Sophie Hamersley is a communications professional. She’s been working in comms in some sort of way for the last eight years. She started mainly in PR, and continues to do PR today for the culture at HubSpot. It became more apparent as her team went through 2020, that internal communications was something that really needs to be a focus for companies. She shared her story with us in the latest episode of The Teambuilders.
You can listen to the entire episode here on this page, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Just search “The Teambuilders”.
Here’s just a small selection of that conversation.:
Before 2020. I think a lot of how we worked was put into a box. It was nine to five. You would commute an hour or maybe more on a train or bus or walk or a car. And it was put into a nice square box. 2020 kind of blew that whole thing up. And it’s really forced us to re-imagine how and where we work.
We equip managers with a ton of resources of how to build teams. And now we’re focused on how to build amazing hybrid teams. So no matter what your team chooses in terms of where they work, you should be able to effectively manage a productive, inclusive, psychologically safe team.
I wouldn’t say we’re perfect at it at HubSpot. I think we’re doing well in asynchronous communication, but I also think there’s always room to improve and to really look at how we’re communicating. We should be leaning on how to get rid of the rest of the noise so that we’re really making so people are getting the right information to them at the right time. So it isn’t just drowning in noise in zoom meetings and really being thoughtful about how we communicate.
One of the resources that we give to managers is the “How You Work with Someone Else” document. This was actually something that I did on my first week when I started at HubSpot. My manager sent me a doc that had simple questions on it. Like how you like to communicate – back then we were in an office and we sat right next to each other.
They included “How do I like to communicate, How do I like to be recognized for my work”; (which I thought was massive and a really thoughtful question) how I like to receive feedback and how I like to give feedback. Those were the gist of them: How do you like to basically… work?
[This year is] really forcing people to think deeply about how they work best, where they work best, and the tools and resources that they need from employers and managers to do that.
For the team that I’m on, which is the employer brand team, we have a slide deck that goes through how we all communicate, how we like to communicate personally. Say I’m someone who loves to hop on a quick zoom to chat something through, which is definitely me. I am able to share that with my team, but also the wider company it’s in my Wiki profile.
Having these conversations and being open about how you like to communicate and how you like to work is, a part of that. It gets the conversation started. So I’m hoping that more people do that. Not only at HubSpot, but beyond in the future, because I think it will make the future of work much more productive and quite frankly, much more enjoyable.
Sophie Hamersley, HubSpot
