Changing your seat changes your work.
Just ask inbound-marketing startup HubSpot.
"Proximity builds relationships,"HubSpot Chief Marketing Officer Mike Volpe tells Business Insider. "When you think back to who you sat near, they might not have been your best friends in the office, but you certainly had different relationships with them than the average person throughout the entire office."
Since its founding in 2006, the company has been switching around its seating chart on a regular basis. Instead of having sales in one room, marketing in another, and engineering in yet another, those folks get jumbled together, allowing for connections to grow.
The growing field of network science shows how much relationships shape our professional lives. According to the research, having connections across departments is a strong predictor of success.
Now that HubSpot's grown to 10,000 customers in 65 countries and about 700 employees, it continues to switch up where people sit every six to eight months. The rearrangements allow people across departments to get to know each other, leading to faster communication between people, higher retention among employees, and better service for customers, Volpe says. He explains why in the below interview, which has been condensed and edited.
Business Insider: Why does HubSpot keep changing its seats?
Mike Volpe: We see the seating chart almost as important as the management relationships that people have. As we've grown, we've found that to be even more true.
We try to use the physical arrangement in the office to stimulate the development of relationships and break down silos.
On the marketing team, folks manage other people, but ultimately, they all report to me. But what you don't want to do is have the whole marketing team report to me and sit in the same room that I sit — then we become very isolated from the rest of the company.
BI: And you'd lose out on building relationships.
MV: Other companies I've worked at before have worked that way.
The best networkers in the company would find the people who they need to get to know, because that's just what they do, but the average person doesn't necessarily have that as their default mode.
But if you break down the physical environment of the office and try to get people from different functions to sit next to each other, you make it much easier for the average person to do that "networking" and get to know other people within the company.
BI: Why is democratizing networking beneficial?
MV: Both as a predictor of success, but also quality of friendships, which are a big predictor of happiness in the workplace and the likelihood to be around for a long time. That stuff is huge.
Most companies don't even think about this as a lever they can pull on, but in reality you can. We've tried lots of things over the course of a company, including shifting desks randomly every quarter or every six months.
BI: What are the different ways you've experimented with seating at HubSpot?
MV: When we were under 40 employees, it was whoever started most recently. When you start, you get to pick whatever desk is available. It was all one giant room; there wasn't a lot of structure to it. After that we moved into new office space, and then we started what we called the "random seat shuffles."
That was 50 to about 200 employees. It was relatively random, we did it about quarterly. We would pick names out of a hat and that would define which desk you were assigned to. But once you get to 200 people, the random thing was complete chaos. We're a little more structured with it now.
BI: How did the "random seat shuffles" help your work?
MV: Having better relationships — it helps you get more done if you ever need something from another group. Instead of going up to somebody and saying, "Hey, I'm Mike, this is what I do and I was hoping you could help me with this," you're going to somebody that you know, and you say, "Hey, we sat together last month, I was hoping you could help me with this."
BI: What's the current seating iteration?
MV: We seat people by go-to-market function.
For our sales, marketing, and service groups, the three of them sit next to the customer segment that they're assigned to. So we have folks assigned to mid-market customers, folks assigned to enterprise customers, folks assigned to specific commerce companies, or to an industry, like education.
For each of those go-to-market groups, sales, marketing, and service sits together. We do a desk lottery among the people on each those teams. We'll take an area of the office and it can be the "enterprise area." Sales, marketing, and service gets random desks within that area. It's a lot less chaotic than having 700 people switch desks at the same time among the four different floors of the building that we're on.
With this arrangement, it's management saying we really want people on enterprise to understand those customers well and be able to work effectively together. We don't want those people siloed out within marketing or sales or service rooms. We re-evaluate those go-to-market groups every six to nine months, or when we expand into a new office space.
BI: What's the biggest outcome you've seen from the new rearrangement style?
MV: Before we were doing this arrangement by the industry group, the person in services that was responsible for keeping the customer happy for what they bought would complain and say sales over-promised something, and a lot of that anxiety would happen because they didn't really know each other. Now they're sitting right next to each other, and when the sales person starts exaggerating a little, the service person throws them an elbow because they're right there, and says, "When you get off the call, let's talk about this more."
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