How to Move Across Culture: Former HubSpot CPO Katie Burke

The truth about core values ​​is not good in most organizations. In a survey involving more than 400 large companies, we did not find that there is a relationship between the elements of corporate culture and how employees expect their company in terms of “core” values. “The most important thing about values,” according to Katie Burke, HubSpot’s former chief people officer (CPO), “is that they feel real, compelling, and useful to employees.” you.” According to our data, most companies are weak.

HubSpot is a notable exception. Since its founding in 2006, the company has grown to 8,000 employees and reached a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion. Within the software industry, with the highest Glassdoor culture and quality ratings out of the 50 industries we studied, HubSpot is ranked No. 1.

Company leaders are very concerned about corporate culture. In 2013, HubSpot published its Culture Code, a document that laid out the five elements of its culture. We benchmarked how well HubSpot employees spoke about these five values ​​compared to their peers at 15 major software companies. Feedback from HubSpot employees was overwhelmingly positive for all five core values. For example, HubSpot employees spoke highly of transparency (almost three standard deviations above the industry average). HubSpot’s culture isn’t just about health; the company’s employees set a positive example of the cultural standards that the leadership has established.

We recently spoke with Burke, who served as HubSpot’s vice president of culture and experience before taking on the role of CPO as the company’s workforce grew eightfold. HubSpot’s story illustrates five general principles we’ve seen among unconventional companies that address culture. Here, Burke offers practical tips for leaders who want to build a strong culture.

1. Values ​​must be realistic for employees.

Sometimes managers pick up cultural practices from other companies and try to impose them on the organization. Unfortunately, these values ​​are often divorced from organizational realities and fail to resonate with employees.

“You can’t copy and paste values ​​across organizations,” Burke said. “People will say, ‘I like Netflix’s vision of high performance. … I like Amazon’s solution for the consumer. … I’m going to build a company, and I’m going to pull four of the values. which I like.’ And what people need is, does that fit with your business model, what you’re trying to do, your ambition, the nature of your team? Those things have to align. …

A better way is to involve employees in the process of developing and talking about the value to ensure that they are grounded in the company’s unique history, leadership style, size, location, and other factors that affect the business culture, Burke advised.

2. Manual valuations.

When it comes to core values, some leaders think even more, something surprising: One Fortune 500 company we studied had more than two core values. But Burke noted, “You can’t have more than five values. … Workers and people don’t remember more than five things in a way that they can explain to their spouses, their roommates, their children. And so in the beginning we tried to have, I think, eight virtues. … They fell short when we tried to introduce them in front of the company. People would say, ‘I don’t know if this fits.’

Reducing the number of criteria also helps leaders to engage them through recruitment, informal recognition, training and related processes. This is especially important for leaders trying to change an existing culture. “From a mediocre culture to a great culture, you can only choose three things that you want to be better at, because changing your culture from mediocre to great is about three things in very important,” said Burke. It is a very big mountain to climb.

3. Confirm that your culture not so for all.

Reducing the number of values ​​also forces leaders to make a tough trade-off when deciding which cultural elements to cut. Burke observed: “You must be clear about who you are, … those you accept, … [and be] it is clear who will not succeed in your organization, who would not be happy there.”

The downside of prioritizing a few values ​​is that the organization has to accept that it will be average or low in many other cases. “That mistake [chief HR officers] do is, they try and appeal to everyone. … So the key, if you’re a CHRO with a culture that wants to be great, is to be clear about what you want to do as an organization,” Burke said. “And unfortunately, often when you ask leadership teams, ‘What should we be bad at?’ from a cultural point of view, it’s usually, ‘Well, we have to be heroes in everything.’

HubSpot’s leaders manage their corporate culture as if the culture is the product and their employees are the customers. It’s better to have a unique value proposition that your customers want to love than a list of views that no one can argue with.

4. Combine culture to appreciate creation.

During the Great Recession, many leaders viewed culture as a way to increase employee satisfaction and retention. However, culture also acts as a buffer that aligns employee behavior with business strategy and supports (or undermines) value creation. In order for culture to drive business results, it must be clearly aligned with the company’s strategy and business process.

“Solve the customer – not just their happiness but their success” is a clear example of HubSpot’s core value that underpins the company’s strategy. But all five of HubSpot’s values, Burke argued, help the company win in the market. For example, transparency, which is in line with the way of doing business, he noted: “We often serve small and medium-sized businesses around the world. We offer a wide range of content. We share a lot about how to grow your business. As a result [transparency] it fits perfectly with who we are as a product, as a software, as a company. ”

5. Retell a coherent story.

The most effective business practices are not based on a set of unrelated core values. Instead, the core values ​​should reinforce each other, create a unique employee experience and support the company’s strategy and business approach. The core values ​​of the organization should tell a consistent story about the employee experience and how culture will contribute to creating value.

HubSpot’s core values ​​tell such a story. Its traditional approach to customer solutions is compatible with long-term driving. The company hires talented people and gives them the freedom to take initiative and improve customer service, then holds those employees accountable for delivering results. HubSpot’s emphasis on transparency ensures empowered employees can align their actions with the company’s overall strategy.

When leaders develop a set of core values, Burke said, it is important to “[make] making sure that the story is understandable and that your employees can explain it.”

Want to hear more advice from Burke? Watch this interview and the entire series on the CultureX YouTube channel, on Spotify, or on Apple.