Offering taxi services, car sharing, e-scooters, regular scooters and e-bikes to happy consumers in more than 150 cities around the world, FREENOW is receiving our Unlocking Productivity Award – Germany for tapping into Slack to optimise its internal workflows, helping FREENOW to better serve 48 million passengers with its leading mobility super-app.
Introduced to replace Skype in 2014, Slack has since become indispensable to virtually all aspects of FREENOW’s business processes. At the core of its productivity are dedicated Slack channels, which the company uses for everything from onboarding to announcements to incident management. Within Slack, the leadership team is transparent, easy to reach and open to suggestions, which promotes innovation and facilitates a culture where everyone has a voice.
‘Slack forms the basis for our communication. Every new employee is in Slack from day one, and is therefore also in the right channels. This makes it really easy for us to share the right information quickly.’
To guide passengers and drivers through cities more easily, project teams that are spread across different geographic regions and time zones work closely together in channels. For Barcelona office manager Izzie O’Keeffe, this is a welcome change compared with the rigid hierarchies of more traditional companies. ‘The switch to Slack was staggering for me,’ she says. ‘I can reach key people when I need to, ask specific questions and talk to upper management without having to worry that I’m taking up their valuable time.’
As FREENOW’s internal communications and employer branding manager, Laura Neusser posts important announcements in Slack channels, and uses message activity to check who’s seen the posts and responded. ‘While email represents one-way communication with little interaction or exchange, Slack encourages open dialogue,’ she says. ‘Everyone should be able to make a contribution, scrutinise things and ask questions.’
‘The degree of automation enabled by Slack is fantastic. It allows us to focus on the really important tasks.’
Because Slack was securely in place before the pandemic, FREENOW easily pivoted to working from home, integrating even more of Slack’s many apps to save time and reduce the need for context switching. They also got creative with their own apps: each one of FREENOW’s numerous monthly webinars previously had to be created manually in a tedious, time-consuming process. Then the IT team developed the AV Slack app to automate the process via a simple slash command. ‘This not only saves a lot of manual work on the IT side, it eliminates human error,’ says Baldzer.
To securely expand channel-based messaging to those outside the company, FREENOW uses Slack workspaces in Slack Connect to work with more than 200 external partners, and has plans for even more. ‘We can collaborate much more effectively with our partners using Slack Connect,’ says Baldzer.
Thanks to its use of Slack, FREENOW’s culture is one that not only unlocks productivity, but encourages agility and resilience. This empowers employees across the company to live up to ‘decisive action’, one of the company’s values. ‘Slack means that we’re able to connect with each other quickly and easily, have short decision-making processes, flatten hierarchies and foster cross-functional exchange,’ says Neusser.
