RWL201:Singapore Tales and Strategies for Remote Tech Team Leadership

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
0:01

Hello everybody. It's Alex once again from the remote work live podcast, and I have with me today another great guest. I have Greg Walters from HubSpot. He is head of culture and learning and development on an international basis for HubSpot. He looks after culture and learning for HubSpot, and I wanted to find out more about HubSpot because HubSpot being one of my favourite remote businesses, and I also wanted to find out more about Greg, having looked at the way his career has progressed, the way he's transitioned and also his dedication to his craft. These are all things that really led me to want to know more about him. So, greg, I just want to say thank you so much for joining me today. You're very welcome.

Greg Walters:
0:51

Thank you for having me, alex. I'm excited to be here.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
0:54

Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, and, as I said, hubspot, for years now, has been one of my favourite, I mean, business is actually of all time. You know remote businesses as well. I already found out after I started using the platform that it was a remote business and it kind of solidified my interest in the platform and the business. But I've never been able to sort of, I suppose, delve as deeply as I wanted. Hence my invitation to you on the podcast. So let's begin, shall we? Let's? First and foremost, I want to find out about you, greg, so tell us, tell me about yourself.

Greg Walters:
1:33

Yep, so I, yes, my name is Greg Walters. I work for HubSpot. I've been with the company for five and a half plus actually going on six years. In August I started as the first member of the learning and development team here in the JPEC region I should mention I'm based in Singapore and then I built the learning and development team here in region. I joined the culture team in 2020 and kind of built that team here in region and then I started looking after culture in our AMIA region as well in 2021. I suppose it was. So. I've been doing kind of different things year on year during my time here at HubSpot. So it's always been a fun, you know, learning and growth opportunity for me. There's always something new to do in a growing company like HubSpot.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
2:29

Yep, it's always good when you've got you know things to keep you interested, but it sounds like you've been immersed yourself in what's going on. It sounds like you've been very important in terms of building the foundation of the team that you work in and in the business as well in general and what, I suppose, what attracted you to HubSpot. Why HubSpot?

Greg Walters:
2:57

So for me, taking one step back, prior to HubSpot, I was in sales, so I was a sales rep for a while and then I managed sales teams for a little over five years and there came a point when I decided that sales was no longer for me.

Greg Walters:
3:13

I was doing well, but it's a bit of a grind and I just really enjoyed working with people and wanting to somehow move more into a people focused role. And just through my job search I stumbled across HubSpot. I was not otherwise aware of HubSpot, but it was my other culture code that I first fell in love with. So for folks that aren't familiar, there is a slide deck that gets updated kind of in real time. I think it has something north of like five million views, but it outlines our culture. And as part of researching HubSpot, I read that I went on Glassdoor. They've got great reviews on Glassdoor and through the interview process I started to realize that it wasn't just marketing material, the culture code. It was a lived reality for the folks working there and the culture code itself really resonated with me and I decided that was the type of company that I wanted to be a part of and wanted to contribute to.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
4:16

No, it sounds good, and I think it's always good, isn't it? It's a good reminder that when you're doing your research, it pays to actually just go beyond the job description, doesn't it, and dig a little bit deeper, not just for the sake of the conversations that you're going to have with people you're potentially going to be working with, but for your own sort of. You want some sort of connection, don't you? You want some sort of alignment between yourself and the business that you're going to be working in, for your own longevity and that ticker roll. And I guess you're testament to that because you've been there, like you said, for the last five or so years. So there must be something good. Well, there must be lots of things that are good about not just yourself in that role, but HubSpot as well, and obviously HubSpot is. I mean, how do you categorise yourself? Because some companies differ in the way they categorise themselves from a remote perspective. Some say that they're fully distributed, some say fully remote, others say remote first. How does HubSpot fit in that sort of scheme?

Greg Walters:
5:28

I think we would describe ourselves as hybrid. So we're all in on hybrid work, and by that we mean that everyone has the opportunity to choose for themselves. We believe that each individual knows best where and when they do their best work, and so for us it's all about flexibility and choice, and so we are quite distributed at this point, like I don't even know how. If we wanted to unwind it, we could unwind it. We've got folks all over the four corners of the globe, but that's, you know. When I say the word hybrid, that's what I think. It's not an individual that has to spend so much time in an office and versus so much time at home. It's everybody gets to decide what's right for them, unless they're in a specific role, like you know, office manager or facilities where they have to be on site.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
6:19

And have you again. I think, like you said, it's good to have that flexibility. You know, and I think remote work is a personal thing. It affects people in different ways. People benefit in different ways as well, which is the beauty of it. You're working on a hybrid basis, so that again it's or at least the company's hybrid. How has it benefited you working in that way?

Greg Walters:
6:50

In a number of ways. So I guess I didn't realize, you know, when I was working full time from an office pre-pandemic you know how much deep work was necessary to my role and how much kind of reflection I needed to do to be successful. And I could and did do those things in an office. But you know, anyone working from an office will know that it's a social space and so you'll have people stopping by your desk, tapping you on the shoulder and if you're trying to be deep in thought or reflective like, it's very challenging to do that. And so I've been able to really create a lot more space for myself to do deep work and strategy and planning and reading. That's very important to me.

Greg Walters:
7:36

I would also say I mean, it's a 45 minute one-way commute from door to door, from here to my office, and so just having that extra hour and a half every day to do things that fill my cup, whether that's going for a walk or, you know, doing a workout or meditation or journaling or whatever that may be I have an extra hour and a half every day to do that. But then more recently I've been going into the office one day a week because I did realize how much I was missing that human interaction and I started to feel the bonds between myself and other folks kind of unraveling, and so just being in the office one day a week has been about right for me and it's helped me achieve the balance that I want between, like being able to do that deep work and then being able to build and foster those relationships with other HubSpotters, as we call our employees HubSpotters.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
8:34

I like it, yeah, it's. And again, as I said, it's the beauty of it, isn't it? Is that you can you can gauge how you feel on a particular day, or you can you in your calendar, you've got what you've got lined up for, you know, got deep work in the morning, or whatever it may be for you. You can then adjust your environment, you can adjust your schedule according to what you need to do, what your priorities are, and that's again, that's another beauty for me of the you know the way, that way of working. So I'm fully on board with that as well.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
9:09

I like that myself and I think, like I said, when I first looked at your profile, I could sense there was that you're really vested in your work. That was my instinct from looking at your profile that you're really vested in your work and you, you love your craft. And again, I can't say that about everybody that I look at, who's LinkedIn profile I look at, but I had that instinct in me. That's what you're about. So I wanted to find out a bit more about that. What drew you to the line of work that you're in now?

Greg Walters:
9:53

So, yeah, it is interesting that it's HubSpot's culture that drew me to HubSpot in the first place.

Greg Walters:
10:01

I didn't know when I joined that I was going to be part of the culture team. It was a bit of a full circle moment for me to be somebody that you know is influencing our culture and thinking about it day in, day out. But for me, I look, we spend so much of our lives at work 40 plus hours every week and I think life is too short to work at a place that you know we're not excited to get up and work at every day, and I think culture is a big part of creating that workplace that that is best for each of us, but also it's important to the bottom line, for the business. When I think of culture, it's not just a lot of people think of perks like ping pong tables and beer taps or whatever, but for me it's the. It's the values and it's the, the rituals and practices of the business. It's the things that we have in common and the things that we value, and so it's finding the things that are right for us and right for the business. And so it's it's and it's ever-evolving right, like I joined just before the pandemic hit the culture team, I should say, and so I was part of helping us think through how do we translate.

Greg Walters:
11:26

At the time, we were mostly in an in-office company. We had a good number of remote employees in the US, but pretty much everywhere else folks were working from an office. So I got to help us think through how do we translate our values and our practices and our rituals from an in-office setting to a fully remote setting. And then again, as the world started to open up, how do we then translate that into a hybrid setting so that it makes sense for people regardless of where they're working, whether they have access to an office or not? And and also, you know, one of the biggest challenges that we've seen over the past couple of years is, as the team is more distributed than ever, how do we keep people connected through all of this when you know we're so used to being able to connect serendipitously around a water cooler or in our hallways? How do we keep people connected now that we don't really have access to those places, or not everybody does, I should say.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
12:28

Yeah, that is a challenge and I think that's the conversations I have is probably one of the top in the top three, isn't it? Of challenges of any remote, distributed, hybrid businesses. Keeping that connectivity, keeping you know, yeah, keeping the connectivity between teams, between people, avoiding the silos and that sort of thing, keeping conversations going, all those sorts of things. And, again, it was because I know that the people that I talked to in, who work in roles that are in culture especially, they tend to also as well, and I sense this with you, is that you really, again, you have to be vested in the, like you said, the back. You're talking about the values just now and the way that the business works. How? Because, because being a distributed team, that's one of the things that I guess leaders have challenges in terms of communicating the values, the ways of work. How do we keep people connected In terms of communicating the values, the ways of work? How do you go about doing that? And how do you, yeah, how do you go about doing that with HubSpot?

Greg Walters:
13:45

Yeah, so I'll say that my stance on this has evolved. A couple of years ago I was of the mind that everybody we should, everything that we do should be inclusive of everybody. So any you know any event that we did had to have a virtual option and an in-person option, and folks there had to be all these different ways to engage with every single thing that we did. My stance on that has evolved, mostly because that didn't really work. Folks weren't engaging. But my stance is now that we need to create something for everyone, and folks is. Everyone's experience is going to be different. If you choose to work for HubSpot in Singapore, where I am, where we have an office, your experience is going to look different from somebody working in Montana, usa, which is very far from any of our offices. But that's a choice that you make when joining a company and that's okay. You kind of have to be aware of the tradeoffs there. Our goal isn't to make my experience and that person's experience exactly the same. Our goal is to make sure that I have opportunities to engage and to connect with other HubSpotters here in Singapore and in the office, and that employee out in Montana, usa, also has opportunities that are easy to engage with, probably mostly virtual in nature, because they're going to be probably far from just about anybody, but we both have opportunities available to us.

Greg Walters:
15:16

So I say all of that to say when we think about our values as a company, they're encapsulated in the acronym HEART. If you've read our culture code, it's humble, empathetic, adaptable, remarkable, transparent. So there are a number of different rituals that we have to reinforce those values. So when we think about humility, we have something called the Failure Forum, which I believe we borrowed from another company, but it's a forum in which five or six people will get up and share a story where they have failed, whether that be in business or in their own personal life, and then kind of the lesson learned from that and those are always very well received. People get to see, you know, show folks demonstrating real humility and growth mindset, and that would be one of the many examples that I could share of how we reinforce our values and we're able to continue doing those regardless of where folks are located.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
16:20

No, I like that idea and it's again like I said, there's challenges there. But I think what I understand of HubSpot, everything is, is is rooted in, or at least, like I said, that the foundations are there to help with. I guess I don't know if the word is educating but just distributing I can't even think of the right word but helping people to understand the values and helping to, I suppose, reinforce, I don't even know, I can't even find the right words right now, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know, I don't know, I don't even find the right words right now, because I don't want to make it sound as though you're trying to hammer it down people's throats, but it's kind of, because for me, values are so important when it comes to the process of connecting with with, with like-minded people, whether that be through attracting talent, whether that be through working with different businesses.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
17:15

And I think I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, from what I can see from the outside, hubspot does it really really well. Hence my you know my gravitation towards that and I, you know, I know people who speak fondly of HubSpot as well that I think that's down to that sort of the bedrock that is there in terms of the values you know. So, yeah, I do like that about HubSpot and you said you're in Singapore. What led you to be over in Singapore?

Greg Walters:
17:46

Yeah, so I'm originally from Minnesota in the US. I always actually dreamed of living abroad, but never really had the opportunity to do so until I was working for my previous company Managing Sales Teams. At the time I was working in Nashville, tennessee, and they were launching a new team here in Singapore and my boss asked me if I'd be interested in coming out here and leading that team, and I jumped at the opportunity. I was here, I think in two months after he first ran the idea by me, so I sold my car, moved all my stuff into storage. It was a very quick move out here. But, yeah, it was a dream come true for me. I didn't know much about Singapore, to be honest, at the time, but I learned very quickly and, yeah, I've been in Singapore now for over eight years, so I haven't really looked back. It was a two-year contract with my old job that moved me here. I've stayed much longer than that.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
18:48

And what I don't know, if it's, singapore is one of quite an expensive place to live, I've heard. Is it or is?

Greg Walters:
18:56

it. I think it is in the present.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
18:57

It's very expensive place to live, but what's it like generally? What you know I'm because I'm just personally interested- yes, it can be very expensive.

Greg Walters:
19:07

I think it's often between Singapore and Hong Kong, the most expensive place to live in the world, so the cost of living is quite high. But interestingly there's I think, a big part of that is the cost of having an automobile, because there are six sober million people on this very small island nation. They want to make it, they want to have fewer cars on the road here, and so they have a fabulous public transportation system between the trains and the buses. They're very clean, very safe, very on time. But they also make it more difficult to own a car here, and so, in addition to the cost of the car itself, which is already going to be more expensive than it would be for, like me back home, they have this certificate of entitlement which can be as much or more than the cost of the car itself, and so that makes the cost of owning an automobile very high. But there's not really you don't need to have a car here. I don't have a car here. I don't miss driving. That was something that Back when I was driving into the office every day in Nashville, tennessee.

Greg Walters:
20:14

You know you spend most of your time in the car, in traffic, either on the way to or from work, and so my experience driving was never all that pleasant. So I think that's a big contributor for the to the cost of living. But the truth is that there's thing called hawker centers here. It's basically street food moved indoors, essentially, and you can get a meal for like three dollars here and it's very good. There's some Michelin starred hawker stalls, but then you can also there's everything up to you know, and including you know, two, three Michelin starred restaurants here, so you can spend as much as you want. I think if you, if you have been here a while and you know how to do Singapore, you can live very frugally, very reasonably. But it's also possible to live Not that way on the other side.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
21:07

Yeah, the other end of the picture. Yeah, and has it helped I mean, working in the way that you do, you know, hybrid remote has it helped you to, like you said that you're avoiding, obviously, having to drive a car into the office? Is it helped you in any Other ways to sort of I don't know explore the city or, you know, do other things that perhaps you wouldn't Wouldn't have done had you been in the office?

Greg Walters:
21:33

Yeah, you know I haven't done this recently, but I was for a while. Every Friday I was going and cycling to the beach and working from there for the morning. Oh, that was Now that I'm talking about it. I need to get back into it. It was a great route. I'm from, like I said, minnesota, which is about as far as you can get from any beach, so being, you know, a five minute cycle away from a beach is a real treat for me, and being able to take advantage of that atmosphere and typically Friday mornings I'm doing kind of my reading, my research, my reflecting, it's a great space to reflect. So that is, yeah, something that I just wouldn't have been able to do if I were working from the office full time.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
22:15

And I mean I know you've kind of touched upon it when we, when we opened up and you tell me a bit about yourself in terms of your, the way your career has progressed and you've transitioned In fact, there's a couple of questions I want to ask you, but this one first. When you you know has the bit. Well, when you look back on your life and you sort of connect the dots, that Leads to where you are now, or led to where you are now what, what are those? What are those dots look like?

Greg Walters:
22:47

I think for me it was when what I'm Good at there's like an intersection Of what I'm good at, what I'm passionate about, and what the company needs. I only have two hands, but imagine I can Converging, and that's where I have found the most success. You know, my journey from lnd to culture was completely because I was just interested In culture. As I mentioned, it's a big part of what drew me to HubSpot initially, and so once I joined, yes, I was like getting into learning and development, and even that was brand new for me because I had come from Managing sales teams to training sales teams. So there was a lot for me to learn, and so I did spend, you know, most of my calories trying to do that and do that well.

Greg Walters:
23:39

But then I had such an interest in culture that I was just getting really involved no-transcript in that and where I saw gaps here, because we are a relatively small team relative to the rest of the business, there were opportunities for me to take on different things here because we didn't have anybody else to do them. And so then, when a more formal opportunity presented itself, like we needed a manager of culture in the region, I was a shoe-in because I'd basically already been doing it. So, yeah, I think it's those three lines converging and also just kind of like you don't need for me, I found that I don't need the job title, I don't need somebody to tell me that I can do something, to do it just like, start doing it and then, you know, maybe somebody will see you and when there is an opportunity to do that in a more official capacity, like it's always been me, no, I like that, yeah, and I think you've put your own stamp on it whilst, like you said, bringing people along with you.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
24:47

You said it's a small team, but it's because I've spoken to other people who work in sort of like similar roles and I think your role that you have is so important. It's integral to the bottom line of the business, you know it's so important. It's also integral to the happiness of people in the team as well, which can't be underestimated. And the other thing that I wanted to ask you is around. The other question I wanted to ask you was because you yourself you said you made it effectively you made a transition to working in a more of an office-based role now to working in a role that gives you that flexibility, hybrid sort of setup. How was that transition for you? How did you navigate that transition from a personal standpoint?

Greg Walters:
25:46

Well, it was jarring because the only reason I actually started working from home was the same reason a lot of other people did the pandemic Prior to that I was working about. I had started, maybe a few months prior, working one day a week from home, but I didn't have a great setup. I was working from my couch with my laptop actually on my lap, and you know that's not a great setup. That's not good for ergonomics or my back or my shoulders. But you know, when the pandemic hit, I bought a proper desk and a lot of proper chair and I created a better setup for myself that was more conducive to, at that time, spending 40 hours a week working from home. So it was a bit of a hard landing.

Greg Walters:
26:32

I think many of us were in that same situation together. But then, as the weeks and the months progressed and I started to get used to this, I kind of came to the realization that this is actually a better setup for me for most of the things that I would need out of a setup. But, like I said and I think this is probably unique to this pandemic time period but I, both inside and outside of work, I was starting to lose connection with my social network and so I have been, like I said, getting back into the office one day a week, but then also just trying to get out there and go out for dinner more and see my friends more and you know, attend events and whatnot Like, remember how to be social and you know how to be part of society. So that's been a journey?

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
27:27

Yeah, it is, and I think you're right. It's a journey where you're adapting and you're finding out what works for you, because somebody might advise you to do a certain thing in a certain way, but then you might do that thing and it might not necessarily work for you, but you have to. Yeah, like you said, you're experimenting with doing different things and you're seeing what doesn't work, and sometimes your body will tell you what doesn't work as well. So yeah, that's right.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
27:54

The other question I wanted to ask you is around, that is, when you're hiring. Are there any particular, I suppose, aside from reading up on HubSpot and going a little bit deeper in terms of understanding the business, what do you look for in people that you're hiring, either in your team or in the wider business?

Greg Walters:
28:18

Yeah, I look well, and I tell this everybody in the interview as well. I look for somebody who is a self-starter and who's self-motivated. I can be a motivator if I need to be. I can micromanage it if I need to micromanage. I believe there's flexible.

Greg Walters:
28:39

Leadership is important, but I work with and respond best to folks who are passionate about what they're doing, that don't need me to tell them to take action, that don't need my permission, that more want to lean on me to remove roadblocks or be a brainstorming buddy or to help them think through their growth trajectory. And so I have built a team of people who are self-motivated, who are self-starters, and my job is just to give them the tools that they need to go do, and I found that to be very effective, and especially so, I mean even prior to the pandemic. Although I was working from an office, I've long managed distributed teams. I was managing people in Australia and Japan and Ireland and France and Belgium, and so, even though I myself was in an office, I have years of experience managing distributed teams, and it is important, especially when we're on time zones that are very far apart, that you're not having to wait on me all the time to tell you exactly what to do every step of the way, and on that actually do you work?

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
29:47

within your team? Do you generally work synchronously, or do you have some elements of asynchronous as well?

Greg Walters:
29:58

It's a blend, yep. So we lean very heavily into Slack. I'm also a big fan of voice notes on Slack, so if it's too long for a quick Slack, it's probably a voice note over an email, because I will ruminate too long on emails as well. It'll probably take me an entire day to send you the same email, but it might take me two minutes to record in a voice note. But then we do have bi-weekly team meetings that rotate around time zones as well, and I have weekly one-on-ones with everyone that reports to me too Got it.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
30:30

You mentioned that your team is small in relation to the rest of HubSpot. I suppose two questions when is your team in the? Where is your team in the region that you're in? Where are they located and how big is the team?

Greg Walters:
30:46

So we are three in the JPEC region, two in Singapore, one in Australia, and then we are now, I feel, on the spot in EMEA. We are two in Ireland, one in France and one in Belgium. Wow, is everybody so quite small Relative to the size of the business? I think we're, you know, six, seven thousand plus employees globally, so a little bit has to go a long way 7000.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
31:21

Something around those, it was so many Gosh, yeah, okay, and again another question that springs to mind, because obviously HubSpot for those who I mean it's a tech business was that a deliberate choice for you as well, or was it more sort of the values that attracted you? Was it tech as well in mind?

Greg Walters:
31:42

Honestly, it wasn't. It wasn't tech. But I'm, in retrospect, glad that it was tech, in that it tends to move a little bit faster. And I'm also glad that I joined HubSpot. When I joined HubSpot when we were younger, smaller, scrappier it gave me an opportunity to really move fast and kind of make my mark. I'd be open to exploring non-tech in the future, but I think for where I was and where I am in my career, it's been really beneficial to be in tech.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
32:19

And talking about the future, what excites you about? Is there anything that excites you about the future, whether that be from a personal standpoint or with HubSpot?

Greg Walters:
32:27

Yeah, Look, we still haven't cracked the code on hybrid connectivity, so we are.

Greg Walters:
32:36

I mean, that is my primary focus this year and probably in the next couple of years as well as we think about connection within teams, connection across teams, connection to the company and I don't know that any company has really figured this out just yet, and so I'm still very excited about trying to solve this, iterating where it makes sense to iterate, learning from what other companies are doing, and trying to find something that works for HubSpot and, if I can, sharing what I've learned with the broader community as well. So I'm still very excited about all of that. And then, now that the world has opened up a bit more, just, I'm very passionate about travel, so getting to travel again, hopefully to see more of my colleagues as well I haven't traveled for business since 2019, I think, so I'd love to see some colleagues that I haven't seen in a while and meet some that I have never. I've never met my boss, for example. She lives in Dublin. I would very much looking forward to meeting her, hopefully later this year.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
33:42

Sounds good and, yeah, travel is something that's one of my bucket list as well, but yeah, it's against all those things that hybrid work and remote work enables you to do, so that's a good thing, and you mentioned learning from other companies. Are there any other particulars that you can mention in terms of that? I suppose that you look at or are favourites of yours at all. Yeah.

Greg Walters:
34:09

I mean, there's a lot to learn from Atlassian. They've been doing this for a long time. Dropbox has a really interesting hybrid toolkit that I am hoping to borrow from and adapt here internally. I think there's a lot of great tools in there that folks can kind of just grab and go. Those are two that I'm looking at right now, and then, conversely, there's a lot of things that choices that companies are making right now relative to hybrid that I kind of like what not to do as well. So it's an interesting mix. There's a lot of folks that are experimenting with some really interesting things, and there are other folks that are making choices that I'm not really bought into. So we'll have to see how things kind of shake out over the next year or so.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
34:55

Sounds good. Sounds good, but whatever happens and I was going to say thank you for joining me today, greg it's been really interesting getting to know you and, of course, I'll be keeping track of your progression. I have more questions to ask, but I know that you've got a busy Actually, no, you're on a. What time is it there at the minute? What time is it in Singapore?

Greg Walters:
35:17

at the moment it's 5.38 in the afternoon. I was about to say you're about to start your day.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
35:25

So, yeah, so you're finishing your day. It's been good to chat. Let's keep in touch. Thank you so much for joining us today and, yeah, I wanted to wish you and HubSpot all the best for the future.

Greg Walters:
35:39

Thank you very much for having me, Alex. It's been great chatting with you and wishing you and remote work life all the best as well.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
35:48

Thank you.