As Bolt’s Head of Internal Communication, Mathis Bogens is receiving Slack’s Champion of the Year Award for unlocking the platform’s transformative value to drive change, prioritise a transparent culture and strengthen team impact as Bolt scales.
One of the fastest-growing mobility companies in the world, Bolt offers ridesharing, scooter and bike rentals, as well as food and grocery delivery, to over 100 million customers in 45 countries. Europe’s first ‘super-app’ has been using Slack since 2017, when its hypergrowth triggered the need for a scalable solution that was as effective as it was beloved by new hires.
An advocate for Slack since he joined Bolt, Bogens and his team continued to implement the productivity platform for their communication needs and quickly realised that it could be used for so much more: as a flexible global workplace. Bogens’s collaboration empowered C-level stakeholders to lead by example and go all-in on Slack.
As Bolt’s teams grew, Bogens knew one important way to reduce context switching would be to ensure that each additional integration and app worked in Slack. This way of thinking has driven growth by 175% – without requiring any new productivity or collaboration platforms.
In fact, Bogens’s enthusiasm for Slack and meticulous attention to detail has led to Slack’s adoption by over 90% of the company: more than 3,000 employees across many different countries. As they say at Bolt, ‘If you aren’t on Slack, you aren’t working.’
The company’s Slack workspace fields over 155,000 daily messages – 36 per employee – rendering email an outdated afterthought. Much of company conversation occurs in transparent global Slack channels such as #all-hands, #1-important (part of a naming convention that helps teams to prioritise channels) and #flea-market (where employees barter for each other’s treasures). Just over half of the messages are in-channel, which is a testament to how intentionally Bolt has built up its channel framework.
Bogens’s efforts to outline best practices and etiquette, including efficient use of emoji (almost every employee has their own face emoji, with 16,500 custom emoji and counting!), are central to Bolt’s success. On any given day, an employee may use one of:
- 325 workflows
- 5,900 Slack huddles
- Nearly 700 Slack Connect channels
- 2,500 public channels
- 193 apps and integrations
In his role in internal communications, Bogens is particularly proud of Bolt’s dedication to using Slack to cut down on unnecessary noise throughout the workday. By offering training and improving the company’s channel system, there has been a behavioural shift in teams not oversharing or relying too heavily on direct messages. In fact, of the 155,000 messages employees send a day, 43,000 of them are in public channels, which facilitates transparent and engaging collaboration.
Slack’s impact is amplified with every new hire. ‘We built a whole onboarding process in Slack that allows us to embed new employees in our culture straight away,’ says Bogens. Whether he’s pioneering new processes, ensuring best practices or aligning with leadership, Bogens knows that Slack is at the heart of Bolt, and has been its champion since the beginning.
