Growing 50% a Year and Getting Listed As a Best Company to Work for
THE CHALLENGE
HubSpot was experiencing incredible growth, with a 50% year-over-year increase in employee count and an international expansion. They needed a tool to help retain the incredible culture they had fostered from their earliest startup days.
Early on in HubSpot’s history, we developed a culture that was really critical for us to maintain. We’ve since codified this into an acronym that we call HEART: humble, effective, adaptable, remarkable, and transparent. The thing is when you’re a 5-person team, or even a 20-person team, sharing and retaining these values is easy.
But we’re growing our employee base 50% per year, expanding internationally, and recruiting from a very competitive industry. Our culture is critical, and one of our core competitive advantages. We needed an effective tool to help us retain this culture as the company scaled.
“We use TINYpulse to make sure sure we're getting the real-time feedback we need to foster a great culture.”
Kipp Bodnar, CMOWhen opening their first international office in Dublin, they wanted to retain their treasured culture. The team decided to test TINYpulse out, and it quickly spread organically across the organization from there.
The real turning point came a few years ago when we opened an office in Dublin as part of our international expansion. We wanted this to truly be a HubSpot office with the HubSpot culture, not just some outpost with the HubSpot name. But given the distance from headquarters, we knew this was not going to be easy. Our Dublin team learned about TINYpulse and decided to test it out.
The team had a great experience with the tool. It helped them foster open communication, transparency, and quick action, all the things we value as part of the HubSpot culture. From there, it spread organically through our organization, first picked up by the US development team, then the product marketing team, and eventually the entire marketing team. Nearly 750 employees across departments and geographies are now using TINYpulse.
"It’s remarkable how easy it is to get TINYpulse up and running. We’ve had zero issues with scaling it across the organization."
Kipp Bodnar, CMOHubSpot had TINYpulse up in no time for a 750+ global team and found that it scaled easily with company growth. HubSpot enjoys many of the features, especially Private Messaging, and enjoys the freedom it gives department heads to manage their individual teams. HubSpot is regularly named a Top Company To Work For, and they credit TINYpulse for helping them achieve this accolade.
It’s remarkable how easy it is to get TINYpulse up and running. We’ve had zero issues with scaling it across the organization. The benefits we saw with a 30-person team in Dublin are the same we’re seeing with a 750-person global team. We had previously used employee feedback surveys, so this wasn’t anything new to our team. And getting employees to start using it was really easy. But Private Messaging might be one of the most unique and valuable parts of the platform. People mention things they wouldn’t normally mention, and the ability to have a back-and-forth with them lets you show them you care, and you can get more info and resolve issues that would have gone unsaid.
One of the things we really enjoy about TINYpulse is the autonomy it brings our individual departments. As a company, it gives us a central tool to make sure we’re all aligned across company values. But thanks to custom segmenting, each department manages its own teams via the tool, giving department heads the freedom to manage their teams directly.
We’ve received awards from the Boston Globe, the Boston Business Journal and several others for being one of the best places to work. This isn’t a fluke. We work very hard at building our culture and TINYpulse plays a big role in helping us do just that.
