How We are Growing Better in 2019

For the third year in a row this December, our global People Operations team celebrating something we call "Grow Better" week, which is an opportunity to reflect on what's working, what isn't, what we can do better, and what we want to do differently in 2019. One of my favorite elements of the week is that it creates space for people to reflect, both personally and professionally, on the year behind them and ahead of them, and to have more courageous conversations with their teams around feedback, motivation, and what they truly want from their careers and their lives at HubSpot and beyond. Everyone from our People Ops leadership team committed to creating a piece of content coming out of the week, so I thought I would share a little bit around how we as a People Ops team are helping HubSpot grow better in 2019 and beyond.

Below are a few key things we'll be focused on as a team, so if you know of amazing people who want to be part of what we are building, please send them our way. And if you're part of our global People Operations team (or for that matter, any people operations team!), thank you for your hard work--people operations gets to help people during the best moments of their lives (landing a new job! getting a promotion!) but also the toughest (medical leave, loss, termination) and I'm continuously impressed by people in this profession doing this work with a smile on their faces every day.

How HubSpot People Operations Will #GrowBetter in 2019:

1) Commitment to our Mission: In Q4, our leadership team worked hard to establish a People Ops Mission Statement, which is "We Attract and Empower People To Do Their Best Work and Help HubSpot Grow Better." In 2019, we are going to spend more time being intentional about connecting the work we do daily to our core mission as a team and a business. For example, drawing more clear lines on how our employment brand team drives our recruiting flywheel, highlighting ways in which our business partnerships and benefits team drive employee retention that helps both our business and our revenue results, and ensuring that the work our learning and development team does to develop and grow HubSpotters is both highlighted and clear will be imperative, and it's on me as a leader to do a better job ensuring folks both feel that sense of mission and that we highlight ways in which our entire team, from recruiting coordinators to management and leadership to benefits to compensation to business partners and culture and employment brand coordinators feel a meaningful part of that impact when they come to work every day.

2) Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging: 2018 was a big year for our DI&B efforts at HubSpot--we formed an internal cross-functional team committed to moving the needle internally on our efforts on this front, and we saw more teams and leaders than ever sharing their personal commitments on this front, including our COO JD Sherman, our CIO Frank Auger, our VP of Customer Success Alison Elworthy, and our VP of Engineering, Eric Richard. We saw record employee resource group participation, Pride attendance, and International Women's Day attendance, but we also saw a shift from diversity being "someone else's job" to being a truly team effort within the business. I'm incredibly proud at how our People Operations team facilitated this energy, and am excited about what we'll do to further this foundation in 2019--my hope is that HubSpot can truly be known long-term as a place where anyone, of any gender, race, age, sexual orientation, education background, religion, class, or experience level can not only succeed at HubSpot but thrive, and I feel really energized by where we can continue to improve in 2019 and beyond on this front.

3) Using Data to Inform Our Decisions: In 2018, we formed a People Analytics team under the leadership of Becky McCullough, and dramatically expanded the remit and role of Recruiting Operations in driving dashboards of data to improve our team's performance and decisions. In 2019, the plan is to become more data-driven than ever, and to really use data insights to inform more of what we do on every team. This change is critical on two key fronts: one, we'll have a team dedicated to creating these insights and sharing them with the business, but two, we want to ensure every member of our team is using data to inform their decisions and recommendations. What I love seeing already is people starting to make recommendations around thing we should do less of in 2019 as a result of data to suggest they are ineffective or irrelevant as we scale and grow, and I love seeing folks on our team who have typically avoided tough number crunching diving in head first to use data to inform their presentations and business recommendations.

4) #OnePOPS: We've grown like crazy the past two years, which is fantastic--the folks who have joined our team have made us meaningfully better as an organization, and teams that didn't even exist one year ago are having a massive impact on our business and our brand. But that means we've still been in the "storming" face of growth, so our People Ops leadership team took some time this fall to take a step back and identify things we could do better together. That started, candidly, with us--we spent a lot of time talking about how we could better align and do fewer things better together, and the results are already clear from our partners in the business-people expect us to operate as a unified team and to operate across management and leadership, learning and development, recruitment, core HR, culture, and employment brand--we have an obligation to make things easy for people to navigate and we can and should do better on this front.

5) Knowing When to Relax, Recharge, and Reflect: I will fully admit I have high expectations as a leader, and that has a lot of positive impact on our team. But it also has led a lot of folks to wonder when it's okay to say something is "done" and when it is not just okay but encouraged to take a break and recharge. One of my most sobering lessons of 2018 was just how important it is to rest, recover, recharge, and unplug. I did so with my sabbatical, and again over the holidays by actively encouraging our entire team to take a full two weeks off to rest and recover. But I know I can continue to do and lead better on this front, so I'm including it here as something I plan to continue to improve upon and lead by example--a healthy, happy, and balanced team will help us grow for many years to come, and I want people on our team who are great partners, spouses, parents, children, friends, siblings, community members, activists, roommates, and caregivers, and I'm going to do my very best in 2019 to ensure people know that coming in and have clear and explicit permission to make rest a priority.

6) Customer-Centricity: As we scale as an organization, it can be easy to drift away from the audiences that matter most to our business: customers and partners. Sure, we could say that their success is more driven by our product, services, or sales team, but that would be missing a huge opportunity to impact our business. Ultimately, we hire anyone who works at HubSpot, and help work with leaders to ensure that HubSpotters grow and thrive, so we have a huge opportunity to ensure that the folks we hire, promote, reward, and grow, are building products, marketing, selling, and serving our customers in a way that truly solves for our customers and partners long-term. From company meetings to new hire training to our awards and recognition program, our team has the change to ensure that customers are celebrated in everything we do, and that we share some of our insights on helping companies grow better with our HubSpot customers and partners globally-this will be a key focus for us in 2019.

As a People Ops team, we get to help HubSpot grow better as an organization, and that's both a huge honor and a great responsibility. I am truly grateful to everyone on our global team for their participation and vulnerability during #GrowBetterWeek, and equally grateful to everyone, including our candidates, employees, customers, and partners, who will help us improve and grow better as a team and a company in 2019 and for many years to come. We are a team that never settles and is always working together to grow better, and if you know people who embody those traits and want to be part of a world class team, we'd love to have them. Here's to a year of Growing Better, and to a team I'm truly grateful to come into work every day to partner with and lead.