the heart of its activities. I'm like a pilot making sure our day-to-day actions echo the company culture."

Through the pandemic, another important aspect has been impacted, that of corporate culture. HubSpot, a leading CRM and marketing automation platform, is one of those companies with a very strong internal culture. We will discuss how HubSpot has reacted to the health crisis as an employer and how the company is preparing for the future in such a particular context.

What does being a Culture Coordinator mean?

In concrete terms, it means spreading the HubSpot culture among employees and being responsible for local inclusion and diversity initiatives to ensure the well-being of employees. "Hubspot is a company rooted in its values, placing its customers at the heart of its activities. I'm like a pilot making sure that our day-to-day actions echo the company's culture. "

HubSpot has over 80,000 customers across 120 countries and employs around 4,600 staff in 9 countries. However, there is a real uniqueness to its employees as well as in its services. Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubSpot, has published a culture code that helps to maintain a guideline in daily actions. This document is the cornerstone of HubSpot.

It is essential to ensure consistency between internal/external actions and the culture code. "When we make decisions, we have to think about our values. I am the lighthouse that will guide people in their choices based on our values."

In order to achieve this objective of inclusion and diversity, Lorraine organises for example cooking classes with an African chef, conferences on the place of women in business led by women entrepreneurs etc.

How are you organised at HubSpot today?

At the moment, the organisation at Hubspot is special: "1/3 of our team is in the office, and 2/3 are teleworking. We have developed an option system where everyone can choose their own organisation. This method has been developed in all countries and we see the same trends. So the choice is made by the employees and there is real trust within the teams. "This is part of our culture; we give employees the choice and the responsibility for their choice. Our motto is 'use good judgment', i.e. the employee chooses what is best for him or herself. We have this idea of freedom and responsibility.

In the midst of the pandemic, what choices have you made to keep your employees productive?

We find that working and reinforcing the culture during the pandemic was not easy. HubSpot wanted to empower its employees by offering a special bonus of €1,000 per employee to purchase the tools they needed to telework.

HubSpot has been growing steadily for several years. How do you manage onboarding and the transmission of values virtually?

The crisis has highlighted the importance of digitalising services, which has encouraged the growth of tech companies like HubSpot. As a result, we have continued to recruit at the same rate as before (hundreds of employees since March).

To maintain quality onboarding, ingenuity has taken over as Loraine explains. Inclusion and communication of values are crucial and must be maintained even online. "We went from a face-to-face system where the promos of new people met physically to a 100% virtual system. When we switched to online onboarding, newcomers were not too worried because of our flexibility and pre-existing teleworking culture (video, remote training and collaboration tools were not foreign to some candidates)."

"Finally, thanks to our teleworking culture, managers were used to it and from the very first days, they were blocking slots to organise one-to-one or team meetings with their new employees."