At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Deliveroo was in a unique position to help. The London-based food delivery platform set a goal to distribute 500,000 free meals to frontline hospital workers. With Slack as its productivity platform, Deliveroo surpassed its goal and delivered more than one million free meals to hospital workers across London.
Elevating winning ideas in Slack channels
When teams across Deliveroo began to work from home, colleagues rallied in Slack channels – dedicated spaces to collaborate on common goals, projects and initiatives. By creating organised, transparent and accessible records of work, Slack channels make day-to-day collaboration within organisations like Deliveroo simpler, more pleasant and more productive.
Deliveroo created a channel called #feedingthefrontline where teammates could brainstorm ideas for community support. Colleagues quickly pulled together an initiative to help frontline healthcare workers and developed a plan to get in touch with restaurant partners and hospitals.
‘I was new to the team and new to using Slack,’ says Craig Foster, director of global enterprise account management at Deliveroo. ‘I was sending messages like, “Hi. We haven’t met yet, but can you help deliver meals to doctors and nurses?” We had to build a programme on the fly and swiftly drum up resources to deliver free meals to hospitals. With Slack, we could quickly add people into channels and have them hit the ground running.’
Transforming collaboration and working towards a shared goal
The plan was a success, and before long, more and more Deliveroo employees wanted to volunteer their time. As the initiative grew, creating a solid organisational system for wrangling details, protocols, order information and logistics became mission critical.
Slack channels made it easy to streamline information. The pin feature allowed teammates to quickly pin messages and bookmark all key files and relevant information to the channel to make it easy for new members to access and refer back to them. The Deliveroo team was able to coordinate restaurants, riders and hospital liaisons all over London, providing hot meals to around-the-clock doctors and nurses while adhering to strict health and safety protocols.
‘New volunteers had everything they needed to get started, even weeks after the channel was created,’ says Foster. ‘No one was having to go back and catch people up to speed. These new volunteers could do that for themselves.’
Nurturing community and connection in the productivity platform
Not only did Deliveroo’s efforts support frontline workers in a crisis, the project lifted spirits during the pandemic, at a time when teammates needed it most. Soon, the #feedingthefrontline channel filled with notes, photos, videos and even children’s drawings offering thanks from the hospital workers.
‘These were long hard days,’ says Foster. ‘Being able to drop in a photo or video in the channel with the message, “Another delivery made! Another grateful team of nurses!” helped us see our impact in real time and kept our morale up.’
Deliveroo delivered more than one million meals to frontline healthcare workers in partnership with the United Kingdom National Health Service from March 2020 to early 2021.
