Delivery Hero is the world’s leading local delivery platform. Over the past 13 years, the Berlin-based business has had to build a global ecosystem of riders, restaurants, shops, and partners. The hyperlocal delivery market is expected to double in size in the coming years; Delivery Hero works night and day to stay number one. It does so by developing brands that resonate with local markets while knitting together a vibrant corporate culture. Slack is central to Delivery Hero’s when it comes to collaboration and communication. With 2.5 million collaborations every day, it is the place where projects are planned, decisions are made, and successes are shared.
“Slack’s deep integration with other tools streamlines workflows and also ensures information is accessible, reducing silos and keeping employees informed and engaged.”
Optimizing technology to drive greater productivity
Rapid growth can be complicated. Delivery Hero has had to move quickly to create a global ecosystem – in reality, dozens of local ecosystems, city by city. This has involved acquisitions. Inevitably, this left the business with multiple systems, applications, and processes. At a human level, there were disparate teams in need of a unifying work culture.
“Our mergers and acquisitions brought multiple brands, each with its own tools and workflows. This left employees searching across platforms, wasting time and struggling to find critical information, which hurt productivity,” said Kenneth Teng, Principal, People Communications at Delivery Hero. “And when it was time to consolidate efforts, we realized that everyone was using Slack, but only the bare minimum. I wanted to see what more we could do.”
The goal was to establish Slack as the company’s central platform for communication and collaboration. Already widely used at the Berlin Head Office, Teng wanted to shift perceptions that Slack was a communications-only tool and demonstrate its wider impact on project management and productivity. To be effective, Slack needed to be the home of work for all 44,000 Delivery Hero employees, in around 70 countries.
“We have the chance to become more productive through technology. But for technology to develop its full potential, it must also be used to its full extent, so rather than pick different features from various tools, we wanted to leverage the full potential of what we had”
“One of my biggest challenges was to get our employees, and particularly the senior stakeholders, to believe that all the features Slack offers, such as automation, canvases, or Lists, will make us more productive.“
Establishing best practices and sharing successes
There were two parts to Teng’s plan: training and habits.
“We already had many advocates for Slack, many heavy users,” he explained. “What we needed to do was to create new habits for the global workforce.”
The company worked with Slack to develop a Slack 101 training program. This would establish basic best practices among new users (naming conventions, shortcuts, tips, and tricks) and provide a roadmap for experienced users to try new features. More than 500 employees showed up for the first training session.
“It is essential to involve everyone and consider individual needs for a successful transition,” he added. “Making this a company-wide project has enabled us to share individual use cases and personal experience. It has created a conversation. Learning how to get the most from Slack is something we can all get into.”
Today, there are 2,400 Workflows on Slack and 70 applications integrated.
Accelerating access to a wealth of corporate knowledge
There have been tangible differences in the way employees work. Delivery Hero has created EmployeeGPT, a Retrieval Augmented Generation-based bot integrated with Slack. This scans documents across platforms and languages, allowing users to find the information they need within seconds. By combining data from sources like Google Drive, GitHub, and Confluence, it provides comprehensive answers to user queries.
This, said Teng, is the ideal example of Slack as a productivity enabler. The answers produced by EmployeeGPT were already within the organization – often broadcast as newsletters or town halls but were siloed in different languages or media.
EmployeeGPT handles multiple languages seamlessly and, through Slack, is universally available at the click of a button.
“One of my tasks is to promote the potential for efficiency through automation,” mentioned Teng. “EmployeeGPT, in Slack, does that. AI and automation will continue to find new ways to save time, money, and energy.”
Finding new opportunities to automate
Primarily, in a fast-moving, global organization that operates 24/7, Slack makes for more effective communication. Teams at Delivery Hero can use some of Slack’s features to communicate internally quicker and more efficiently. From the huddles to canvas and lists, employees can juggle multiple.
Niklas Östberg, Delivery Hero CEO, now uses Slack to update all employees on new wins and project progress. Compared to email, there has been a 20% uptick in engagement rates. Similarly, Ana Mitrasevic, the Chief People & Sustainability Officer at Delivery Hero, finds Slack better for building empathy and talking directly to employees.
“It was always important to have the C-level onboard, seeing the benefits of Slack,” said Teng. “The feedback we’ve had from employees is that they appreciate that they can respond directly to senior management via Slack. As a business, we want to move fast. We must listen to employees as we go.”
At a personal level, Teng continued, Slack is helping remove many of the mundane, repeatable tasks that clogged his day. He is constantly looking for opportunities to automate workflows. Employee recognition, for example, involved trawling through hundreds of messages and hours of data management. Today, there is a standard workflow. More employees are being recognized for great work, and Teng’s team is spending less time wrangling data.
“It means I have more time for other things. Slack has definitely helped me to be more productive.”
