iFood, a tech leader in food delivery services across Brazil, has embraced innovation in every bite. Beyond delivering culinary delights, the company has ventured into other initiatives, like grocery delivery, pharmacy services and even pet products. Through a user-friendly app, iFood connects a diverse audience to various restaurants, markets and pharmacies. It also offers a flexible benefits card with vouchers for meals, petrol and more.
As the company scaled, the need for an intelligent productivity platform led it to Slack, its go-to communication and automation tool for over 5,000 employees. iFood's innovative use of Slack and internal chatbots has transformed its HR processes and enhanced employee experience.
Navigating the journey to operational excellence
In its early stages, iFood juggled multiple productivity tools, including worksheets. As the company grew, however, this patchwork of systems became unsustainable. This prompted managers to centralise their operations where people work, using Slack as their enterprise tool.
'We use Slack as our main productivity tool. We make decisions asynchronously, manage projects and use several apps that help our FoodLovers on a daily basis.'
Slack's user-friendly interface improved communication and collaboration, reducing the need to switch between platforms – and less switching between systems means more time to serve employees. This centralised approach is invaluable for large, growing organisations like iFood.
Slack empowered iFood to make decisions asynchronously, manage projects and open tickets, and integrate with other apps its teams use daily to make the whole business more efficient and productive.
Elevating productivity through the power of Slack
iFood transitioned from manual processes and spreadsheets to Slack features like clips, huddles and Workflow Builder. Leaders use audio or video clips to share meeting recaps and ensure that critical information is accessible to all team members. More than 15,000 huddles were used at iFood within the past month to facilitate quick team meetings and discussions. These changes have significantly improved user experience and productivity at the company.
Automation played a crucial role, with iFood's internal team building over 1,200 workflows and integrating 500 apps through Slack to connect internal systems like Oracle and integrate with tools like Greenhouse.
Collaboration at the heart of IT and HR partnership
One standout success story at iFood originates from the human resources department. Responsible for the entire employee lifecycle, HR faced difficulties in performance evaluations. To address biases in the evaluation process, the department used organisational network analysis (ONA) via Slack, leveraging data to generate a fair list of evaluators.
'Slack provides us with the information to generate the best possible list, and that’s where 80% of the process takes place.'
iFood overcame challenges tied to a third-party vender system for performance evaluations by developing an internal solution using Slack API. Relying on a third-party system led to frequent crashes and manual workarounds.
To ensure data privacy, it was essential for iFood to develop an internal solution using its data and tools to optimise the user experience as the company scaled. Leveraging Slack API, the department developed Judite (the name Judith in Portuguese), an intelligent bot designed to automate the 360-degree performance review process while adhering to a secure data storage protocol. Beyond automation, Judite effectively helped guarantee fair performance evaluations by actively mitigating biases in the selection of evaluators.
Judite became the cornerstone of iFood's performance evaluation process, making it more efficient and user-friendly. The transition from manual worksheets to Judite not only elevated employee satisfaction with the performance evaluation experience, from a score of 41.6 to 63, but also underlined the app's flawless operation, ensuring zero downtime throughout the entire process.
The seamless integration of Slack resulted in collaborative efforts between IT and HR. By partnering early on, they were able to redesign workflows, helping HR achieve its departmental and company goals faster.
A future powered by Slack AI
iFood's innovative use of Slack has both transformed HR processes and enhanced the overall employee experience. The company is particularly excited about the upcoming release of Slack AI along with the potential possibilities and insights it can extract from the vast amount of Slack-generated data.
As iFood continues to automate daily work, it eagerly anticipates exploring features like channel recaps, thread summaries and search answers. Channel recaps generate key highlights on any channel, while thread summaries help employees catch up on long threads in one click. Search answers will help users get clear, concise answers based on relevant Slack knowledge.
By using Slack as its intelligent productivity platform, iFood exemplifies dedication to efficiency, productivity and user satisfaction. The company's journey serves as an inspiring example of how Slack can be a versatile and powerful tool for organisations looking to centralise, streamline and enhance their operations.
