Why HubSpot is Encouraging Employees to Get Personal
What if you learned that your pregnant coworker grew up with a mother who was an addict, or that the woman at your lunch table danced burlesque on the weekends? What if you found out that your male colleague proudly smokes cigarettes and has no intention of quitting? Or what if you discovered that the person sitting next to you recently came out as queer?
These personal experience are rarely discussed in the professional setting of 9–5, yet they have an enormous impact on who we are, how we think, and how we work. And while revealing these personal parts of ourselves feels absolutely terrifying, there’s a strange alchemy in the act — somehow in the exchange of telling and listening, we create empathy.
And it turns out that empathy has actual, quantifiable business value. According to research published in the Lady Geek Global Empathy Index, the top 10 companies in the Global Empathy Index 2015 increased in value more than twice as much as the bottom 10 and generated 50% more earnings. Lady Geek’s 2016 findings showed an 80% correlation between departments with higher empathy and those with high performers.
I’m on the culture team at HubSpot and a few months ago we began to contemplate this question: If building empathy is a business priority, how do we cultivate empathy and understanding amongst nearly two thousand co-workers across seven global offices? How do we strengthen the empathy muscles of our employees?
That’s when we settled on stories, specifically, sharing the kind of personal stories that rarely (if ever) get discussed at work. We recently hosted a live storytelling show called Humans of HubSpot. Modeled after NPR’s The Moth, Humans of HubSpot featured eleven HubSpot employees from across our offices telling personal stories on the theme of “identity.” Employees submitted pitches, were selected, and then honed their stories over the course of several weeks.
On the night of the event, we arranged our largest conference space to look like a black box theater and the Humans of HubSpot stood up one by one to tell their stories in front of more than a hundred of their colleagues. (We also livestreamed and recorded the event.)
It was a huge hit. One seasoned employee emailed me after the event to say, “Humans of HubSpot was hands down the best HubSpot employee event I’ve ever been to. Others may have been more ‘fun’, but I don’t think I’ve walked away from an event feeling more connected to and proud of the organization or my colleagues than this. It was such a simple format, but was so powerful. I only cried like 4 times.”
And he added, “When I think of the things that enable me to ‘do my best work’, it all comes back to trust. I now know that my colleagues are willing to be vulnerable around me, and with vulnerability comes trust. With trust comes loss of fear of failure, with that loss comes creativity and results.” (We’ve written about this before on ThinkGrowth.org)
For him, and many others, this event was one of the most compelling HubSpot culture initiatives we’ve taken on yet. It was personal, emotional, can we use the word beautiful when talking about work-related topics? 😍 With feedback like this, we’re obviously already planning V2.
And here’s another thing to consider, you don’t necessarily need to have a storytelling event in order to build workplace empathy. Empathy can be nurtured in small ways like:
- being a more active listener
- reflecting on your daily personal interactions with those around you
- sending a simple thank you card or an email to a grieving co-worker
- opening up about the less tidy reality of your day-to-day life
- seeking to understand before you seek to be understood
These are small acts of courage and vulnerability that build our empathy muscle. But, when you add them all together, you quickly begin to see that, collectively, they’re pushing us all toward a workplace (and world) that’s just a little more empathetic.
And if you want to hear what was shared at our first Humans of HubSpot event. You can check out audio-only or video versions below. We broke the stories into three categories: Rebels, Acceptance, and Personality. Enjoy!
